Author Connections

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Dazai Osamu 

• In a famous photo of Akutagawa he is posing with this thumb and pointer finger in a V-shape under his chin. Because Dazai idolized Akutagawa he copied the pose.
  Pictures of Akutagawa and Dazai can be found on the Pictures page.

• Akutagawa’s suicide had a tremendous affect on Dazai.
  In July of [1927], Akutagawa Ryunosuke committed suicide, and this is said to have had a tremendous affect on [Dazai], who idolized the great write and whose behavior subsequently underwent radical changes. He began to neglect his studies, devoting himself instead to writing and making use of his princely allowance to dress foppishly and to hire the services of geisha at expensive restaurants in Aomori and Asamushi Hot Springs.
  - Exerpt from Osamu Dazai: Self Portraits Introduction.  The introduction was written by Ralph. F. McCarthy

• After Akutagawa’s death, his son, Akutagawa Hiroshi, became an actor and asked Dazai to write the play “A New Hamlet” for his stage troupe to perform.
  Akutagawa Hiroshi, the actor son of Dazai’s literary hero Akutagawa Ryuunosuke, visited him in May to discuss the possibility of having “A New Hamlet” staged by the troupe that he and the playwright Katou Michio had formed. We can only guess how Dazai must have been moved by Akutagawa’s two-day visit; having failed twice at the Akutagawa Prize, at a time in his life when critical recognition would have been like a lifeline thrown to a drowning man, Dazai was now being consulted by Akutagawa’s son. Nevertheless, Dazai’s career as a playwright was very limited, and despite some interest from the theater world at the time, his plays are remembered more as printed texts  than as working scripts.
  - Phyllis I. Lyons, The Saga of Dazai Osamu (pg. 49)

• On Akutagawa and Dazai from the introduction to Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation by James O’Brien:

  • Like Dazai, however, thought not quite so often, Akutagawa will intrude into his work with an authorial comment. Yet … Akutagawa limited himself to authorial comment that was brief and often cryptic. When he - or his persona - does make a more substantial appearance, his role seems problematic. One senses, however, a deliberate decision on the author’s part to implicate himself, and thereby give an added complication to the basic narrative. Dazai’s presence too, whether as author or character, whether directly or through the indirect method of his telltale language, is always a complicating factor. But one senses that he, unlike Akutagawa, was acting on instinct or from habit. One can hardly imagine Dazai being anything other than forthright about his presence in a story, even one partially borrowed from other sources. 

  • Akutagawa’s more fastidious use of this sources seems consistent with hsi normal narrative strategies. He composed in a spare, deliberate vein; … In Akutagawa a dialectic often takes place between such opposed concepts as reality and appearance, truth and falsehood, art and power. The author’s scheme of thesis and antithesis is seldom obscured by descriptive details, nor is it substantially altered in the interests of achieving a resolution. … Dazai, on the other hand, seldom shapes his stories so entirely around a thematic statement. Measured against Akutagawa’s orderly procedures, many Dazai works have a random, even wayward, character about them. Rather than limit himself to an idea or theme from an earlier work, or hone a plot from a classic story, Dazai habitually augments the received materials. The plot takes new twists and turns, with added dialogue and idiosyncratic authorial commentary casting the old tale in a totally different light. At the end Dazai tries to sum up the meaning of the tale: a character will confess to his real motives or the author/persona deliver a verdict on the events that have just transpired. Nonetheless, such comments usually seem interpolations more than integral parts of the narrative. … Did Dazai merely find a story which he could manipulate and expand in multiple ways, then throw himself into the business of generating out of this genius for language an essentially different narrative? Or was there more deliberation and planning than this description implies? There is, to be sure, an organizing intelligence behind much of Dazai’s fiction. One sees this, among other things, in the ironies and reversals that permeate much of his writing. As with Akutagawa, things often turn out to be the opposite of what they seem. And, despite the bizarre character of the above-mentioned final comments by the author/persona in Dazai, the relation of these comments to the finished narrative is less tenuous than it might seem.  

  • Akutagawa usually took a basic idea from another work as the starting point for his own composition. And the debt - if that is actually the word for the process - seldom went beyond. … While Akutagawa often alludes in significant ways to brief, anecdotal materials, Dazai customarily has recourse to more substantial works as source materials. More to the point, he incorporates large swatches of detail, his own retelling of an earlier tale usually ending up as an amalgam of sorts. It must also be said, however, the Dazai virtually obliterates the tone and effect of the originals. … Dazai [has an] uncanny ability to turn almost any material to his own purpose … And yet, Dazai succeeds in preserving much that is recognizable from the originals even as he totally transforms them. 

