A00037 - Jakucho Setouchi, Author of The Tale of Genji

 Setouchi, Jakucho

Jakucho Setouchi (b. Harumi Mitani, May 15, 1922, Tokushima, Japan  – d. November 9, 2021, Kyoto, Japan), formerly Harumi Setouchi, was a Japanese Buddhist nun, writer, and activist. Setouchi wrote a best-selling translation of The Tale of Genji and over 400 fictional biographical and historical novels. In 1997, she was honored as a Person of Cultural Merit, and in 2006, she was awarded the Order of Culture of Japan.

Setouchi was born Harumi Mitani on May 15, 1922 in Tokushima, Tokushima Prefecture, on the southeastern Japanese island of Shikoku,  She was the second daughter of Toyokichi and Koharu Mitani. Her father was a cabinetmaker, her mother a homemaker. In 1929, her father was adopted by an aunt’s family and took their surname, Setouchi, for his own family.

Setouchi studied Japanese literature at Tokyo Woman's Christian University before her marriage in 1943. She moved with her husband after the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent him to Beijing, and gave birth to their daughter in 1944. In 1945, her mother was killed in an air raid, an event which influenced her for the rest of her life. 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.

In 1950, she divorced her husband and serialized her first novel in a magazine. She continued to have sexual relationships, including affairs with married men, and some of her novels were semi-autobiographical.  In 1957, she won her first literary award for her novel "Qu Ailing, the Female College Student". She then published Kashin ("Center of a Flower"), 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." Publishing her work was difficult for several years afterwards, and critics called her a "womb writer".

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

In 1973, Setouchi began training to become a Buddhist nun within the Tendai school of Buddhism, and received her name Jakuchō, which means "silent, lonely listening." From 1987 to 2005, she was the chief priestess at the Tendaiji temple in Iwate Prefecture. Setouchi also became a social activist, built a center for women, and became a spiritual advisor. She was a pacifist and participated in anti-war protests, as well as anti-nuclear rallies in Fukushima after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. She also opposed capital punishment. 

Setouchi received the Tanizaki Prize for her novel Hana ni Toe ("Ask the Flowers") in 1992, and was named a Person of Cultural Merit in 1997. Her translation of The Tale of Genji from Classical Japanese took six years to complete and was published in ten volumes in 1998. 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. The novel sold more than 2.1 million volumes by mid-1999. After the book was published, she gave lectures and participated in discussion groups organized by her publisher for more than a year.

Setouchi received the Japanese Order of Culture in 2006. She also wrote under the pen name "Purple", and, in 2008, revealed she had written a cell phone novel titled Tomorrow's Rainbow. In 2016, she helped found the nonprofit Little Women Project, to support young women experiencing abuse, exploitation, drug addiction, or poverty.  In 2017, she published her novel Inochi ("Life").

Setouchi died of heart failure in Kyoto, Japan, on November 9, 2021, at the age of 99.