Kazuko Saegusa

Kazuko Saegusa ( Japanese 三 枝 和 子 , Saegusa Kazuko ; born March 31, 1929 in Kobe as Kazuko Yotsumoto ( 四 本 和 子 ); † April 24, 2003 ) was a Japanese writer, essayist and literary critic .

Life

Saegusa grew up as the eldest of four daughters of an employee of the water police and a Protestant teacher, who introduced her early Western European ideas and a liberal mindset. In 1944, as a student at a girls' college, she was engaged in a factory for military aircraft accessories. The following year, she entered the normal school in Hyōgo prefecture , where she joined a Dostoevsky reading group and a theater club.

In 1948 she began studying philosophy with a focus on the philosophy of Hegel and Nietzsche at the Kwansei-Gakuin University . At a meeting of the "Reason Society", a student reading group at the University of Tokyo , she met the budding literary critic Kōichi Saegusa (known as Tatsuya Morikawa ) in 1950 , whom she married the following year. They went to Kyoto, where both worked as teachers, worked on the literary magazine Bungeijin and from 1956 published the journal Mushinpa bungaku , of which eight issues appeared until 1964.

In 1963 Morikawa succeeded his father as the chief priest of a Buddhist temple in Takino, where the couple moved. In 1964 Morikawa founded the journal Shinbi , of which sixteen editions appeared until 1973 and in which, in addition to writings by authors such as Yutaka Haniya , Hiroshi Noma , Shinichirō Nakumara , Mitsuharu Inoue , Toshio Shimao , Junnosuke Yoshiyuki , Kōichi Isoda and Shun Akiyama , most of them critical writings of his wife from the 1960s and early 1970s.

In 1969 Kazuko Saegusa published the short story collection Jokei ga okonawarete iru , for which she was awarded the Tamura Toshiko Prize . In the following years numerous novels appeared, including Hikaru numa ni ita onne (1986), Murakumo no mura no monogatari (1987), Sono hi no natsu (1987, German: The summer on that day , Insel 1990), Sono fuyo no shi (1988), Sono yuro no owari ni (1990). She has written texts on Mahayana Buddhism, Nō theater, writers from the Heian period and European modern and postmodern authors (including Franz Kafka , Alain Robbe-Grillet , Michel Butor ), and in the essay collection Sayonara, otoko no jidai ( 1984) criticized the socio-cultural situation in Japan from a feminist perspective and in the study Ren'ai shōsetsu no kansei (1991) showed the traces of a patriarchal worldview in the works of contemporary Japanese writers from Sōseki Natsume to Haruki Murakami . In 2000 she was awarded the Murasaki Shikibu Literature Prize for Kusuko no kyō .

Individual evidence

• Chieko I. Mulhern: "Japanese Women Writers: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook" , Greenwood Publishing Group, 1994, ISBN 9780313254864 , pp. 320 ff
• Douglas Slaymaker: "The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction" , Routledge, 2004, ISBN 9780203300145 , pp. 153 ff