Mori’s guilt and the Japan-West dialogue
As you know, Elise is the manifestation of Mori’s skill Vita Sexualis. Along with this, she’s often argued to be the representation of some of Mori’s suppressed emotions. This includes his feelings of guilt, which I will focus on here. Mori feels guilty for some of his actions involving children, even if these actions were considered ‘logically justified’. This is, for example, why Elise adopted some of Yosano’s traits after the military era, as Mori shapes both her appearance and behavior. Unlike the children Mori could not treat well, Elise is someone he can genuinely care for. So given she’s said to represent this guilt, I found this particularly interesting in relation to broader cultural differences between the West and Japan. I’ll elaborate below.
One work I would like to refer to is Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. This research was commissioned by a U.S. government agency during WW2. Their aim was to better understand Japanese culture in order to face their enemy more effectively. Therefore, Benedict outlined cultural differences between the U.S. and Japan. The West was described as a guilt-oriented culture and Japan as a shame-oriented culture. These two terms reflect how cultures rely on guilt or shame to guide behavior. In the West, feelings of guilt were constantly reinforced. Individuals were said to rely on their own conscience to judge their actions. While in Japan, social expectations and not bringing shame upon others were emphasized. This division is obviously not absolute, it’s spectrum-based with each culture leaning towards one side. For the sake of clarity, I will keep it oversimplified like this.
With this in mind, we can look at Elise. She represents Mori’s guilt while visually appearing as a Western-looking person. You could say that the guilt theory aligns with Elise’s form here. This becomes interesting within a broader framework. The dialogue between the West and Japan can be extended to the real author and his literary work. Mori Ōgai stayed abroad in Germany for some years where he was exposed to and influenced by Western culture. His story The Dancing Girl follows a Japanese student in Berlin who falls in love with a German girl called Elise. Eventually, the man must choose between his love (personal feelings) and his career (societal obligations). This way, the story covers the tension between individual desire and social expectation too, which mirrors this rough West-Japan division. This aligns with the situation during the Meiji era, when The Dancing Girl was written. In this period, Japan was torn between tradition and the tendency towards Westernization.
So within this framework, across Mori Ōgai’s life and writing, the dialogue between Japan and the West keeps reappearing. The guilt-shame theory also makes this distinction between the two. Therefore, I found it interesting how Asagiri made Mori a character that deals with feelings of guilt and uses Elise, a Western girl, to represent specifically this emotion.