Citation

Bălan MH. Brukenthal. Acta Musei 2021; 16(4): 162-168.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021)

DOI

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PMID

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Abstract

This paper is aiming at an overview of the image of suicidal death in the Japanese modern and contemporary literature. The research involves an X-ray of the suicide patterns that the Japanese society has been confronting with in a controlled, but also out of control way. We are writing this topic neither in favor, nor against suicide, but somewhere in-between, in a less judging and more analytical position so that we further grasp into the psychological depth of the mind, into the cultural and sociological resorts of choosing voluntary death, from a literary point of view. Our methods will include classification of suicidal acts that the Japanese society had experienced and is experiencing at the moment, contrastive outlook of European and Far East cultural patterns regarding our issue and analysis of a few novels that cross upon suicide. The main ideas that are to be developed are the cultural tradition of suicide in Japan as opposed to the West, the unprecedented social crisis that leads people into committing suicide out of lack of communication, loneliness, shame of failure, no religion restrictions, literary outbursts as a way of exorcizing and bestselling it in some novels of Natsume Sōseki, Mishima Yukio, Taichi Yamada, Inoue Yasushi, Abe Kōbō, Murakami Haruki, Taguchi Randy. © 2021, Brukenthal. Acta Musei. All Rights Reserved.

Language: en

Keywords

Suicide; Hikikomori; Seppuku; Death as ritual; Japanese literature; Shinju