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三浦清宏 Miura Kiyohiro (1930-)

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%89%E6%B5%A6%E6%B8%85%E5%AE%8F

PDF: Je Veux Devenir Moine Zen !
par Miura, Kiyohiro
Roman traduit du japonais par Elisabeth Suetsugu
Éditions Picquier Poche, 1988, 143 p.

Kiyohiro Miura (三浦清宏, Miura Kiyohiro, born 1930 in Muroran, Hokkaido) is a Japanese writer. After attending the University of Tokyo he went to the United States for further education. He received his B.A. from San Jose State University in 1955 and his MFA from University of Iowa in 1958. His novel Chōnan no shukke 『長男の出家』 or He’s Leaving Home: My Young Son Becomes a Zen Monk won the Akutagawa Prize in 1988.

He’s Leaving Home: My Young Son Becomes a Zen Monk
by Kiyohiro Miura
translated by Jeff Shore
Charles E. Tuttle, 1988; English translation, 1996

Reviewed by Chris Beal

How do the parents feel when a child decides to become a Zen monk? This is the territory explored in this exquisite little volume, translated from the Japanese by Jeff Shore. Told in first person from the father’s point of view, the story explores the emotional journey a family takes as the son disengages from his birth family and is adopted by the priest at a temple.
One of the many strengths of this novel is the realistic way the father’s ambivalence is explored. He is the one who first takes his son to the temple to do Zen, when he is still in primary school. The boy expresses a childish desire to become a monk, but it is the father who clings to this notion, as well as the woman priest. She is quite a character in her own right, and the father likes her but also becomes suspicious of her motives in wanting to take his son away from him. All of this is complicated by the attitude of the mother. We only know the mother, of course, through the father’s eyes, but as time goes on, she blames her husband more and more for the fact that they are losing their son.
The awkward title reads more simply in Japanese. The original title was Chonan no Shukke, but expressing in English the culturally dependent, complex ideas embodied in this phrase isn’t easy. “Shukke” means “to become a Buddhist monk,” but the characters, translated literally, would mean “home-leaving.” Thus, both the title and subtitle express aspects of the meaning of this word. “Chonan,” too, carries cultural meaning. Literally it means, not “young son,” but “eldest son.” In Japan, of course, the eldest son is the one who carries the family line. In Miura’s story, while there is a younger daughter, there are no other sons, and therefore, no other heirs to the family name. This issue isn’t explicitly explored in the text, but a Japanese reader would, of course, understand the gravity of the situation.
In the West, Zen is not even considered a religion by some of its practitioners, and certainly it isn’t part of our cultural tradition. So probably the most analogous situation for readers in English-speaking countries would be when a Catholic child decides to become a monk or nun. Parents’ attachment to their children is, after all, universal. But the Buddhist emphasis on detachment makes the story all the more poignant. The priest, in fact, tells the father that the loss of his son is his koan (a riddle Zen practitioners are given to advance their spiritual understanding).
It would be an unforgivable omission not to mention one of the facets of the book that makes it so charming: the fanciful illustrations by J.C. Brown. The drawings in themselves tell the story of the boy’s maturation and coming to terms with a monk’s life.
Miura spent time in the United States when he was young, receiving a degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa. Perhaps the insight he gained from living in the West explains, at least in part, why this book has such appeal to English language readers.
In Japan, Chonan no Shukke received the Akutagawa Prize, an esteemed award for fiction. This book deserves to be a classic of Buddhist fiction in its English translation as well.

From Library Journal
This semiautobiographical novel won the prestigious Japanese Akutagawa literary prize in 1988. The clear and engaging English translation by an American professor now teaching in Japan offers a glimpse of Zen from a perspective not often seen by Americans. The story, told quite simply and briefly from a father's viewpoint, deals with events in a Japanese family when the young son decides to become a Zen monk at the age of eight. By detailing the effect of the decision on everyone close to the boy, Miura offers a vivid picture of what the Buddhist tradition of "home leaving" really means. The passages in which the father explores his own motives and his relationship to Zen practice are especially interesting to anyone with a basic knowledge of Zen. This book is not an essential purchase, but as a cross-cultural study, it could add a nice dimension to any collection with a particular interest in Zen and Japanese studies.?Mark Woodhouse, Elmira Coll. Lib., N.Y.

From Booklist
Miura's beguiling, semiautobiographical novel, which was awarded Japan's most esteemed literary prize, will charm and intrigue Western readers with its sweet-natured and thoughtful simplicity. Kimura, the narrator, discovers a decrepit Zen temple near his home and starts attending seated meditation sessions, or zazen, on the weekends, taking along Ryota, his young son. Even though he marvels at the usually rambunctious boy's willingness to spend time at the temple, he is taken by surprise when eight-year-old Ryota tells him he wants to become a monk. Kimura assumes the boy will quickly outgrow this desire, but when he doesn't, Kimura speaks to Gukai, the priest. Gukai is a wonderful character, a powerful, independent woman of advanced years whose rigorous Zen practice has taken her beyond gender roles. She takes charge of Ryota's future with impervious command, leaving his father and mother to cope with this abrupt and irrevocable change in their heretofore ordinary lives. This gentle tale illuminates certain aspects of the Zen tradition as well as the type of sacrifices that devotion to spiritual matters entails. Donna Seaman