Disease Narrative In Yokomitsu Riichi ’s Sick Wife Trilogy

Disease has always played a very important role in the field of literature.Writers consider the social reality caused by disease through words,and the image of disease is the punchline in modern Japanese literature.Yokomitsu Riichi’s "Sick Wife Trilogy" is based on Yokomitsu Riichi’s own experience of caring for his wife suffering from tuberculosis.The series is also a representative work of "sick wives" that has been popular in the Japanese Literature.Illness provides the narrative thread for the "Sick Wife Trilogy" and plays a crucial role in the development of the story of the wife’s deteriorating condition until her death and the double narrative level told from the author’s own perspective.In this series of works,the experience of taking care of his sick wife provides enough material for Yokomitsu to write about the disease.By describing the spiritual growth of the couple’s battle against the disease,Yokomitsu explores the perception of life brought by the disease and warns people to think about the value of life in the face of illness.Based on the theory of disease narrative,this paper analyzes and interprets the series of works of the Sick Wife Trilogy by using the method of close reading of texts,the method of intertextual comparison and the method of literature research.by combing through the symptoms of tuberculosis and pathological psychology presented in the sick wife,the deep metaphor behind them is analyzed.Behind these two symptoms,It implies Yokomitsu’s keen attention to modernity and his reflection on his own subjectivity in the context of the tuberculosis pandemic.This paper summarizes three characteristics of the disease narrative strategy of the "Sick Wife Trilogy" from the perspective of narratology and analyzes its effect on the text expression.Firstly,analyze the advantages and disadvantages of the narrative perspective of the "Sick Wife Trilogy".Secondly,discuss the survival plight of tuberculosis patients under the metaphor of disease.Finally,analyze the three novels that make up the "Sick Wife Trilogy" from the perspective of narrative techniques.This paper presents the significance of disease narration in the trilogy from three aspects: bioethics,disease aesthetics and gender emotions.In addition,in the "Sick Wife Trilogy",Yokomitsu’s emphasis on maintaining his own subjectivity,objective description of the sick wife’s survival predicament,and reflection on the meaning of life in the face of illness are of certain practical significance for people in the current society to correctly and objectively view diseases and patients with diseases.