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Vita Sexualis by Mori Ōgai

Holiday. I am taking a break from Sōseki and decided to finally read Mori Ōgai’s Vita Sexualis (1909). It has been sitting on my shelf for months; a library copy, no less. And it’s very short, about 150 pages in English, so I don’t know why I didn’t get to it sooner.

I have been reading Sōseki for the last million years for my thesis–so it feels–but embarrassingly, I had never really read Mori Ōgai, a major contemporary of his. The only thing I have read is “Dancing Girl” (Maihime), his most famous short story, often assigned to college undergraduates. Vita Sexualis is the first…”novel” of Mori’s I’m reading.

But “novel” is really just a placeholder for whatever genre Vita Sexualis really is. Drawing on Heian-period zuihitsu–another difficult genre to explain; think miniature sketched essays–Vita Sexualis is a collection of sketches, most of which represent one year of the narrator’s sexual development. But in this case, it’s more like sexual non-development. We begin when the narrator is six years old; end when he is just 21 years old.

I must say, the narrative is fascinating. This is NOT your normal bildungsroman in which the protagonist discovers the joys and sorrow of sex. Our protagonist in Vita Sexualis is what we might retrospectively call asexual. According to him, he feels almost no sexual desire, even during his teenage years. The thought of sex often repels him; he judges his fellow schoolmates for indulging in their carnal desires.

Instead, the narrator dreams of romance–different from sexual desire. A pure romance that reflects the great Chinese literature of the past. Once, he happens to see a girl in front of a shop. He doesn’t know who she is, never meets her. But in his imagination, they are lovers (again, not in the sexual sense); this illusionary figure sustains him and pains him; he is lonely.

For me, the most revelatory aspect of the story was the completely natural place of homosexuality (again, anachronistic here; I’m sorry). I am not well-versed in Edo culture, but if I remember my professors’ lectures all right, male-male sexual relationships were an Edo practice that died out with the emergence of modernity and Western prudeness. At the narrator’s secondary school, the male population is divided roughly into two groups: the “mashers” and the “queers.” Basically, the straights and the gays. But the narrator rejects both these groups; somehow, he manages to make two friends who likewise do not seek sexual desire (or at least, less than the typical teenage boy). The trio form their own comradeship, bashing the vulgar exploits of the mashers and queers.

Let me say a cliche: this is a psychological novel. The narrator is actually a man in his 40s who appears in the beginning and end. In between, he is writing a memoir–the bulk of the story we read. In fact, he is essentially psychoanalyzing himself; trying without exception to write down the truth. He is open about his insecurities about his physical appearance. There are plenty of moments that discuss masturbation without explicitly mentioning the word. Oh yeah, I forgot to say that this was banned almost immediately in Japan. Obviously.

I want to read more Mori after this. What a refreshing, corporeal read after surviving the puritan, mental contortions of Sōseki. Perhaps we should all write our own autobiographical sexual development. Though I’m not sure I’m ready for that rabbit hole.

The translation was published in 1972 through Tuttle by Kazuji Ninomiya and Sanford Goldstein.

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