Japanese female writer Jasmine Mori is an unfamiliar name to people who don't know much about Japanese literature.
Many people know her by the label she carries: lifelong father, extreme ego, willful luxury, the originator of beautiful novels, and some people call her Japan Zhang Ailing... But she herself is far from being summed up by these labels.
Mori's Xuanhe family lineage
Mention of Mori Jasmine, and we have to mention a man who has influenced her life: her father, Mori Ouwai.
Mori Ouwai is a representative writer of modern Japanese Romantic literature. He is on a par with Natsume Soseki and is a well-known literary figure in Japan. Not only that, after graduating from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Tokyo, he went to Germany to study, and after returning to China, he served as the military medical director of the army, and his social status was high. As the eldest daughter of Mori Ouwai and his second wife, Mori Has lived in an environment of extremely elaborate eating and wearing since birth, integrating thousands of tolerances and pampering. It was this kind of childhood that created her willful self-selves throughout her life, bold and rebellious character. But at the same time, she has been branded as "the daughter of Mori Ouwai" all her life.
When Mori was five years old, she suffered from a hundred-day cough with her one-year-old brother and was declared only 24 hours of life by doctors. Seeing Jasmine's painful appearance, Mori-oh outside considered euthanasia, but was dissuaded by Jasmine's uncle. After being declared dead, Jasmine's condition did not deteriorate, and miraculously slowly improved. Jasmine says that she wants to eat "beef and onions", and Mori Immediately goes to Jingyangxuan to buy this dish for Mori to eat, and Jasmine is eventually able to survive, but her brother unfortunately dies. This experience, also used as a prototype, was almost untouched by Mori's novel Sweet Room. "Sweet Room" mainly depicts the complex and strong feelings of the young girl Zao Luo and her father Lin Zuo, who are similar to love, but have not crossed the moral bottom line, and this novel is also a projection of Mori Jasmine's own feelings.
In the later work "Children outside the Mori Ou", there is a detailed account of Mori Jasmine learning the piano when she was a child. At that time, Mori Ouwai bought a piano for six-year-old Jasmine, and he held Jasmine and walked back and forth around the room, saying as he walked, "This is Jasmine's piano, this is Jasmine's piano." Jasmine sat in a chair, her hair that had been carefully cared for like satin, dressed in exquisite and expensive clothes, and studied the piano with a specially invited teacher. From this description, we can see Mori Ouwai's doting feelings for her, as well as the atmosphere of wealth and high class in the entire family environment at that time.
Mori Jasmine's marriage
At the age of fifteen, Mori became engaged to The French literary researcher Tsuki Yamada. After graduating from the French-English and higher girls' schools the following year, he married Yamada. At the age of seventeen, Mori gave birth to her first child. She wrote from a postcard from the hospital to her father, Mori Ouwai: "Pain くなくてウンコみたいだた." Seventeen-year-old Mori Jasmine, who is still a wayward child herself, has become a mother. Later, because of her husband's literary research, Mori traveled from Japan to Europe, shared her husband's hotel in Paris, and had a rather pleasant time, writing many essays about Paris. However, the good times did not last long, and during her stay in London, Sen Jasmine received the bad news of her father's death. Immersed in an irreparable sadness, she did not sleep for three days, and then went to Berlin, where her father had studied, to remember his father.
Her feud with her husband, Yamada, began when she returned to Japan. After returning to China, she gave birth to a second child, but her relationship was rifted between her husband and the geisha. Finally, at the age of twenty-four, Mori divorced Yamada. Later, Mori wrote: "If I can have it twice in my life, I am willing to stay at home for the sake of two children." But life is only once, and I am not willing to sacrifice my life for the sake of my children. It was with this belief in her arms that Mori left the house, and she and the children saw each other again, many years later.
At the age of twenty-seven, Mori began her second marriage. She married Akira Sato, a professor at Tohoku University who lives in Sendai. But this time the marriage did not last long. Mori said, "Sendai has neither Ginza nor Mitsukoshi. For Mori, who grew up in high society and lived a fashionable and exquisite life, Sendai could not meet her spiritual and material needs. Soon, she said "go to the theater" and returned to her hometown in Tokyo. The second marriage lasted only a year or so.
