ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that there was a parallel development of writing about mental illness and/or madness in both psychiatry and literature in Japan in the early twentieth century. It examines the historical connection between the practices of modern psychiatry and the representation of madness in modern literature in Japan. In the landscape of European and Islamic worlds, the mentally ill had long been in public spaces, while in Japan and other countries in East Asia, the private space of the family assumed the role of care, control, and confinement, that was often encouraged and promoted by public authorities through various practical and ideological means. The actual lack of such institutional care in early modern Japan gave a different structure to the representation of madness. Likewise, religion and medicine responded to the problem of madness or mental illness. Some Buddhist temples provided medical-religious sites of treatment and care of patients.
