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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, without careful attention to the words of the dead themselves. Drawing upon far-ranging creations by famous twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japanese writers and little-known amateurs alike—such as death poems, suicide notes, memorials, suicide maps and manuals, works of literature, photography, film, and manga—Kirsten Cather interrogates how suicide is scripted and to what end. Entering the orbit of suicidal writers and readers with care, she shows that through close readings these works can reveal fundamental beliefs about suicide and, just as crucially, about acts of writing. These are not scripts set in stone but graven images and words nonetheless that serve to mourn the dead, straddling two impulses: to put the dead to rest and to keep them alive forever. 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.

About the Author

Kirsten Cather is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Literature and Film at the University of Texas at Austin. She is author of The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan.

Reviews

"Equal parts literary analysis and social psychology, this subtle and profound study engages with a wide range of Japanese places and people to demonstrate the insoluble entanglement of suicide with the practice of writing."—Jordan Sand, author of Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects

"In this stunning book, Kirsten Cather traces the literary genre of self-written texts scripted before, and about, the suicides of some of Japan's most famous modern authors. Questioning the relationship between the act and the writing, and why and for whom such 'autothanatography' trends as so popular in Japan, Cather is masterful in the attention she gives this subject. Mapping the poetic places of suicide (Kegon Falls, Inokashira Park, Aokigahara Jukai, Mt. Mihara) and archiving a range of masterpieces penned at/for self-death (Akutagawa, Mishima, Etō Jun, Yamada Hanako), Scripting Suicide in Japan is as hauntingly beautiful as it is analytically profound."—Anne Allison, author of Precarious Japan

"This meticulously researched monograph presents a radical rethinking of the very limits of literature itself, showing us what it might mean to ethically engage with ambivalence, silence, and the ultimate unknown of death. It is a tour de force."—Christina Yi, author of Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea