Gender Roles and Expectations Theme Analysis

Though “A Family Supper” has a relatively uneventful plot, the story is rife with instances of cultural and societal expectations. One of the most prevalent of these is the pressure to adhere to traditional gender roles, which exert their influence on every member of the narrator’s family. The narrator’s father not only embodies the prototypical hard-working, stoic, and self-sacrificing Japanese father, but he also attempts to propagate traditional gender roles through his role as a parent—encouraging his daughter Kikuko, for instance, to step into the role of caregiver following her mother’s death. However, despite his attempts to encourage his children to act according to Japanese gender customs, the siblings’ desire to forge unique identities for themselves, regardless of gender, appears to ultimately overcome their father’s influence. In addition to critiquing the value of unquestioned tradition, then, the story also suggests that traditional gender roles—however influential—are ultimately too restrictive and limiting to persist in the modern world.

Ishiguro’s depiction of Kikuko focuses in large part on the way in which she has begun to occupy some of the submissive, domestic, and maternal qualities expected of a traditional Japanese woman. The narrator’s father praises Kikuko for completing domestic tasks and places her in the role of a mother or caretaker. For example, he calls her “a good girl” for preparing the food to be served at dinner, and he excludes her from a private conversation with the narrator by ordering her to make a pot of tea. The narrator notices Kikuko adhering to her father’s orders whenever he is physically present, even if those orders are nonverbal. For example, describing the father’s actions when he finishes looking at the photograph, the narrator says: “He held it out to Kikuko. Obediently, my sister rose to her feet…and returned the picture to the wall.” Her tendency to submit to male authority, much like her willingness to complete domestic tasks, reflects her understanding of gender expectations of a respectable Japanese woman devoted to her family. At least within the confines of her childhood home, Kikuko temporarily fulfills these expectations, seemingly out of respect for her father.

Ishiguro suggests that the influence of traditional gender expectations is so strong that both the narrator and his sister have begun to mimic certain gendered behaviors of their parents. The narrator, who has returned to Japan after living alone in the U.S., remarks to his father that he has left behind “empty rooms” in America, directly paralleling the remarks his father makes while explaining that their house in Japan is now too large for him after the death of his wife and the departure of his children. The protagonist’s narration also emphasizes the fact that Kikuko fulfills her father’s requests even though she often expresses hesitation before doing so. Kikuko’s submission to her father’s domestic demands parallels the relationship between her mother’s death and gender-based ideas of etiquette. Her mother ate the poisonous fugu, a dish she “always refused to eat” in the past, because she did not want to offend a friend who invited her to dinner.

However, it’s also clear in the narrator’s family that the influence of traditional Japanese gender roles, though still strong, is waning. Because the siblings’ mother has died and their father is aging out of his ability to function as the head of the household, Kikuko and her brother are expected to step into their adult roles, suggesting that family structures and aging are wrapped up in the inheritance of traditional gender roles. Yet even as the narrator and his sister embody several features of their respective gender roles, they also challenge gender expectations in marked ways throughout the story. Despite Kikuko’s apparent domesticity and obedience, Ishiguro reveals that she has not truly adopted all of the maternal or daughterly qualities her father expects of her, and she even rejects some of these qualities outright. For example, she smokes cigarettes (a habit she is clearly trying to hide, given that she attempts to cover up her cigarette butts in the garden) and proclaims a love for hitchhiking. Perhaps most important in terms of her rebellious qualities is her confession that, like her brother, she is interested in living in America. Like Kikuko, the narrator himself also moves away from the gendered expectations that his father still holds. The father comments more than once that he considers Watanabe, his former business partner, an honorable man for committing suicide after their law firm failed. Though the father seems to question this perception later on, it also seems that he wishes the narrator would follow Watanabe’s masculine example by putting honor above everything else. However, the narrator clearly abhors Watanabe’s actions and seems uninterested in becoming the kind of honorable businessman that his Watanabe and his own father epitomize.

Finally, the narrator and Kikuko’s reluctance to move home and take care of their father serves as a pointed rejection of the demands of traditional gender roles. Though it is clear that the father in the story wants both of his children to move back to their childhood home in Japan, Ishiguro implies that neither the narrator nor his sister plans on doing so. When the father asks the narrator if he plans to stay in Japan now that he has come to visit, he responds with ambivalence, and though Kikuko is also not certain about her future, she confides in her brother about her desire to move away from her boyfriend and her childhood home. In this way, though Japanese tradition dictates that respectable sons and daughters stay home to care for their aging parents, both children express very little interest in adhering to this custom.

Gender roles exert a strong influence in “A Family Supper;” the story’s narrator and his sister in particular fulfill many of the respective gender expectations of males and females in the domestic sphere. In fact, the narrator and Kikuko perform many of the habits and daily tasks of their mother and father, suggesting that they have learned from their parents’ gender performances. Kikuko has filled the mother’s role as the family caretaker to some extent, while the narrator may have become a lonely bachelor like his father. However, the fact that the siblings often diverge significantly from these roles, and that they both demonstrate a clear desire to leave the space in which they learned gendered habits, suggests that tradition is perhaps easier to circumvent for young people who are unmarried, relatively independent, and capable of imagining alternate futures for themselves beyond those prescribed for them by gendered traditions.