  • Akutagawa … gives the impression of pursuing a more organized program of reading than Dazai does. Perhaps, then, Akutagawa might be labelled catholic, with the term eclectic reserved for Dazai alone. In any event Akutagawa is assuredly more cultivated and scholarly, his reading experience and general literary knowledge far surpassing that of Dazai. Akutagawa’s ability to read English gave him a considerable advantage, especially when Dazai made no discernible progress in French, his chosen field of study at the university. In contrast to Dazai, who appears for the most part to have read whatever came to hand, Akutagawa, while hardly confining himself to specific authors and certain kinds of literature, seems to have intensively explored special dominant interests, the ghostly and the absurd prominent among them. In the final analysis, however, Akutagawa and Dazai both emboy the sort of unrestrained curiosity and interest that one readily identifies with modern Japan in many areas of endeavor. 

  • Separated by almost a generation, Akutagawa and Dazai were never associated with one another as members of a school or literary current; nor did they ever come close to creating the master-disciple bond so common in the history of modern Japanese letters. However, Dazai was keenly interested in Akutagawa, especially during those formative years of late adolescence and early manhood; indeed, several of his youthful writings make indirect references to the older writer. Looking at both lives in retrospect, one can detect a number of striking resemblances. Each writer occupied a peculiar and ambiguous position in his family, giving rise to a troubled childhood and adolescence in each case; each entered his maturity deeply alienated from society; and finally, each committed suicide on the threshold of middle age. Not surprisingly, both Akutagawa and Dazai wrote out of desperation and with a degree of moral passion. Both excelled in the short tale, Akutagawa never attempting anything longer than a novelette, and Dazai, except for his two postwar novels, appearing to best advantage in the short tale and the vignette.  

  • This volume of translations introduces a special genre of writings by two modern Japanese authors, each of whom achieved considerable renown during his lifetime. One of them, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, seemed likely during the 1920s to succeed Natsume Sōseki as Japan’s foremost writer of prose fiction. Only thirty-five years old when he committed suicide in 1927, Akutagawa never achieved the status of Sōseki; nonetheless, the intellectual play and superb craft of his numerous tales guarantee him a permanent place in the history of modern Japanese letters. Dazai Osamu, who made his debut in the early 1930s, was also quickly recognized for his unique gifts. Like other Japanese writers, Dazai was subject to the scrutiny of government censors during World War II. While almost every other major writer either collaborated with the military or remained silent, Dazai wrote genuine works of fiction and got them published. He survived the war’s end by less than three years, but his final stories and novels are often cited as the most telling depictions of those troubled times by a Japanese writer. 

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Akutagawa references Dostoevsky's House of the Head in one of his autobiographical short stories:
  He hated school, of course. He especially hated middle school with all its restrictions. How cruel the gatekeeper’s bugle sounded to him! How melancholy was the color of the thick poplars on the school grounds! There Shinsuke studied only useless minutiae - the dates of Western history, chemical equations for which they did no experiments, the populations of the cities of Europe and America. With a little effort, this could be relatively painless work, but he could not forget the fact that it was all useless minutiae. In The House of the Dead, Dostoevsky says that a prisoner forced to do such useless work as pouring water from bucket number 1 into bucket number 2 and back again would eventually commit suicide. In the rat-gray schoolhouse, amid the rustling of the tall poplars, Shinsuke felt the mental anguish that such a prisoner would experience.
  - Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Daidouji Shinsuke: The Early Years”

• Akutagawa was familiar with Dostoevsky's works and referenced Crime and Punishment in another autobiographical short story:
  ‘The complete works of Dostoevsky. Have you read ‘Crime and Punishment’?’ I had of course become familiar with four or five Dostoevsky novels some ten years earlier. But I found myself moved by the title ‘Crime and Punishment’ which he had just happened (?) to mention, and so I asked him to lend it to me as I was leaving for my hotel… Thinking of Raskolnikov, I felt the desire to confess everything I had done…
  - Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Spinning Gears”

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Nikolai Gogol

• Akutagawa references Gogol's life in one of his autobiographical short stories:
  Thinking how Gogol, too, had gone mad, he could not help feeling that there was a force governing all of them.
  - Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Life of a Stupid Man”

