Scripting Suicide in Japan (book talk)
Kirsten Cather (East Asian Studies, University of Texas—Austin)
Japan is a nation saddled with centuries of accumulated stereotypes and loaded assumptions about suicide. Many pronouncements have been made about those who have died by their own hand but with little careful attention paid to the words of the dead themselves.
Scripting Suicide in Japan (UC Press, New Interventions in Japanese Studies Series, 2024) explores far-ranging creations by famous 20th and 21st century Japanese writers and little-known amateurs alike – death poems, suicide notes, memorials, suicide maps and manuals, and works of literature, film, and manga that anticipate or respond to an artist’s suicide – to consider how suicide is scripted, and to what end. These words reach out to us to initiate a dialogue with the dead, one that can reveal why it matters to write into and from the void.
In this book talk session, author Kirsten Cather invites the audience into a discussion of these difficult texts. These are not easy to read, and nor we can imagine were they easy ones to write. By entering the orbit of suicidal writers and readers together with care, we can explore fundamental beliefs about suicide and, just as crucially, about acts of writing.
Scripting Suicide in Japan is available as a free ebook.
The following select chapters are recommended reading for audience members:
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Chapter 8: Autothanatography, or the Exorbitant Call to Write One’s Own Death: Etō Jun and Yamada Hanako, pp. 169-188
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Part Three: Mourning in Multimedia & Chapter 9: Copycat Poets and Suicides: Nagasawa Nobuko and Haraguchi Tōzō, pp. 189-208
About the speaker:
Kirsten Cather is a literature and film scholar who focuses on modern Japan. She has been teaching in the Department of Asian Studies at University of Texas at Austin since 2005. Her first monograph The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan (UHI Press, 2012) analyzed Japan’s seven landmark obscenity (waisetsu) trials from the translation of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the 1950s to an erotic manga in 2002.
Her most recent book, Scripting Suicide in Japan (UC Press, New Interventions in Japanese Studies Series, 2024) considers how and why individuals write and read in the face and wake of suicide. It analyzes a variety of literary and literal sites of writing including death poems, suicide notes, memorials and tourist sites, as well as semi-fictional artworks that anticipate or respond to an artist’s suicide.
Both projects demonstrate her interest in engaging in transhistorical, multimedia, and interdisciplinary research to illuminate how and why words, sounds, objects, and images matter to a society, a state, and its people.