Subject Matter The motivation of shizuka kanai for sustaining his normal sexual life under the pressure of his surroundings as reflected in Mori`s Vita sexualis.

Thus the narrator-hero of Vita Sexualis declares he will endeavor to write the history of the sexual desires of one Shizuka Kanai, himself, but the result of this nineteen-year chronicle of a sexual life is that Ogai succeeds in creating that twofold path of body and spirit in all its psychologically ambivalent complexity 16. Character is also divided into flat and round. Forster describes a flat character as a character without many details and can be simply defined. On the other hand, a round character is a character with many changes and complexities 20-21. Based on the character division, Shizuka Kanai is considered as a flat character. Along the story, Kanai is always described as a straight-thinking person. He never changes his thought about sexual life. He is also always interested in knowledge, especially literature. The author Ogai Mori uses Kanai’s thought and reaction to emphasize his flat character. Probably Kojima and I were the only virgins to graduate from the English Academy. And even after entering the department of literature at our university, we kept the moral sanctions of our triumvirate intact so that Kojima and I remained innocent 102. It shows how Kanai’s perspective concerning sexual life remains the same. He always believes that sexuality issues will somehow be an obstacle to his efforts in pursuing what he desires in life. After the analysis on the character, the first problem arises. To discover Kanai’s reasons for sustaining his normal sexual life, the theory of motivation especially Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is utilized.

4.1.1 Getting Higher Education

As mentioned in chapter 2, Maslow states there are five elements of human basic needs in the hierarchy of needs. They are physiological needs, safety needs, belongingness and love needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs 302-305. In the novel, it is described that Kanai is an intelligent student. At the age of ten, he says “My father began teaching me English a little at a time” 38. He is a young man with a big curiosity. He likes reading very much and willing to learn new things. However, he is not a man who has a special interest in sexual life. When he is eleven years old, he enters a private school located at Ikizaka in Hongo where German is taught. He goes there because his father wants him to take mining as the specialization. Kanai’s father lodges him in the home of the famous Professor Azuma to ease him going to school since his estate at Mukojima is too far from the school. During the time I lived at Professor Azuma’s, I was never pressured by sexual desires 56. My lesson at school did not seem very difficult. Since I had studied English under my father’s instruction, I had been using a dictionary by a man named Adler. It was in two volumes, one German-English, the other English-German. Whenever I was bored, I would amuse myself by looking up such a word as member and then finding its equivalent zeugungslied or by looking up the word pudenda and finding scham 57. When Kanai is thirteen, he gives up German and enters the Tokyo English Academy. The change is not because he cannot follow the German lessons, but partly because of the revision of the educational system by the Ministry of Education and partly because of his interest in studying philosophy. In this new school, his passion for reading gets its proper place. There is a library in the dormitory. Kanai makes use of this means to fulfill his self-actualization needs. Maslow explains that self-actualization needs involve the desire someone has inside to prove himself and to become more and more what he is, as well as to