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Paper short abstract

Sakaguchi Reiko's Mother's Image (1970) depicts a family facing a dying mother. The father insists on prolonging life; the daughter cannot choose. Her hesitation forms narrative wavering. This essay reads wavering as response to the unspeakable: mortality beyond medical reason and family duty.

Paper long abstract

Main Points and Aims:

This essay reexamines Sakaguchi Reiko's novel Mother's Image (1970) as a fundamental interrogation of how language itself fails before aging and death. Rather than a conventional family narrative, the work articulates what modern discourse cannot fully speak: the unspeakability of mortality within contemporary medical and rational frameworks. The study asks: How does the narrator-daughter's persistent "wavering" articulate the limits of language? What does this hesitation reveal about 1970, when medical technology and family structures underwent radical transformation? How might we reconceptualize the novel as an "ethical record" bearing witness to the difficulties that modern rationality cannot contain?

Key Arguments:

A father refuses medical counsel and insists on life-prolonging measures; his daughter attempts caregiving while caught in ambivalence. The narrator-daughter cannot align with either her father's conviction or the physician's rationality. Standing before her mother's weakening body, she finds herself at a loss for words. This narrative "wavering" expresses the fundamental unspeakability of aging and death within modern linguistic orders. The novel's formal properties—its narrative hesitation and temporal complexity—enact rather than merely represent this linguistic aporia.

At the historical juncture of 1970, Mother's Image poses fundamental ethical questions about life-prolonging treatment and familial care. By reading the novel through care ethics and narrative theory, the essay contributes to contemporary discussions of how literature articulates what philosophical and medical discourse cannot speak. The work reconceptualizes Mother's Image as an "ethical testimony" to the enduring difficulties of articulating mortality in the modern age.

Keywords: narrative impossibility; unspeakability; care ethics; postwar Japanese literature