He's Leaving Home: My Young Son Becomes a Zen Monk

Rating:
Summary: unpretentious - hidden quality
Review: The japanese original was edited in 1988 and awarded the renowned Akutagawa Prize (if you don't know the name, maybe you remember the film 'Rashomon' - Ryunosuke Akutagawa wrote the book). The translator, Jeff Shore, is professor at the Buddhist Hanazono University, Kyoto. The translation has been selected by the Association for 100 Japanese books, and a Dutch and German translation are in the making. The small booklet is a consciously simple father's report, whose eight-year old son suddenly decides to become a Zen monk. Against the rather halfhearted opposition of the family he succeeds and is ordained at an age of 13. A simple everyday story, and yet - it's readable at so many different levels, and at any level you may get so much out of it that it's difficult to lay aside. It's not even especially pious ore one-sided - you needn't look for criticism, it's there manifestly, but cautiously - and caution itself is examined again. If not of the psychology of Zen, then at least of the psychology of monks and monasteries in Japan I've learned more from that booklet than from scientific treatises.