The Abject Woman and the Meaning of Illness in Kōda Rohan’s ‘Tai Dokuro’ (Encounter with a Skull)

ABSTRACT Kōda Rohan’s (1867–1947) ‘Tai dokuro’ (Encounter with a Skull) is often treated as a tale of karmic retribution and transcendence. In addition to drawing on Buddhist philosophy, the text is rich in allusions to classical literature and philosophy. Yet, as this paper argues, Rohan’s tale is decidedly modern. His depiction of illness places his story in dialogue with modern regimes of health, gender, and class, while also drawing on traditional notions of illness and Buddhist aesthetics of decay as associated with the Kusōzu (Nine Stages of Death Scrolls). For centuries, Hansen’s disease was feared as an illness that reduced sufferers to a living corpse, and the 1873 discovery of bacilli that caused the illness did little to assuage public fear – rather, the new attention to the disease increased social stigma. Rohan’s 1890 piece, written before Japan’s 1907 legislation calling for quarantine of sufferers in some cases, draws on modern understandings of Hansen’s disease while at the same time complicating the stigma surrounding the disease. Through a close examination of ‘Encounter with a Skull’, I draw attention to the meaning of illness and the abject woman, as well as the play between archetype and innovation in this distinctly ‘modern’ text.