Detached Hero, Attached Heroine

Autobiographical fiction was a popular genre of modern Japanese literature which dealt with the author’s deep introspection and featured their growing awareness of the self and others. The author’s Buddhist experience helps the main character understand the causes of their suffering, encourages the protagonist to engage with and overcome afflictions, and leads the protagonist to construct their relationships to others more meaningfully. This paper examines the correlation between Buddhism, the author, and the formation of a literary self in Natsume Sōseki’s Michikusa and Ishimure Michiko’s Kugaijōdo, respectively. The hero in Michikusa is constructed by the author who contemplated the state of death, suffered a near death experience, practiced Zen Buddhism, and was aspired to become a man who could overcome his egotism. Sōseki used the writing of autobiographical fiction as a device to transform his sense of selfhood through the narrator’s analysis of his literary alter ego and the protagonist. The heroine in Kugaijōdo is created by the author who was prone to the suffering caused by social injustice and economic hardship and who understood that the suffering of life-anddeath is the theme of Buddhism. Ishimure designated her first-person narrator “I,” her alter ego, to exercise empathy towards the characters of the Minamata disease victims and to consider the implications of the Pure Land. Despite the popular perception that Sōseki and Ishimure were great novelists of modern Japan, they were Buddhist practitioners. For them writing autobiographical fiction represented a new form of the Buddhist practice, while Buddhist words and symbols continued to appear in modern Japanese literature despite modernists’ tendency to separate Japan’s modernity from its premodern experience

Art · Buddhism · HERO · Literature · Theology · Chinese history and philosophy · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Indian History and Philosophy · Philosophy