Jakucho Setouchi, 99, Died; Buddhist Monk Wrote Sex and Love


Setouchi studied Japanese literature at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University and attended World War II in 1943. During World War II, she married Yasushi Sakai, who was nine years older than her. When Japan’s foreign ministry sent her to Beijing, she accompanied her and gave birth to her daughter Michiko there in 1944.

On July 4, 1945, shortly before the end of the war, Ms. Setouchi’s mother, who was hiding in a bunker in Tokushima, was killed during an air raid by American B-29 bombers. In one of Ms. Setouchi’s recent articles published last month in The Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s largest daily newspapers, she wrote of her horror at the thought of her mother’s death.

“Imagining her despair at the moment she lost consciousness,” she wrote, “my heart is wrenching and can never be healed, no matter how many years have passed since then.”

He returned to Japan in 1946 and settled in Tokyo with his family in 1947. The following year she left her husband and daughter for an affair with a much younger man. Later, as he once said in a newspaper interview, his father wrote him a letter in which he wrote that he “went out of the human path and entered the world of demons.” Ms. Setouchi later told reporters that leaving her daughter was the biggest regret of her life.

She divorced her husband in 1950, the same year she published her first novel, serialized in a magazine. Her relationship with her young lover did not last long and she repeatedly entered into relationships with married men. Areno Inoue, the daughter of writer Mitsuharu Inoue, novelist and one of Ms. Setouchi’s lovers, later told public broadcaster NHK that Ms. Setouchi was a free spirit who “followed her own will” and “embodied freedom”.

In 1957, Ms. Setouchi was awarded a literary prize for “Qu Ailing, a Female College Student,” about the love between two women in Beijing during the Second World War. In the same year, she published another novel, “The Seed of a Flower,” about an affair between a woman and her husband’s boss. When some critics called it pornographic, he replied, “Critics who say such things must all be impotent and their wives frigid.”



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