Swaddling Clothes (Style)

Style

Point of View and Fragmented Narration

“Swaddling Clothes” is not narrated in a straightforward, linear style. While the present action of the narrative is generally progressive (Toshiko leaving the nightclub and heading home in a taxi), the linear progression of events is interrupted by Toshiko’s memories and contemplations. The nurse’s delivery is also recounted in pieces and from different points of view (Toshiko and her husband’s) offering the reader a comparison of the character’s attitudes.

There are many reasons why an author may choose to disrupt a traditional, linear narrative with fragmented memories and contemplations — for instance, to use the present action as a mere premise for unearthing the past, to underscore the difficulty and painfulness of remembering the past, or to stress the discontinuity of a character’s experience. In this way, a fragmented narrative style can emphasize major themes within the story. For example, Asian-American literature that dramatizes the arduous and often interrupted and diverted journeys of immigrants across North America often uses fragmented narrative styles to enhance the feeling of discomfit and unsettlement in American culture. In “Swaddling Clothes,” Toshiko is afraid of the future, as the narrator comments “thoughts of the future made Toshiko feel cold and miserable,” because she anticipates only increased violence, bloodshed, and loss of moral values in the rapidly modernizing Japanese society. In this context, the frequent interruption of the present action by Toshiko’s memories, projections and meandering thoughts emphasizes her unwillingness to move forward in time into an inauspicious future.

Symbolism and Setting

Much of the symbolism in “Swaddling Clothes” is achieved through elements of setting and their contrasts. Each place or piece of the Japanese landscape that Toshiko views from the taxi window are symbols of tradition and its decay through the oppressions of modernization: for instance, the tacky entertainment district versus the solemn, stately Imperial Palace, and the organic, comforting structure of the Imperial Palace versus the cold and uninviting, ultra-modern skyscrapers in the background. The visual contrast of these structures standing together symbolizes the chaos and incongruence Toshiko feels in a modernizing society that seems to have irretrievably abjured its culture and tradition. The park in front of the Imperial Palace contains many internal contrasts also symbolic of this chaotic transformation. While the park has preserved its splendid vista of cherry blossoms, the trees are decorated by garish, colored light bulbs, reminiscent of the “pinpricks of light” emanating from the stark, modern office buildings, and the park grounds are littered with bottles, waste paper, and sleeping vagrants.

Waste paper, newspapers, and cherry blossoms form the central group of symbols of the story. The crumpled up trash reminds Toshiko of the “mere scraps of white paper” that have been crafted into fake cherry blossoms to decorate a theater, and the newspapers that cover the homeless youth remind her of both cherry blossoms and the shameful newspaper “swaddling clothes” of the illegitimate baby. It seems to Toshiko that the Japanese environment is no longer naturally adorned by real cherry blossoms, which represent the purity of Japanese culture and tradition, and is now instead “decorated” with trash and newspapers, representing the contamination of that culture and tradition. In other words, cherry blossoms have been degraded — made artificial or replaced by the waste products of a careless modern culture.

Another symbol of purity that suffers degradation is the figure of the newborn baby. Conventionally, babies and births connote joy and celebration, but in “Swaddling Clothes,” the nurse’s delivery is perceived as a violent scene of bloodshed by Toshiko and a laughably grotesque vision of mockery by Toshiko’s husband. The nurse’s baby wrapped in soiled newspapers embodies not only the nurse’s loss of moral values, but the staining and contamination of Japanese society’s future. Toshiko comments: “Those soiled newspaper swaddling clothes will be the symbol of his [the illegitimate baby’s] entire life.” The figure of the homeless youth curled up on the park bench under a layer of newspapers echoes this earlier symbol, and as Toshiko imagines it, is the manifestation of the poverty and crime that the nurse’s baby will no doubt grow up in.

A Modern Parable

“Swaddling Clothes” functions as a modern parable or allegory, a pithy moralization of general social problems through a specific and concrete story. By imbuing various objects and places with symbolism, the story not only dramatizes a particular incident in one woman’s life, but can be widely applied to society in general. In this way, Toshiko’s experience is presented as a universal truth, to which society as a whole can broadly relate. The function of a parable is also to provide a moral lesson. The lesson or “message” in “Swaddling Clothes” warns of the destructive effects of western-induced modernization.