Domestic Porosity and the Transcultural Uncanny in Select Japanese and Indian Folk Narratives

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Publication Abstract

This essay examines how Japanese folk narratives produce the uncanny not through spectacular supernatural intrusion but through subtle disturbances within domestic life. Drawing on Freud’s concept of the uncanny and Kristeva’s theory of abjection, the study explores how familiar spaces (such as household) become porous environment where boundaries between human, spirit, and object begin to dissolve. Close readings of the Japanese tales of “Yuki-Onna” and “Futakuchi Onna” demonstrate how secrecy, appetite, and bodily transformation destabilize the apparent stability of domestic order. The snow-woman’s silent return as wife reveals how intimacy may conceal alterity, while the hidden mouth of Futakuchi Onna exposes the tensions between bodily need and social expectations of restraint. The analysis extends comparatively to Girish Karnad’s Nāga-Mandala and Abanindranath Tagore’s Khirer Putul, where serpent lovers and edible dolls function as mythic substitutions that articulate otherwise inexpressible domestic anxieties. Japanese traditions of animated dolls (ningyō) further illustrate how objects may serve as vessels of memory and spiritual presence. Across these narratives, the uncanny emerges through symbolic substitutions that transform landscapes, bodies, animals, and objects into alternative forms of life. The article argues that folklore imagines domestic space as fundamentally relational, where human identity remains permeable to nonhuman forces.