29/11/2023
Journal of Philosophy and Ethics in Health Care and Medicine, No. 13, December 2019
Masaoka Shiki’s Last Days and His Creations: Notes on a Poet Who Suffered from Tuberculosis and Spinal Caries
Ren INO, Waseda University
Abstract
Once, tuberculosis was said to be a disease that made us acknowledge death, as cancer might today. Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), a pseudonym for Masaoka Tsunenori, died of tuberculosis at 35, with complications from spinal caries. One of the most famous and important poets in modern Japanese literature, Shiki expressed, through his last poems and thoughts, the poignancy and challenges of his debilitated state, offering us a rare glimpse into a highly active and poetic mind at the edge of death, still able to find beauty, even within severe restrictions of illness. The continual and thoughtful care he received from family and friends offers us insight and chances for reflection on how best to support a
dying person.
As literary historian Reginald Horace Blyth wrote of Shiki, “By the end of his short life, he had found some humanity, but no religion, no pantheism, or mysticism, or Zen.” This article asserts that Shiki’s self-discovery of a sense of ‘humanity’ is deeply related to the poet’s epiphanies of objective self-awareness, satori [enlightenment], and kaigyaku [humor], all of which represent fundamental qualities of his writing, especially his later writing. This article focuses on the philosophical concepts of Shiki’s thinking, but also serves as a brief introduction to the life and literary work of the artist, who is not so well known outside of Japan.
Keywords: thanatology, Masaoka Shiki, haiku, tanka, satori, kaigyaku, objective self-awareness,
pulmonary tuberculosis, spinal caries, end-of-life care