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Izumi Kyōka

• Akutagawa coined the term "Kyouka's world" to describe his stories' settings:
  Never doubting the miracle of a pure heart and the power of language and literature, he delivered himself from his many anxieties by establishing a fictive purgatory that is often precious and bizarre, though always genuine despite is melodramatic formality. This is a small and idiosyncratic world. However, Kyōka went deep enough in his search to find that place which is connected with all others, and the world of his imagining provides us with vistas of emotional territories that expand in every direction. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892-1927), the brilliant novelist of the generation that followed, coined the term ‘Kyōka’s world” (Kyōka no sekai) for this eccentric place.
  - Charles Shirō Inouye, from the introduction to Izumi Kyōka’s Japanese Gothic Tales short story collection

• Akutagawa admired Kyouka as an author:
  Ryūnosuke continued to devour books. He read Kunikida Doppo and Tayama Katai, Tokutomi Roka and Takayama Chugyuu, Izumi Kyouka and Natsume Souseki. He particularly admired Doppo, a novelist deeply influenced by Western Culture. Doppo was a Christian who regarded literature as a medium of instruction, a tool to be used in the ‘criticism of human life’. He was one of the leaders of the Naturalist movment in Japanese literature, which reached its peak during the years when Ryūnosuke was in Middle School.
  - G.H. Healey, the introduction to Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Kappa

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Kunikida Doppo

• Akutagawa read Kunikida Doppo's works:
  [The middle school teachers] did not hesitate to use any means at their disposal to infect students’ minds with their own prejudices. And in fact one of them, the English teacher they nicknamed ‘Dharma,’ often beat Shinsuke for being what he called a ‘smart aleck.’ What made Shinsuke a ‘smart aleck’ was nothing worse than that he was reading such writers as Doppo and Katai.
  - Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Daidouji Shinsuke: The Early Years”

• Akutagawa kept a diary that was inspired by Kunikida's famous diary:
  He kept a “Diary without Self-Deceit” in imitation of the writer Kunikida Doppo; on its lined pages he recorded passages like this: ‘I am unable to love my father and mother. No, this is not true. I do love them, but I am unable to love their outward appearance. A gentleman should be ashamed to judge people by their appearance. How much more so should he be ashamed to find fault with that of his own parents. Still, I am unable to love the outward appearance of my father and mother… . Doppo said he was in love with love. I am trying to hate hatred. I am trying to hate my hatred for poverty, for falsehood, for everything.’
  - Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Daidouji Shinsuke: The Early Years”

• Akutagawa admired Kunikida as an author:
  Ryūnosuke continued to devour books. He read Kunikida Doppo and Tayama Katai, Tokutomi Roka and Takayama Chugyuu, Izumi Kyouka and Natsume Souseki. He particularly admired Doppo, a novelist deeply influenced by Western Culture. Doppo was a Christian who regarded literature as a medium of instruction, a tool to be used in the ‘criticism of human life’. He was one of the leaders of the Naturalist movment in Japanese literature, which reached its peak during the years when Ryūnosuke was in Middle School.
  - G.H. Healey, the introduction to Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Kappa

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Mori Ōgai

• Akutagawa's writing style was influenced by Mori's:
  Akutagawa was more conspicuously influenced by Mori Ōgai. The style of his early works is so indebted to Ōgai’s that one critic believed it would be more accurate to speak of imitation, rather than influence. This critic, the novelist Nakamura Shin’ichirō, went on to state: ‘Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s special virtue as a new writer lay, more than in anything else, in his dry, intellectual manner of dealing with his subjects. The strongest influence Mori Ōgai exerted on Akutagawa, in fact, was embedded in the very foundations of Akutagawa’s creative formation as an author. It may be detected, for example, in the way he preserved his distance from his subjects. If this analysis is correct, it means that Ōgai handed over to Akutagawa the key for unlocking the secrets of modern literature, and that Ōgai created Akutagawa. In that case, this event brought about an important advance in the stages of Japanese absorption of Western literature.’
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 563-4

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Nakajima Atsushi

• Nakajima is often compared to Akutagawa because their works had a Chinese classical subtext:
  Because of his use of Chinese classical subtexts, Nakajima is often compared to the early Akutagawa, but here he comes out squarely against Akutagawa’s position that plotless fiction is the purest form of fiction; Nakajima insists that the plot is ‘the backbone’ of a story and that contempt for events in fiction is like ‘a child’s forced and unnatural mimetic way of wanting to become a grown-up.’
  - Faye Yuan Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South

