“In the middle of up and down ikigai is there”: Japanese women’s embodied narratives of personal crisis

Abstract

This study focuses on Japanese women’s embodied narratives of personal crisis and explores notions of self and understandings of ikigai, loosely translated as “meaning in life” or “life worth living,” as a result of the crisis. I draw on notions of illness narratives by Arthur Frank and Havi Carel’s phenomenological study of illness and extend Carel’s framework to examine broader personal crisis as an embodied disruption of normality, referred to as “bodily doubt.” Data analysis suggests that women’s crisis experiences and ideas of self and ikigai are influenced by dimensions such as culture, society, language, sense of self and moral constructions. I use ikigai studies, particularly Gordon Mathews’ work, to argue that although women describe an emerging new sense of self and ikigai derived from crisis, their ideas still present a tension between a self that navigates socio-cultural norms and internal desires. This study argues that studying embodied narratives of personal crisis offers us a way of thinking more actively about such narratives in interrelational, socio-cultural-bodily terms, in other words, as a process constructed in conversation between self, culture, society and moral beliefs.

Keywords:

• Japanese women
• personal crisis
• embodiment
• self
• ikigai

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the reviewers for taking the time and effort to review the manuscript. Their insightful comments and suggestions helped me to improve the quality of the manuscript. I would also like to thank Prof. Yasui Manami, Prof. Paola Cavaliere, Dr. Susannah Daniels, and Dr. Sungho Hong for their valuable feedback and criticism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, [JR]. The data are not publicly available due to containing private information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by JSPS Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.