Jakucho Setouchi

Setouchi was born Harumi Mitani on 15 May 1922 in Tokushima, Tokushima Prefecture to Toyokichi and Koharu Mitani.[3] Toyokichi was a cabinetmaker who made Buddhist and Shinto religious objects.[2] In 1929, her family began using the surname Setouchi after her father was adopted by a family member.[3][2]

Setouchi studied Japanese literature at Tokyo Woman's Christian University before her arranged marriage to scholar Yasushi Sakai in 1943.[3][2] She moved with her husband after the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent him to Beijing, and gave birth to their daughter in 1944.[3] In 1945, her mother was killed in an air raid[3] and a grandmother was also killed during the war.[2] She returned to Japan in 1946, settled with family in Tokyo in 1947, and in 1948 left her husband and daughter for a relationship with another man.[3][4]

In 1950, she divorced her husband and serialized her first novel in a magazine.[3] She continued to have sexual relationships, including affairs with married men, and some of her novels were semi-autobiographical.[4][3] In 1957, she won her first literary award for her novel "Qu Ailing, the Female College Student".[3][5] She then published Kashin ("Center of a Flower"),[5] which was criticized for the sexual content, and to which she responded, "The critics who say such things all must be impotent and their wives frigid."[3] Publishing her work was difficult for several years afterwards, and critics called her a "womb writer".[4][5]

She began to shift her novel writing focus to historical female writers and activists,[5] eventually including Kanoko Okamoto, Toshiko Tamura, Sugako Kanno, Fumiko Kaneko,[4] and Itō Noe.[6] In 1963, she was awarded The Women's Literature Prize (Joryu Bungaku Sho)[5] for her 1962 book Natsu no Owari ("The End of Summer"),[7] which became a best-seller.[4][3] In 1968, she published the essay Ai no Rinri ("The Ethics of Love").[4]

In 1973, Setouchi began training to become a Buddhist nun[3] within the Tendai school of Buddhism,[8] and received her name Jakuchō,[3] which means "silent, lonely listening."[8] From 1987 to 2005, she was the chief priestess at the Tendaiji temple in Iwate Prefecture.[9] Setouchi was a pacifist and became an activist, including by participating in protests of the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq[2] as well as anti-nuclear rallies in Fukushima after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami,[10][3] including an anti-nuclear hunger strike in 2012.[11] She also opposed capital punishment.[4][8]

She received the Tanizaki Prize for her novel Hana ni Toe ("Ask the Flowers") in 1992,[9] and was named a Person of Cultural Merit in 1997.[5] Her translation of The Tale of Genji from Classical Japanese took six years to complete and was published in ten volumes in 1998.[12][10] She considered Prince Genji to be a plot device for the stories of the women of the court, and used a contemporary version of Japanese for her translation.[12] The novel sold more than 2.1 million volumes by mid-1999.[12] After the book was published, she gave lectures and participated in discussion groups organized by her publisher for more than a year.[13][14]

She received the Japanese Order of Culture in 2006.[5] She also wrote under the pen name "Purple", and in 2008 revealed she had written a cell phone novel titled Tomorrow's Rainbow.[15][10][4] In 2016, she helped found the nonprofit Little Women Project, to support young women experiencing abuse, exploitation, drug addiction, or poverty.[4][3] In 2017, she published her novel Inochi ("Life"), and then continued to publish her writing in literary magazines.[11][10]

At the time of her death, her home temple was in the Kyoto Sagano area.[11] Setouchi died of heart failure in Kyoto, Japan, on 9 November 2021, at the age of 99.[3]

• Joshidaisei Chui Airin ("Qu Ailing, the Female College Student") (1957)
• Natsu no owari ("The End of Summer") (1962), translated by Janine Beichman ISBN 978-4-77001-746-8
• Kashin ("Center of a Flower") (1963) OCLC 51236673
• Miren ("Lingering Affections") (1963)
• Kiji ("Pheasant") (1963) translated by Robert Huey in ISBN 978-4-77002-976-8
• Hana ni toe ("Ask the Flowers") (1992)
• Beauty in Disarray (1993), translated by Sanford Goldstein and Kazuji Ninomiya[6] ISBN 978-0-80483-322-6
• The Tale of Genji (1998)
• Basho ("Places") (2001)

• 1957 Shinchosha Coterie Magazine Award for Joshidaisei Chui Airin
• 1963 Women's Literature Prize (Joryu Bungaku Sho) for Natsu no Owari[5]
• 1992 Tanizaki Prize for Hana ni Toe
• 1997 Person of Cultural Merit[5]
• 2001 Noma Prize in literature for Basho
• 2006 Order of Culture of Japan
• 2006 International Nonino Prize[16]

• J'Lit | Authors : Jakucho Setouchi | Books from Japan (in English)