IRST PUBLISHED in 2001 when the author was seventy-eight, Setouchi Jakucho’s memoir (Hawai’i) has finally been translated into English, by Liza Dalby. Setouchi, now ninety-nine, is perhaps Japan’s most famous Buddhist nun; before she was ordained at the age of fifty-one, however, she was a novelist, controversial for her candid portrayals of female sexuality and notorious for her extramarital love affairs. In this autobiographical work, Setouchi journeys through the most formative places of her life with a frank realism that only occasionally gives way to nostalgia. From the mountains of her childhood to her last Tokyo apartment before taking tonsure, Setouchi anchors the meandering memories of her messy entanglements with love, bouts of depression, and the nascence of a “temptation to wander,
