“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.