Life, Passionately: Reflections on a Japanese Love Nun

by Suzanne Kamata

A few weeks ago, I gave my Japanese university students the assignment of writing about someone they would like to meet. As an example, I told them that my dream was to meet the writer/Buddhist nun Jakucho Setouchi who was born in Tokushima, where I now live, as Harumi Setouchi in 1922. Most of my students, whether local-born or not, are familiar with this figure. Setouchi, with her shaved head and nun’s robes, appears regularly in TV, in print, and at various venues around the country where she gives speeches and sermons. Although celibate since becoming a nun at the age of 50, in her sermons, Setouchi often urges people to be passionate in their love affairs. In an interview with Harumi Ozawa, published in The Japan Times, Setouchi said, “The meaning of life is to love someone – or not just that – to get besotted with someone. You come into life alone and die alone anyway.” This is a rather radical idea in a country where until, recently arranged, marriages were the norm.

Setouchi herself loved passionately. She abandoned her husband and three-year-old child after falling in love with a younger man, an experience that she wrote about in her autobiograhical novel Basho (Places). Natsu no Owari (The End of Summer), one of only two of her many novels to be translated into English is based on her eight-year affair with a married man. (Her other novel translated into English is Beauty in Disarray which was based on the life of the early feminist writer Noe Ito.) Male critics vilified her for writing about sex and passion. One wrote that she must have been masturbating while writing her novel Kashin (Center of a Flower) and she was shunned by publishers for five years thereafter.

Setouchi entered the clergy not because she was repentant for her wild ways, but because even with men and work in her life, she felt that something was missing. “I wanted to pursue something else,” she told Ozawa.

She recently translated the world’s first novel, Genji Monogatari, into modern Japanese, and she continues to write novels and court controversy. She has protested the U.S. bombings of Afghanistan in 2001 and Japan’s involvement in the war in Iraq, and has traveled to that country to bring medical kits to children. She currently corresponds with inmates on death row, and opposes the death penalty.

Setouchi is clearly a courageous and passionate woman, and it is for these reasons that I wanted to meet her.

I’d heard that she was in town for the annual national culture festival, which was held in Tokushima this year. Although I was eager to hear her speak, I was unable to get a ticket to an event at which she was making an appearance. The day of the event, I was having lunch at an Indian restaurant with a friend. While we were enjoying curry and naan, an elderly woman with a shaved head and nun’s attire came into the restaurant.

After eating, I politely approached her. “Are you Jakucho Setouchi?”

“Yes, I am,” she replied in Japanese.

“I live in Tokushima,” I told her. “I am a writer, too. And I am a great admirer of your work.”

I asked if I could interview her at a later date, and she complied. I returned home, feeling somehow blessed, with the memory of her warm hand in mine.

Suzanne Kamata is the author of Losing Kei and the editor of the anthologies The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs.