Япония: цивилизация, культура, язык 2022

ЯПОНИЯ: цивилизация, культура, язык 2022 238 The wretched mother was afraid to confess to her son who she was, supposing not without reason that the son had already internally put up with her death and was ready to see and recognize his mother only as a victim of Ishinome – that is a stone statue in which the beauty of the unsuccessful photographer was captured forever. Being afraid of facing her son as an old and ugly woman she tried to keep the already grown up child near herself to the last, pretending that she was Ishinome and taking care of him, thus compensating herself for what she had failed to give him when he was a child, having given preference to career. Needless to say that the mother was right in her propositions: the son from whose person the story is told never called her mother ever since – either in the face or behind her back, just using the word “she”. Complying with the last request of the mother teacher S. gave her Ishinome’s photo; the woman looked at her friend’s remarkable beautiful face for the first time and thus killed herself. The young man took the box with Ishinome’s photo, the bird petrified by means of the photo and the leg of his petrified mother out of the burning house. By some miracle the river washed him ashore in his native village and upon leaving the hospital the young man little by little lost his sanity spending days at the river in search for his mother’s stone leg lost during the fall down the river; he planned to commit suicide in the same way his mother had done. In this Otsuichi’s novel we can see the manifestation of the archetype of “witch of cold”, which draws on images of both Japanese folklore and world mythology. Some elements of the legend of Medusa Gorgon in Greek mythology can be traced here; Medusa, as well as Ishinome, had been treated unfairly, had been offended and took vengeance against one