What do you think?
Rate this book
死霊I (講談社文芸文庫)
晩夏酷暑の或る日、郊外の風癲病院の門をひとりの青年がくぐる。青年の名は三輪与志、当病院の若き精神病医と自己意識の飛躍をめぐって議論になり、真向う対立する。三輪与志の渇し求める＜虚体＞とは何か。三輪家４兄弟がそれぞれのめざす窮極の＜革命＞を語る『死霊』の世界。全宇宙における＜存在＞の秘密を生涯かけて追究した傑作。序曲にあたる１章から３章までを収録。日本文学大賞受賞。
357 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 10, 2003
4 people want to read
About the author
埴谷雄高
49 books2 followersYutaka Haniya is a Taiwan born (then a Japanese colony) Japanese author. He was born to a samurai family. He had a bad start in life, living an enfeebled childhood, he got tuberculosis in his teens.
He was interested in anarchism for a while in his younger years, but round up joining the Japanese Communist Party in 1931 at the age of 22 years of age. He became its Agriculture Director the following year and was promptly arrested. While in the prison's hospital, he devoted himself to studying Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
After the Second World War Yutaka Haniya founded the magazine, Kindai Bungaku (Modern Literature), perhaps the best thing Haniya got out of this business adventure is the discovery and publishing of Kōbō Abe who subsequently joined Haniya's avant-garde group Yoru no Kai (Night Group)
Haniya was a prolific writer; after his death, Kodansha published his complete works in a set of 19 volumes. He won the Tanizaki Prize in 1970 for his collection Black Horses in the Darkness and other stories.
He was interested in anarchism for a while in his younger years, but round up joining the Japanese Communist Party in 1931 at the age of 22 years of age. He became its Agriculture Director the following year and was promptly arrested. While in the prison's hospital, he devoted himself to studying Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
After the Second World War Yutaka Haniya founded the magazine, Kindai Bungaku (Modern Literature), perhaps the best thing Haniya got out of this business adventure is the discovery and publishing of Kōbō Abe who subsequently joined Haniya's avant-garde group Yoru no Kai (Night Group)
Haniya was a prolific writer; after his death, Kodansha published his complete works in a set of 19 volumes. He won the Tanizaki Prize in 1970 for his collection Black Horses in the Darkness and other stories.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 2, 2025
This is a weird novel, and I. LOVE. WEIRD.
The first two times I tried to read this, I got to about 50 pages or so before giving up. It's mostly because my Japanese wasn't as good and I struggled to follow the conversations between the characters, which really is the meat of this novel. It's appropriate to think of this as a work of philosophy, with characters standing in for philosophical ideas and their dialogue unravelling those ideas. That's something pretty hard to get used to for me, I suppose.
For my third try, I read this novel alongside secondary material to get some handrails. With summaries of the key events in each part and a better idea of what Haniya Yutaka is trying to do exactly, I managed to appreciate and enjoy Shirei a lot more. Besides the difficulty of reading this, I can't really think of anything bad to say about this novel. Putting in effort to understand what the characters were trying to say really made me feel like I got rewarded. The novel's beauty starts to open up, even though it might not really be beautiful in normal terms. Maybe it's difficult to find a flaw because it doesn't seem fair to compare this novel to any standard; it really is its own thing.
More concretely, my enjoyment of this novel came from three main things: 1) the philosophical ideas, 2) the mysterious vibe of almost everything that happens, and 3) some of the characters being really funny for some odd reason.
From what I understand, this novel is supposed to be like the opposite of real, but it's also not exactly fiction per se. Either way, it has a de-realizing effect that reminds me of 2666. This plays into one of the important concepts of this novel: the idea of kyotai 虚体. This could be translated as "empty body", but kyo also can mean "false" or, apparently, "sky"? There is one scene in which the protagonist Miwa Yoshi is walking in the night and he feels himself expanding , becoming the cosmos. There's some kind of ascetic implication here, since in the prologue Haniya seems to stage the novel as some kind of dialectic between Buddhism and Jainism. These ideas get more interesting when, in the second part, the notion of demons is also introduced. The implication that human beings are possessed by ideas is pretty haunting but also fascinating. There's more that can of course be said here, but I'll leave things at that for now.
The novel has this strange tendency to hyper-focus on scenes in extreme minutiae that makes me feel as if time in the novel is either frozen or moving super slowly. At the end of part 3, Yoshi and his friend Kurokawa Kenji stop for a moment to gaze at the bridges over the canals, which are oddly described as tentacles 触手. Trees are also sometimes described as tentacles. This doesn't happen very often, but the specificity of this word just sticks out to me. Anyway, the way Yoshi and Kenji gaze at that scene just makes me think of myself as a reader stopping and trying to just look a bit harder at some of the weird things that happen in this novel, especially that opening scene with Yaba Tetsugo pulling a child by her ears when he saw the child pulling a dog's ears. (Later Tetsugo apparently vanishes but then reappears in a mental hospital, and has apparently lost the ability to speak?) Yeah, lots of weird shit happen, but not in an explosive lol randomz way. It always feels so subtle and unnerving, somewhat bordering on ridiculous but still remaining in the zone of indeterminate hauntingness.
