Illness and Fluctuation : A Study of Naming and the Named in Hōjō Tamio's "The First Night of Life”

ヤマイ　ト　ユラギ　ホウジョウ　タミオ　イノチ　ノ　ショヤ　ニ　オケル　ナヅケ　ト　ナノリ　ニ　カンスル　コウサツ

イノウエ, ヒトミ

Inoue, Hitomi

オオサカ　ダイガク　ニンゲン　カガク　ケンキュウカ　フゾク　ミライ　キョウソウ　センター

病い

アイデンティティ

環境

アクターネットワーク理論

現象学

Hōjō Tamio

illness

identity

environment

actor-network theory

phenomenology

Research Article

Recently, not only in the field of humanities and social sciences, but also in medicine, the “patient’s point of view” has been attracting attention, along with the biomedical point of view. Attempts to reconsider the experience of illness from this viewpoint have been undertaken and are underway. At the same time, however, conventional research has shied away from the question of how coherent the “patient’s point of view” is in the first place. Therefore, to present a new perspective on this research trend, this paper attempts to clarify the concerns surrounding “being sick” through an analysis of Hōjō Tamio’s literary work entitled, “The First Night of Life” (1936), which was set in a leprosarium. In this study, I focused on the interpersonal relationship of “doctor–patient,” and explored the environment in a broader sense, which includes elements other than human beings. This is also the perspective proposed by the actor-network theory, which addresses the question of how both people and non-human entities are woven into the network as actors. This approach highlighted the possibility that the inability to identify as a sick person internally, which has traditionally been negatively regarded, is rather a way of positioning oneself in a way that becomes nobody.