| Through the Hospital Gates: Hansen's Disease and Modern Japanese Literature analyzes the significance of the genre of "leprosy literature," written by patients diagnosed with Hansen's Disease and quarantined for treatment under Japan's Hansen's Disease-prevention legislation. Broadly, this project focuses on the implications of this genre for patients, doctors, and society during a key period in Japan's history: the early decades of the 20th century.;The genre of "leprosy literature" has often been analyzed through the lens of the hospital and patient subjectivity. This project challenges this narrow view of patient writing and explores the functions of patient literature both for the hospital and the patients themselves. Examining the ways the genre created communities and represented patient experience to a broad public outside the hospital reveals the complicated and contested nature of "leprosy literature" and traces the myriad ways patients used literature to create connections to a world outside the hospital. It also argues literature allowed patients to define their trauma and experiences in narratives that countered government and hospital representations of the disease and their life in quarantine.;Each chapter takes a different hospital and writer as its subject and examines the ways in which that writer gave their personal illness and quarantine experience social significance. The first chapter argues that the poems of Shimada Shakuso on everyday life within the hospital represent not only personal trauma but also a collective narrative of patient experience. Chapter Two examines how Nagata Honami uses his nationalistic and Christian writings to make himself a vital part of religious and patriotic movements outside the hospital. The final chapter takes up Hojo Tamio and the consequences of the popularization of his work beyond the hospital. I argue that Hojo, in his frank depictions of life in the hospital, offered a powerful counter narrative to official hospital representations of the illness and its treatment. As a whole, the dissertation underscores the diversity and multiple functions of the genre of "leprosy literature" and questions what literature does and how it responds to the social, medical and legal realities of illness and isolation. This in turn reveals the complex relationship between trauma, society, literature, and the hospital. |
