While criticizing Foucault from a clinician's point of view, Kamiya finds some elements of humanism inherent in so-called anti-human texts of Foucault. For example, Kamiya claims that Foucault gives madness a positive value as ' an integral part of human nature." Kamiya also sympathizes with Foucault's attitude of raising a question against modern Western society which has alienated mental patients. Such notions of madness that Kamiya acquired in the process of reading and translating Foucault are reflected in her Woolf studies, which expounds the integrity and creativity of the world of madness.
Kamiya applies the same method for her analysis of the actual paranoid case of a leprosy patient and of the fictional shell-shocked patient in Woolf's novel. It is a method called an anthropological approach, which tries to reconstruct the pathological world of patients as an organic whole through the eyes of the patients themselves. This method culminates in Kamiya's 'Autobiography' of Virginia Woolf, written as a memoir narrated by Virginia herself.
In Mrs Dalloway, Woolf criticizes what Foucault calls the political function of medical profession. Foucault describes how the medical profession, when nationalized in the eighteenth century, gave birth to a concept of ' model man. ' Sir William Bradshaw, a self-made man and guardian of the British Empire who has led the nation to prosperity by secluding lunatics, imposing his own sense of proportion on every citizen, is a paragon of ' model man.' Woolf breaks up the illlusion of this concept, treating sanity and madness as relative.
The essay is written in Japanese but based on an English oral presentation "Reading Woolf and Foucault through Kamiya's Eyes" at the 7th Annual Conference of the International Virginia Woolf Society held at Plymouth State College, U.S.A. June 15th, 1997