Reiko´s purification: A psychoanalytic reading of Yuko Mishima´s “Música” (1965)

Abstract

Music (Mishima, 1965) is a novel that tells the story of a fictional psychoanalytic case, where characters Dr. Shiomi and consultant Reiko Yumigawa are presented in their process of curing the young woman's inability to "listen to music" (having an orgasm). This document conducts an analysis of the mentioned case, through the technique of the “three readings” (Murillo, 2010): philological reading, semiotic reading, and psychoanalytic reading. After doing a background review of the novel and developing the first two readings, the argument of the psychoanalytic reading is presented, in which it is expressed that the character Reiko suffers from her frigidity because she did not feel worthy of feeling pleasure with her boyfriend, the revered "good and pure" Ryuichi, in the wake of her own "impurity". In the end, it is established that in this novel there is a clear presentation of how some social traditionalisms may be capable of hurting a person to the point of making them a prisoner of a past over which they had no control, and the importance of paying attention to cases of a similar nature that may be happening in real life, to give them their due opportunity to "purify" themselves.