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Paper short abstract

This roundtable examines the lawsuit over Yu Miri’s Ishi ni Oyogu Sakana, focusing on creative impulse in model novels and related ethical and legal issues. It highlights gaps between harm suffered by the real-life model and the author’s awareness during the creative process.

Paper long abstract

This roundtable examines an author’s creative impulse and the ethical and legal constraints that may be imposed upon it in the context of model novels, focusing on the lawsuit concerning Yu Miri’s Ishi ni Oyogu Sakana. Approaching the issue from both literary and legal perspectives, it first outlines the process from the work’s creation and publication to the subsequent litigation, highlighting the discrepancy between the mental harm suffered by the real individual who served as the model and the author’s own awareness during the act of creation. In this case, the modeled individual claimed mental distress caused by the novel’s representations and sought damages as well as an injunction against publication. While Yu Miri argued for the necessity of the expressions and invoked freedom of expression, the court granted the claims. The judgment indicates that an author’s creative impulse may be subject to social constraints, while also revealing the lack of an integrated understanding between literature and law regarding the standards and legitimacy of such constraints.

Against this backdrop, the presentation explores the ethical responsibility that arises at the moment a literary work is published as a social act, drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of “responsibility for the Other(la responsabilité pour autrui).” From a literary perspective, it considers the possibility that a strong initial creative impulse and an orientation toward a particular other ultimately failed to respond to the concrete suffering of the individual who became the model, using the author’s own publicly available accounts of her creative process as analytical points of reference. From a legal perspective, the paper organizes the criteria used in judicial determinations of illegality in cases involving model novels and reconsiders the scope of legal responsibility borne by expressive actors in light of insights derived from literary analysis. Through this combined approach, the paper argues that issues surrounding model novels resonate with contemporary problems in digital discourse, such as on social media, where representations can unintentionally fix or distort images of real individuals, and aims to provide a foundation for ethical reflection on these modern challenges.