Suicidal honor : General Nogi and the writings of Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Suicidal honor : General Nogi and the writings of Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki
University of Hawai'i Press, c2006
- : hardcover
Available at 28 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [259]-277) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
On September 13, 1912, the day of Emperor Meiji's funeral, General Nogi Maresuke committed ritual suicide by seppuku (disembowelment). The revered military hero's wife joined in his act of junshi (""following one's lord into death""). The violence of their double suicide shocked the nation. Doris Bargen, in the first half of her book, demonstrates that the deeper significance of Nogi's action must be sought in his personal history, enmeshed as it was in the tumultuous politics of the Meiji period. In the second half of ""Suicidal Honor"", Bargen turns to the extraordinary influence of the Nogis' deaths on two of Japan's greatest writers, Mori Ogai and Natsume Soseki. Ogai's historical fiction is a profound meditation on the significance of ritual suicide in a time of historical transition. The protagonist of Kokoro, Soseki's masterpiece, refers to the general's junshi before taking his own life. Scholars routinely mention this reference, but Bargen demonstrates the ways in which Soseki's agonized response to Nogi's suicide structures the entire novel. By exploring the historical and literary legacies of Nogi, Ogai, and Soseki from an interdisciplinary perspective, ""Suicidal Honor"" illuminates Japan's prolonged and painful transition from the idealized heroic world of samurai culture to the mundane anxieties of modernity.
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