• Nakajima tended to stick to the source material he was using to write his stories more than Akutagawa did:
  Nakajima Atsushi’s manner of using Chinese sources… is mostly faithful to the classical source texts, keeping changes to a minimum. Nakajima’s treatment of confucius and his disciples in ‘The Disciple’ (1943), for example, weaves several sources together to create a dynamic story of human interaction, yet he does not easily take liberties with the situations, ideas, or characterizations…. It is important to note that this ‘respect for the classical sources’ is a characteristic that distinguishes Nakajima as a writer from Akutagawa, although some critics have compared Nakajima to Akutagawa on the basis of the two writers’ predilection for using classical source texts. Akutagawa generally reinterprets the events and characters from a modern skeptical perspective, probing the hidden motives and darker emotions of human beings. By contrast, Nakajima focuses on larger, more fundamental issues of human existence - how one should find oneself, how one should live in an unjust world.
  - Nobuko Ochner and Paul McCarthy, the Afterword of The Moon Over the Mountain and Other Stories by Nakajima Atsushi

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Natsume Sōseki

• Souseki taught Akutagawa about his doctrine of self-detachment in pursuit of heaven:
  The doctrine of sokuten kyoshi - self-detachment in pursuit of heaven - was taught by the famous writer, Natsume Soseki, to his student’s at the Imperial University of Tokyo in the early years of the Taisho era (in the years of World War I). Happiness exists only in the contemplation and imagination, suggested Soseki, a contention which fascinated his brilliant and extremely sensitive young student, Akutagawa Ryunosuke…
  - John McVittie, the Introduction to Japanese Short Stories by Akutagawa Ryunosuke

• Akutagawa admired Souseki as an author:
  Ryūnosuke continued to devour books. He read Kunikida Doppo and Tayama Katai, Tokutomi Roka and Takayama Chugyuu, Izumi Kyouka and Natsume Souseki. He particularly admired Doppo, a novelist deeply influenced by Western Culture. Doppo was a Christian who regarded literature as a medium of instruction, a tool to be used in the ‘criticism of human life’. He was one of the leaders of the Naturalist movment in Japanese literature, which reached its peak during the years when Ryūnosuke was in Middle School.
  - G.H. Healey, the introduction to Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Kappa

• Souseki was so impressed with Akutagawa's story "The Nose" he wrote Akutagawa a letter:
  [Akutagawa’s] ‘The Nose’ was also derived from Konjaku Monogatari, and there may have been influence from Gogol’s story ‘The Nose’ (1835). But the composition as a whole owns much to Akutagawa’s ability to combine the grotesque and the humorous without being too obvious. Natsume Sōseki read the work in Shinshichō and was so impressed the he wrote Akutagawa a letter expressing his admiration. The story was subsequently reprinted in the major literature review Shinsōsetsu (New Fiction), marking the beginning of Akutagawa’s fame. Praise from Sōseki was undoubtedly more welcome than from any other source. Sōseki, the commanding figure in the literary world, had gathered around him a circle of disciples, some whom later became well-known writers and critics. Akutagawa had admired Sōseki ever since he was a middle-school student, and early in December 1915 he and his friend, the novelist Kume Masao (1891-1952), finally mustered the courage to attend one of Sōseki’s regular Thursday afternoon sessions with his disciples. From then on Akutagawa went fairly often, though he confessed that he was so hypnotized by Sōseki’s presence that he was almost incapable relaxing and enjoying the experience. Sōseki’s letter, written in February 1916, praised the novelty of the materials, the skill of his terse style, and Akutagawa’s ability to be humorous without forcing. He urged Akutagawa to write more stories in the same vein, cautioning him that he must not worry even if ‘The Nose’ failed at first to attract much attention. Sōseki predicted that if Akutagawa could write twenty or thirty such stories he would establish an absolutely unique reputation. He urged Akutagawa to follow his own path without taking into account the possible reactions of the mass of readers.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 561-2
  I think your piece is very interesting. It is assured, and it is serious, not merely frivolous. I think its particular merit is that the absurdity is not forced, but is perfectly natural, and is allowed to emerge of itself. …The style is concise and controlled. I admired it. You could carve your own special niche in the world of letters.
  - Natsume Sōseki wrote this in a letter to Akutagawa Ryūnosuke after reading Akutagawa’s short story “The Nose.”

