Leverich has a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Michigan and has taught composition and literature at Georgetown University, New York University School of Continuing Education, and the University of Michigan. In the following essay, she discusses the significance of the murdered wife of Han in relation to Shiga Naoya's philosophy of the self in Shiga's short story, "Han's Crime."

Several years after publishing the story, "Han's Crime," Shiga Naoya became seized with the desire to "write of the wife, dead and quiet in her grave, from the wife's point of view," according to Edward Fowler in The Rhetoric of Confession. Shiga wrote in his journal, "I would call the story 'The Murdered Wife of Han.' I never did write it, but the urge was there." Shiga's journal entry reveals that although the character Han questioned his own motives, and the judge in the...