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Accepted Paper
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
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed): | タイトル（日本語）： 語り得ぬものを語る――坂口䙥子『母の像』における『揺らぎ』とケアの倫理 坂口䙥子『母の像』（1970）は、母の最期と「看取り」をめぐる家族の相剋を描いた作品である。医師の提言を拒む父、戸惑いながらケアを担う娘たち。本稿は、この作品を単なる家族小説ではなく、極限状況における「語りの構造」の問題として読み解く。 語り手である末娘は、父の倫理観にも医師の合理性にも同化できず、衰弱する母の前で何を言えばいいのか分からない。この「揺らぎ」は心理的動揺ではなく、老いと死という経験が言葉では『語り難い（unspeakable）』ものであることを照射する。 医療技術と家族構造が変容する1970年において、本作は延命治療をめぐる根本的な倫理的問いを提示している。本稿は『母の像』を、近代的言語では語り得ない「老い」と「死」の経験を文学的に表現する「倫理的記録」として再評価したい。 キーワード（日本語）： 語り得ぬもの；語り難さ；揺らぎ；ケアの倫理 |
Modern Literature individual proposals panel
Session 9 Sunday 30 August, 2026, -