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Edgar Allan Poe

• Akutagawa's lecture on Edgar Allan Poe's poetic beauty:
  Akutagawa, referring to ideas proposed in ‘Letters to Mr. ___,’ [by Edgar Allan Poe] clarifies the nature of Poe’s sense of poetic beauty as being ‘that which brings tears, which is, moreover, melancholic.’ He defines this melancholy as a mixture of ‘beauty and strangeness.’ This is determined as characteristic of not only Poe himself, but of his works as well. Contrasting Poe’s theories concerning poetry and the short story, Akutagawa observes that, for Poe, ‘Truth interferes with the rhyme of a poem; terror, passion, sarcasm, and humor are all the intention of the short story,’ and that ‘beauty cannot be the only aim’ of the short story, ideals reflected in both Poe’s and Akutagawa’s works of prose fiction.
  - Lori Dianne Hitchcock, “The Works of Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Lectures on Poe, and Their Applications”

• Akutagawa borrowed from Poe's works:
  Akutagawa’s habit of literary borrowing was, at its worst, little more than plagiarism; however, such instances were not only relatively scarce, but gradually diminished as his career progressed. Of more interest is the manner in which Akutagawa adopted not only the stories, but also themes and literary techniques, of other writers to augment and illustrate his own ideas. As [Donald] Keene writes, ‘Even when a scholar has identified to his own satisfaction the origins of some section of an Akutagawa story, there is generally no question of direct imitation.’ In the case of Akutagawa’s emulation of Poe, this holds particularly true; despite technical, stylistic, and thematic parallels between the works of both authors, the undeniably unique ideas of Akutagawa are apparent throughout his tales.
  - Lori Dianne Hitchcock, “The Works of Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Lectures on Poe, and Their Applications”

• Akutagawa would translate Poe's works into Japanese for practice:
  As a youth, Akutagawa read Japanese and Western authors known for their often darkly imaginative works, such as Mori Ōgai, Izumi Kyōka, Anatole France (whose Japanese introduction Akutagawa is credited with), Baudelaire, and Poe. Knowledge of such works he affixed to his already comprehensive understanding of Japanese and Chinese classic literature to form the basis of his literary vocabulary. In particular, the young Akutagawa, as evidenced in a passage from a 1928 ‘special edition’ of his semi-autobiographical work, ‘Daidouji Shinsuke no hansei,’ exhibited an early interest in the short stories of Poe: ‘[Akutagawa] would translate one page a day of Poe’s short stories. His primary intention of doing this was, more than perfectly translating Poe, to first study the composition of a story, and, secondly, to study the construction of his sentences in this hidden manner.’
  - Lori Dianne Hitchcock, “The Works of Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Lectures on Poe, and Their Applications”

• There are a lot of similarities between Akutagawa and Poe's stories, but Akutagawa still made his own works unique:
  Among the Occidental writers whose works Akutagawa is known to have admired and emulated, those of the American short story stylist, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), are of particular interest. At first glance, the tales of Akutagawa are thematically reminiscent of Poe’s, both sharing a fascination with the morbid and grotesque, as well as exhibiting a certain dark, almost cynical humor. Yet, such similarities between the works of Akutagawa and Poe are comparatively superficial when contrast to the more fundamental technical and ideological parallels demonstrated between these two bodies of fiction. The importance of Poe’s influence on the works of Akutagawa Ryunosuke should not be underestimated, as it constitutes not only an additional literary source for his tales, but also one of the essential elements of Akutagawa’s development as a writer of short stories.
  - Lori Dianne Hitchcock, “The Works of Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Lectures on Poe, and Their Applications”

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Tanizaki Jun'ichirō

• Akuagawa and Tanizaki had a famous argument over the necessity of plot in fiction:
  Akutagawa’s dispute in 1917 with Tanizaki Jun'ichirou, surely one of the least heated and least focused of literary disputes, arose from Akutagawa’s stated doubts about the aesthetic value of plot in a work of fiction, and his subsequent attempts to justify stories that lack a clear-cut plot or structure. “Literary, Excessively Literary” opens: ‘I do not consider that a work of fiction without a recognizable plot is the finest variety; consequently, I do not urge others to write nothing but plotless stories. I might mention that mot of my own stories have plots. A picture cannot be composed without a dessin. In precisely the same way, a work of fiction stands or fails on its plot… . To put it more exactly, without a plot there can be no work of fiction.“ With this conclusion Akutagawa tried to disarm critics like Tanizaki who believed that a plot was essential to any story…
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West