Jasmine's Literature and "Father-in-Love"
In Mori's literature, there are marks left by her father, Mori Oguchi. Many call Mori a doting "father's daughter."
Jasmine Mori made her official debut in the Japanese literary scene with the award for her essay collection "Father's Hat". She was fifty-four years old that year, and living alone, she began to make a living by writing. In 1961, Mori published Botticelli's Gate and Lovers' Forest. Both novels depict beautiful and cruel love stories between men. Writing such stories in that era, Mori Jasmine was extremely avant-garde and bold, and she was later known as the originator of the Tammy novel. In addition to the two films mentioned earlier, Mori also wrote novels such as "Bed in Dead Leaves" and "I Don't Go on Sundays". After reading these novels, it is not difficult to find that they have many common features. First of all, the protagonists in the novel are set as a teenager and a middle-aged man; secondly, young men are usually incapable of survival, or even unlearned, and can be said to be useless except for beauty, while middle-aged men are set as well-known writers or university professors with strong financial resources and social status; and finally the fierce love between the two will lead to destruction through death.
Many researchers believe that the love between the teenager and the uncle in Mori Jasmine's novel is a projection of her feelings with her father. The love between the teenager and the uncle, like her love with her father, is contrary to social morality and cannot be maintained for a long time, and can only bloom violently in an instant, and then go to destruction. Mori Jasmine's juvenile has a hermaphroditic, youthful and childish beauty, while the description of the physical characteristics of mature women in the novel is mostly derogatory. In Mori's will, "motherhood" is associated with heterosexual systems, family, and social morality, but the love she wants to describe is the opposite of love that violates morality, so she shows a strong exclusion of "motherhood" in the novel. In addition, the childhood concept that "the father only likes himself" collapses with age, and the desire for punishment and control is also reflected in the novel as a cruel love with a control desire and a sadistic nature, and the two eventually go to destruction and become a poignant tragedy. This is the beautiful world of Mori Jasmine's pen, absolute cruelty, absolute decadence.
In addition, there is a novel that must be mentioned - "Sweet Room". This is the last novel that Mori jasmine spent her life writing, which is 100,000 words long and won the third Izumi Kyoka Literature Award. It is divided into three parts: "Sweet Room", "Sweet Joy", and "Back to Sweet Room Again". The novel is mainly based on Mori Jasmine herself, and describes the relationship between the beautiful girl Sakuro and her father Hayashi. Known as the Carnivore of Desire, she plays with and devours male desires as a maiden, but in the end she returns to the sweet room and returns to her father, Hayashi. After reading the second part, Yukio Mishima called the novel a "masterpiece of the senses" and marveled at why the author could have such a correct understanding of the carnal desires of men. "In all the dreamlike worlds, only carnal desire is presented in an almost cruel reality. Very few women can correctly and without dreams break through a man's only concern for the 'appearance' of the person he loves, only for the 'appearance', and the carnal desire of men, the pornography of men. ...... She knows 'men' better than any slutty woman, it's incredible! Mishima argues that Mori "uses a language that is sold only in Mori's stores in Japan" and succeeds in "clearly describing" the relationship between young girls and men. (Quoted from Baidu Encyclopedia)
The prototypes of Sakura and Hayashi in Sweet Room are believed to be Jasmine Mori and her father. But Mori herself said that she hoped that people would stop thinking that Lin Zuo was outside of Mori Ou. Someone on Douban commented that the novel was an old woman's Mary Sue fantasy. Whether it is a Mary Sue or not, but the word "fantasy" is very accurate. In this novel, the author uses her own language to sketch a world that belongs only to her. Complicated, verbose, sophisticated, beautiful, one's self-talk. She was alive and well in her fantasies, forever young, absolutely girly. At this time, in fact, whether Hayashi is outside the Mori Ogura is not so important, "Father", "Hayashi Saku", "Mori Ogura Wai" are just a corner of Mori Jasmine's fantasy room. In her literary world, she is no longer just a "father's daughter", but the builder of the sweet room, Mori Jasmine.