Lycoris radiata, or red spider lily, is a beautiful symbol of hell in East Asian civilizations. The famous 20th-century Japanese writer Nagai Kafu titled his first published work “Jigoku no Hana,” or “The Flower of Hell.” The story, which explores the duality of suffering and sacredness, is a perfect representation of the lycoris radiata. The beauty that exists amidst the terror of the novel is just as striking and paradoxical as a flower growing in hell.
The novel recounts the story of a young female tutor, Sonoko, finding a job at a rich yet infamous household. The bad reputation of her workplace rings true: After being hired, Sonoko experiences a deceitful situationship, a violent rape and the suicide of her employer. In the face of this adversity, she gains a newfound courage. She decides to reconcile with her distant mother, face her past without resentment and embrace her real salvation. She becomes a flower blossom in the hell of the human world, unswayed by all phenomena, emotions and desires.
How did Sonoko become the flower of hell?
Initially, Sonoko’s recognition of herself was similar to that of a moon covered by clouds, ambiguous and vague.
“ Her strong emotions toward her situationship were nothing but a desire for erotic love motivated by hormones, a need for attachment and an inability to satisfy her lust.”
On one occasion, Sonoko reminisces about two men whose proposals she turned down. She rejected them because she did not love them; yet, she savoured the unnamed and untraceable pride of someone choosing to dedicate themselves fully to her. She indulges this ephemeral desire by letting lust dominate her imagination.
Sonoko, before the world revealed its violence to her, remained a slave to physical and psychological desires. Just as she begins to fully indulge this illusion, she is sexually assaulted.
But how does this act of rape — this calamity — allow Sanoko to escape this mental prison?
This violent act destroys Sanoko’s framework for understanding the world: Her rape breaks down all conceptions of societally constructed moral values, allowing her to recognize her own desires and disengage from her previous fantasies.
In a patriarchal society, the constructed idea of virginity holds a central prominence. Although it is a concept usually applied to women, it is predominantly men who hold the power to determine a woman’s purity. It is an idea that forces women to surrender under the male gaze, to accept her natural, naked body as an object of others’ judgement; it is an idea that indulges men to face their lustful nature, to look at their own sexual arousal without pretense. Virginity, hence, is a construct that serves men, andyet provides women with no ability to resist nor protect themselves through physical means.
Thus, for Sonoko, the loss of virginity through violent means is paradoxically an enlightening experience. She realizes the voidness of societally imposed moral restrictions and the need to face herself. To confront her real desires instead of the one wrapped with virginity or morality that had reduced her to an ornamental figure. She realizes that social restrictions — misrepresented as morality — are deceitful and meaningless; they are a check created to suppress the natural, whole-hearted feeling of sex. Such a suppression, she realizes, had created a new form of desire that forced her to overly fantasize about the two men she rejected in the past for only a temporary sense of pride. Although different from her previous desire, Sonoko’s new, liberated physical nature is hellish in its own sense: Her transformation strips away her own humanity, making her the one possessed by human’s original animalistic and lustful nature.
Thus, Sonoko is special. By seeing through humankind’s conventions about what desire should be, Sonoko reveals that she is not the muddy soil or rotten fertilizer — she is the flower blossom in the hell of the human world.
Nevertheless, the book itself, for the female audience especially, has an obvious and disgusting weakness: A male author tried to define the idea of virginity for women. And unfortunately, Nagai Kafuu failed to accomplish this goal without any biases. He was born, raised and grew up in a patriarchal society that benefits him. He was never a recipient of this kind of sexual violence. Thus, it was natural for him to stand from a superior perspective to imagine how the corruption of morality and desire enlightened everyone, including its victims. Yet, because Nagai Kafuu was never the victim, his imagination could never create the real, authentic female victim’s perspective on this involuntary “salvation.” Sonoko, this so-called flower of hell, is just a facsimile of an idea of flourishing in hell, leaving our protagonist adrift in an uncertain and contrived salvation.
Leslie Tong PO ’29 loves films and history. She didn’t win anything from the performative male contest but still claimed to be the most performative female in her year just by her passion for matcha and classical CDs.
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