• Tanizaki references Akutagawa's writing in The Key:
  What surprised me even more was that the earrings suited her so well. I recalled something Akutagawa Ryunosuke once wrote about the alluring pallor of the back of a Chinese woman’s ears. My own wife’s ears, seen from the back, were like that. They enhanced the pearls, and were enhanced by them - the effect was quite lovely.
  - Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, The Key

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Tayama Katai

• Akutagawa read Tayama Katai's works:
  [The middle school teachers] did not hesitate to use any means at their disposal to infect students’ minds with their own prejudices. And in fact one of them, the English teacher they nicknamed ‘Dharma,’ often beat Shinsuke for being what he called a ‘smart aleck.’ What made Shinsuke a ‘smart aleck’ was nothing worse than that he was reading such writers as Doppo and Katai.
  - Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Daidouji Shinsuke: The Early Years”

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Ueda Akinari

• "Tales of Moonlight and Rain exerted a powerful influence in the twentieth century. Many novelists—including Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939), Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), Ishikawa Jun (1899–1987), Enchi Fumiko (1905–1986), and Mishima Yukio (1925–1970)—were avid readers of the collection. Two of the tales inspired Mizoguchi Kenji’s cinematic masterpiece Ugetsu monogatari (1953; known to Western viewers as Ugetsu), which is widely regarded as “one of the greatest of all films." Deeply rooted in its eighteenth-century cultural context, Tales of Moonlight and Rain is nonetheless a work of timeless significance and fascination."
  - Anthony H. Chambers, Introduction to Tales of Moonlight and Rain by Ueda Akinari

Edogawa Ranpo and Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Ranpo referenced Crime and Punishment in his famous short story "The Psychological Test":
  …he was now determined to take possession of the old woman’s money. But there were still certain details which had to be figured out before he could make his first move. One of these was the all-important problem of how to divert even the faintest suspicion from himself. Other questions, such as remorse and the attendant pangs of conscience, troubled him not in the least. All this talk of Raskolnikov, in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, crucified by the unseen terrors of a haunted heart was, to [him] sheet nonsense. After all, he reasoned, everything depended on one’s point of view.
  - Edogawa Ranpo, “The Psychological Test”

Edogawa Ranpo and Edgar Allan Poe

• Edogawa Ranpo looked up to Poe and even based his pen name is based on Poe's name:

  • The name Edogawa Ranpo is the pen name of Hirai Tarou… Ranpo’s choice of pen name reflects the Japanese writer’s deliberate homage to the nineteenth-century American writer. But, as remarked by Mark silver in Purloined Letters: Cultural Borrowings in Japanese Crime Literature, 1863-1937, the Chinese characters chosen to write the pen name can also be translated as 'staggering drunkenly along the Edo River,’ or as I prefer, ‘chaotic ramblings.’ The multiple levels of meaning that figure into the ideographs of his chosen pen name through sense and sound suggest that Ranpo from the start saw his mission as a writer as multi-layered: first, as a conscious move to position himself as Japan’s Edgar Allan Poe, and second to closely examine the contradictions of a life in modernity through his literary ramblings. The double meaning, along with the slippages and gaps between his chosen pen name and its references further suggest the crucial anxieties of identity he, like other contemporary urban dwellers, experienced in his youth, a time of immense social change. Thus Ranpo’s pen name is a curiously apt moniker for a keen observe of the modern such as himself.
    - the Introduction to Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination

  •  Born Hirai Tarō in 1894, Ranpo was already enamored of detective fiction, particularly the works of Kuroiwa and those of Edgar Allan Poe, by the time he graduated from Waseda University with a degree in economics in 1916. He was 22 years old. Feelings that Japan offered no opportunities for the creation of original mysteries yet prevented by financial considerations from pursuing a career abroad, Ranpo took up a series of odd jobs in Tokyo and Osaka, including stints as a used bookseller, a newspaper reporter and a noodle vendor. His life continued in this way until 1923, when his debut work, Nisendōka (‘The Two-Sen Copper Coin’), was published in the magazine Shin-Seinen (New Youth). ‘The Two-Sen Copper Coin’ was the first detective story by a Japanese author the magazine had published, and ShinSeinen’s founder and editor-in-chief, Morishita Uson, billed Ranpo as a Japanese writer capable of producing detective fiction equal to Western works, a fact that immediately drew a passionate critical response, both positive and negative.
    - William Varteresian, the introduction to The Early Cases of Akechi Kogorō by Edogawa Ranpo

