A Woman With Demons: The Life of Kamiya Mieko (1914-1979) (review)

The subject of television documentaries and at least four biographies since the 1990s, Kamiya Mieko continues to win admirers in Japan as a homegrown version of Albert Schweitzer. As a psychiatrist—a member of a profession that in Japan received less government support than did medical specialties dealing with infectious diseases—she drew attention to the psychological dimension of somatic disorders by examining the impact of social isolation on leprosy patients. Gaining renown as the author of a 1966 existential treatise, What Makes Our Life Worth Living (Ikigai ni tsuite), she helped to increase public sympathy for individuals suffering from stigmatizing ailments.

In this first English-language study of Kamiya, Yuzo Ota nevertheless criticizes the hagiographic quality of earlier accounts that focus on the obstacles that Kamiya had to overcome, such as family opposition and struggles with tuberculosis and cancer, in order to devote herself to leprosy patients. Through an examination of unpublished material preserved by Kamiya's husband and a rereading of her published works, Ota demonstrates how such views cover up the complexity of her personality. Rejecting the saintly image that others imposed on her, she described herself as a "person possessed with seven demons" whose "complex, terrifying [osoroshii]" qualities were undetected by the majority of people who knew her (p. xiii).

Ota delves into Kamiya's family background, discussing the marital discord between her parents, and notes how Kamiya, as a psychiatrist, later concluded that she had inherited both parents' conflicting extrovert and introvert characters. The daughter of a diplomat posted in Switzerland, she attended an elementary school headed by the psychologist Jean Piaget. As the eldest daughter, she cared for her siblings when her mother remained abroad and began reading works on child psychology in order to fulfill this responsibility. According to Ota, the death of her first love, Nomura Kazuhiko, in 1934 marked the turning point in Kamiya's life, propelling her into a long-lasting search for personal meaning and sparking her interest in working in leprosaria. However, he overturns the view that she was unwavering in her commitment to such work by revealing her doubts about pursuing a medical career. Moreover, he shows how a desire to understand herself better led her to specialize instead in psychiatry, the study of which led her to believe that she was not a "normal" person. It was only after her marriage in 1946 that Kamiya began to seriously examine conditions among leprosy patients.

Ota devotes only the last two short chapters to the post-1946 period, the time when Kamiya became more productive as a psychiatrist. He explains that this focus was determined by his respect for the privacy of relatives and friends who are still alive, and also by his wish to produce, not a "regular" biography of Kamiya, but "the history of her inner rather than her external life" (pp. xxiii–xxiv). However, in order to assess his subject's inner feelings, he occasionally has to rely on the products of her external life, her medical writings of the 1960s. For example, he uses a psychological assessment of a leprosy patient that Kamiya made decades later to establish a case for her sense of identification with such individuals in the period immediately following Nomura's death in 1934. While one wishes that Ota had extended his analysis to include more of Kamiya's psychiatric studies, a subject more appealing to historians of medicine, his book should attract the attention of those interested in the topic of female professionals in Japan, and it may become a launching pad for future examinations of Kamiya.