A Love Triangle in Kowata-no-shigure: What Sotoori-Hime Implies in the Mother-Daughter Narrative

Abstract

Kowata-no-shigure is generally regarded as a story about a child-abusing mother. As Sotoori-Hime is mentioned in the beginning of the story, however, the relation between the mother and her twin daughters is inseparable from love affairs between the twins and a man. In short, the conventional pattern of mother-daughter narratives in the Heian Period is structurally inflected by the complicated subplot of a love triangle. But the story comes to a happy ending with the twins' exchange of partners. This extraordinary denouement is diegetically imperative in the logic of mother-daughter narratives.