Speaking of ridiculous, shoutout to Kubi Takeo and his dialogue with Ms Tsuda. I don't know why but this dialogue was so unexpectedly funny and enjoyable. Takeo's introduction in the first part was already pretty weird, since he apparently has like really bad skin with yellow patches or something like that and tends to monologue passionately about things that don't seem to make immediate sense (in his introduction he went on some schpiel about toads?). He also has these constant verbal tics like "cho!" or "pui!" It's like his saliva is all over whatever room he walks into. Maybe his dynamic with Ms Tsuda is so funny because she also has a kind of verbal tic, which goes like "maa maa". It's just the most absurd thing: they're sitting in a car - Takeo, Ms Tsuda, and Tsuda Kenzo (her husband) - and while Kenzo just sits there apparently not moving an inch (the narrator REALLY EMPHASIZES THIS) Takeo is talking his mouth off to Ms Tsuda and she keeps saying she doesn't understand a word he's saying. And when Takeo leaves, Ms Tsuda is like, huh! What a bright young man! I swear, I wasn't expecting this novel to be this funny.
Overall, I will say that part 1 is like the filter. Once you get past that, the novel really starts becoming really fun (though of course it's still tiring). Also, secondary materials really help. And taking notes is rewarding!
Also, this volume only has the first three parts. There are six more parts, and the whole Shirei is apparently unfinished. (I think Haniya intended to write twelve parts in total.)
The first two times I tried to read this, I got to about 50 pages or so before giving up. It's mostly because my Japanese wasn't as good and I struggled to follow the conversations between the characters, which really is the meat of this novel. It's appropriate to think of this as a work of philosophy, with characters standing in for philosophical ideas and their dialogue unravelling those ideas. That's something pretty hard to get used to for me, I suppose.
For my third try, I read this novel alongside secondary material to get some handrails. With summaries of the key events in each part and a better idea of what Haniya Yutaka is trying to do exactly, I managed to appreciate and enjoy Shirei a lot more. Besides the difficulty of reading this, I can't really think of anything bad to say about this novel. Putting in effort to understand what the characters were trying to say really made me feel like I got rewarded. The novel's beauty starts to open up, even though it might not really be beautiful in normal terms. Maybe it's difficult to find a flaw because it doesn't seem fair to compare this novel to any standard; it really is its own thing.
More concretely, my enjoyment of this novel came from three main things: 1) the philosophical ideas, 2) the mysterious vibe of almost everything that happens, and 3) some of the characters being really funny for some odd reason.
From what I understand, this novel is supposed to be like the opposite of real, but it's also not exactly fiction per se. Either way, it has a de-realizing effect that reminds me of 2666. This plays into one of the important concepts of this novel: the idea of kyotai 虚体. This could be translated as "empty body", but kyo also can mean "false" or, apparently, "sky"? There is one scene in which the protagonist Miwa Yoshi is walking in the night and he feels himself expanding , becoming the cosmos. There's some kind of ascetic implication here, since in the prologue Haniya seems to stage the novel as some kind of dialectic between Buddhism and Jainism. These ideas get more interesting when, in the second part, the notion of demons is also introduced. The implication that human beings are possessed by ideas is pretty haunting but also fascinating. There's more that can of course be said here, but I'll leave things at that for now.
The novel has this strange tendency to hyper-focus on scenes in extreme minutiae that makes me feel as if time in the novel is either frozen or moving super slowly. At the end of part 3, Yoshi and his friend Kurokawa Kenji stop for a moment to gaze at the bridges over the canals, which are oddly described as tentacles 触手. Trees are also sometimes described as tentacles. This doesn't happen very often, but the specificity of this word just sticks out to me. Anyway, the way Yoshi and Kenji gaze at that scene just makes me think of myself as a reader stopping and trying to just look a bit harder at some of the weird things that happen in this novel, especially that opening scene with Yaba Tetsugo pulling a child by her ears when he saw the child pulling a dog's ears. (Later Tetsugo apparently vanishes but then reappears in a mental hospital, and has apparently lost the ability to speak?) Yeah, lots of weird shit happen, but not in an explosive lol randomz way. It always feels so subtle and unnerving, somewhat bordering on ridiculous but still remaining in the zone of indeterminate hauntingness.
Speaking of ridiculous, shoutout to Kubi Takeo and his dialogue with Ms Tsuda. I don't know why but this dialogue was so unexpectedly funny and enjoyable. Takeo's introduction in the first part was already pretty weird, since he apparently has like really bad skin with yellow patches or something like that and tends to monologue passionately about things that don't seem to make immediate sense (in his introduction he went on some schpiel about toads?). He also has these constant verbal tics like "cho!" or "pui!" It's like his saliva is all over whatever room he walks into. Maybe his dynamic with Ms Tsuda is so funny because she also has a kind of verbal tic, which goes like "maa maa". It's just the most absurd thing: they're sitting in a car - Takeo, Ms Tsuda, and Tsuda Kenzo (her husband) - and while Kenzo just sits there apparently not moving an inch (the narrator REALLY EMPHASIZES THIS) Takeo is talking his mouth off to Ms Tsuda and she keeps saying she doesn't understand a word he's saying. And when Takeo leaves, Ms Tsuda is like, huh! What a bright young man! I swear, I wasn't expecting this novel to be this funny.
Overall, I will say that part 1 is like the filter. Once you get past that, the novel really starts becoming really fun (though of course it's still tiring). Also, secondary materials really help. And taking notes is rewarding!
Also, this volume only has the first three parts. There are six more parts, and the whole Shirei is apparently unfinished. (I think Haniya intended to write twelve parts in total.)
Displaying 1 of 1 review