Be passionate in love, says nun

KYOTO - When Jakucho Setouchi strolls through the streets of the ancient Japanese city of Kyoto, her shaved head and flowing robes marking her out as a Buddhist nun, high school girls cheerfully call her 'Jakky' and fans trail in her wake.

Thousands attend her sermons and some people become so emotional that, putting aside traditional Japanese reserve, they sob publicly.

At 84, Setouchi is one of Japan's best-known religious leaders yet some of her life's most defining experiences have been love affairs.

A novelist who did not take her vows until she was in her 50s, she has also had a dazzling literary career and was recently awarded the prestigious Order of Culture by Emperor Akihito.

'I never expected I would receive the award. Most of my works' themes are against the establishment, including the imperial system,' she said.

The award recognised not only her novels but also her broad cultural contributions such as translating into modern Japanese the 11th-century love story, The Tale Of Genji, which is Japan's - and some say the world's - first novel.

But she was once an outcast from literary circles, endured being labelled a pornographer and was famous for her love affairs.

She was born in 1922 in Tokushima city on Japan's western Shikoku island. By the time she was 25, she was a typical wife and mother of a three-year-old daughter until she fell in love with a younger man, an experience she chronicled in her autobiographical novel Basho (Places).

The affair led her to leave her husband and daughter - with no money and a patch on her eye, thanks to her husband's violent reaction to her affair. The trauma of that experience kick-started her literary career.

'I have kept saying women must stand on their own economically when they seek equality with men,' she said. 'That is the single message I have sent to women throughout my career.'

By the time she was in her early 30s, she had gained recognition as a novelist with Joshidaisei Qu Ailing (Female College Student Qu Ailing), a story about a free-spirited young Chinese woman, for which she won her first literary prize.

She then published Kashin (Centre Of A Flower), a title that can also be interpreted as 'womb'. About a woman who abandons her husband and child for unconventional love affairs and becomes a prostitute, it was advertised as the maiden book of a 'writer who thinks with her womb'.

With explicit descriptions of sex written by a woman, the book caused a scandal in the literary circles of the time, and provoked a slew of criticism.

She fought back, publishing a stinging rebuttal in which she called her critics 'impotent' and said their wives must be 'frigid'.

'Then I was thrown out,' she laughed, referring to how she was shunned by the publishing industry for the next five years.

Her comeback books were Tamura Toshiko, the biography of an earlier female author, and Natsu No Owari (The End Of Summer), based on her own eight-year affair with a married man.

At the age of 51 in 1973, at the apex of her popularity as a novelist, she shaved her head and took Buddhist vows in pursuit of 'something greater'.

She has kept the nun's commandment of not engaging in love affairs. But in her sermons she has unreservedly urged people to be passionate in their love affairs - one of the main reasons for her popularity.

'The meaning of life is to love someone - or not just that, to get besotted with someone,' she said. 'You come into life alone and die alone anyway.'

AFP