Mari Mori


Mari Mori was a Japanese author. New York University Professor Keith Vincent has called her a "Japanese Electra", referring to the Electra complex counterpart put forth by Carl Jung to Sigmund Freud's Oedipal complex.

Early life and family

Mari Mori was born in Hongō, Tokyo. Her father was novelist Mori Ōgai.

Career

Mori won the :ja:日本エッセイスト・クラブ賞|Japan Essayist Club Award in 1957 for a collection of essays called My Father's Hat. She began a movement of writing about male homosexual passion in 1961 with A Lovers' Forest, 恋人たちの森, which won the Tamura Toshiko Prize. Later works include I Don't Go on Sundays and The Bed of Dead Leaves.
She was greatly influenced by her father; in A Lover's Forest, the older man can be seen as imbued with the same virtues and honor as she saw in her father. An older man and younger boy are trademarks of Mori Mari's work. The older man is extremely rich, powerful, wise, and spoils the younger boy. In The Lover's Forest, for example, the older man, Guido, is 38 or so, and Paulo is 17 or 18. Paulo is extraordinarily beautiful, prone to lounge lazily, and has a lack of willpower in all but the field of his pleasure.
In 1975 her The Room Filled with Sweet Honey won the 3rd Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature.

Personal life

Her first husband was :ja:山田珠樹|Tamaki Yamada, whom she married in 1919 and divorced in 1927. Her second husband was Akira Sato 佐藤彰.
Mori Mari died of heart failure on 6 June 1987.