Coping, Resilience, and Post-Traumatic Growth in Shiga Izumi’s Mujō no kami ga maioriru (2017)

This contribution presents Shiga Izumi's work Mujō no kami ga maioriru (2017) as an example of a fictional account of the Tōhoku triple disaster. The study distinguishes coping skills, resilience, and posttraumatic growth, each exemplified by the protagonists' actions enacted by Shiga Izumi. This approach makes it possible to observe how the resilient qualities of the Japanese population are partly attributable to culture-specific factors, such as beliefs of a Buddhist philosophical matrix (mujō), and partly resulting from social support and mutual empathy that sees its healing power in social bonds (kizuna).