was a

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

writer.

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then- Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, th ...

Professor Keith Vincent has called her a "Japanese Electra", referring to the

Electra complex In neo-Freudian psychology, the Electra complex, as proposed by Carl Jung in his ''Theory of Psychoanalysis'', is a girl's psychosexual competition with her mother for possession of her father. In the course of her psychosexual development, the ...

counterpart put forth by

Carl Jung Carl Gustav Jung ( ; ; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, phi ...

Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies explained as originating in conflicts ...

Oedipal complex The Oedipus complex (also spelled Œdipus complex) is an idea in psychoanalytic theory. The complex is an ostensibly universal phase in the life of a young boy in which, to try to immediately satisfy basic desires, he unconsciously wishes to have ...

Early life and family

Mari Mori was born in Hongō, Tokyo. Her father was novelist

Mori Ōgai Lieutenant-General , known by his pen name , was a Japanese Army Surgeon general officer, translator, novelist, poet and father of famed author Mari Mori. He obtained his medical license at a very young age and introduced translated German la ...

Career

Mori won the Japan Essayist Club Award in 1957 for a collection of essays called ''My Father's Hat''. She began a movement of writing about male homosexual passion (''tanbi shousetsu'', literally "aesthetic novels") in 1961 with ''A Lovers' Forest'', , which won the Tamura Toshiko Prize. Later works include ''I Don't Go on Sundays'' (1961) and ''The Bed of Dead Leaves'' (1962). She was greatly influenced by her father; in ''A Lover's Forest'', the older man can be seen as imbued with the same virtues and honor as she saw in her father. An older man and younger boy are trademarks of Mori Mari's work. The older man is extremely rich, powerful, wise, and spoils the younger boy. In ''The Lover's Forest'', for example, the older man, Guido, is 38 or so, and Paulo is 17 or 18. (However, he is not yet 19, the age that Mori was when her father died.) Paulo is extraordinarily beautiful, prone to lounge lazily, and has a lack of willpower in all but the field of his pleasure. (Guido dies when Paolo is 19, and Paulo subsequently falls in love with a man who's been waiting in the wings, another one just like Guido.) In 1975 her won the 3rd

Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature (, ''Izumi Kyōka Bungaku Shō'') is a prize for literature in Japan named for Kyōka Izumi. It was established and started in 1973 to commemorate the 100th year since the birth of Kyōka Izumi. Kanazawa city, wh ...

Personal life

Her first husband was Tamaki Yamada (1893-1943), an assistant professor of French literature and librarian at the Tokyo Imperial University who co-founded the University of Tokyo Buddhist Literature Department, whom she married in 1919 and divorced in 1927, having had two children. Her second husband was Akira Sato 佐藤彰. Mori Mari died of heart failure on 6 June 1987.

References

External links

Summary of Prof. Keith Vincent's lecture at NYU
(see 10 February)

centerforbookculture.org

aasianst.org * ttp://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/send-pdf.cgi/Nakata%20Kaori.pdf?acc_num=osu1192480867 ''The Room of Sweet Honey'': The Adult Shoujo Fiction of Japanese Novelist Mori Mari (1903–1987) {{DEFAULTSORT:Mori, Mari Japanese writers LGBT writers from Japan 1903 births 1987 deaths Writers from Tokyo