• Ranpo references Poe's stories in his own writing:

  •  If we speak of fiction, in the beginning of Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ Dupin correctly guesses his friend’s inner thoughts from a single movement of his body, does he not? Doyle mimics that in ‘The Adventure of the Resident Patient’ where, although Holmes makes his usual deductions, they are all associative diagnoses in some way. The various mechanical methods of the psychologist are nothing more than tools created for the use of ordinary people who lack this natural insight.
    - Edogawa Ranpo, “The Case of the Murder on D. Hill” from The Early Cases of Akechi Kogorō

  • Dear readers, I wonder if some of you might not be reminded of Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ or Doyle's ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’ as you read this story. In other words, I wonder if you might not be imagining that the criminal in this case is not a human being, but an orangutan or a venomous Indian serpent or something of that kind.
    - Edogawa Ranpo, “The Case of the Murder on D. Hill” from The Early Cases of Akechi Kogorō

Edogawa Ranpo and Tanizaki Jun'ichirō

• Many years ago Tanizaki Junichirou wrote a poem on a scroll for me, and to this day it hangs in the alcove of my drawing room.
        Night flies on blackbird’s wings
        Shades of a dream -
        What is a shadow seen in daylight?
  - Edogawa Ranpo, "The Phantom Lord" essay (1936) from The Edogawa Rampo Reader

Izumi Kyōka and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

• Akutagawa coined the term "Kyouka's world" to describe his stories' settings:
  Never doubting the miracle of a pure heart and the power of language and literature, he delivered himself from his many anxieties by establishing a fictive purgatory that is often precious and bizarre, though always genuine despite is melodramatic formality. This is a small and idiosyncratic world. However, Kyōka went deep enough in his search to find that place which is connected with all others, and the world of his imagining provides us with vistas of emotional territories that expand in every direction. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892-1927), the brilliant novelist of the generation that followed, coined the term ‘Kyōka’s world” (Kyōka no sekai) for this eccentric place.
  - Charles Shirō Inouye, from the introduction to Izumi Kyōka’s Japanese Gothic Tales short story collection

• Akutagawa admired Kyouka as an author:
  Ryūnosuke continued to devour books. He read Kunikida Doppo and Tayama Katai, Tokutomi Roka and Takayama Chugyuu, Izumi Kyouka and Natsume Souseki. He particularly admired Doppo, a novelist deeply influenced by Western Culture. Doppo was a Christian who regarded literature as a medium of instruction, a tool to be used in the ‘criticism of human life’. He was one of the leaders of the Naturalist movment in Japanese literature, which reached its peak during the years when Ryūnosuke was in Middle School.
  - G.H. Healey, the introduction to Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Kappa

Izumi Kyōka and Dazai Osamu

• Dazai quotes Kyouka in "The Sound of Hamering":
  I also wanted to quote for her the famous words from Kyouka’s novel: ‘Even if you die, don’t become his plaything!’ but that would be going too far…. Even if you die, don’t become his plaything! What does wealth amount to? Or material goods?
  - Dazai Osamu, “The Sound of Hammering”

Izumi Kyōka and Kunikida Doppo

• Izumi was a contemporary of Kunikida and Katai, but Katai's works didn't become popular as quickly as the others':
  Katai began his career as a writer earlier than either Kunikida Doppo or Izumi Kyōka, but his reputation was quickly eclipsed by theirs. His stories were ordinary and sentimental, and although he was true to himself, he could not yet present his problems in such a way as to arouse sympathy among the public. He managed nevertheless to survive on the meager sums his manuscripts brought in.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 242

Izumi Kyōka and Ozaki Kōyō

• Kyouka was Kouyou's student:
  In 1890 Kyōka went to Tokyo, intending to call on Kōyō, but he was too shy to appear at Kōyō’s door. Instead, he wandered the streets, shifting his lodgings a dozen times, leading the hand-to-mouth existence he would describe in several especially moving works. One morning in October 1891 he finally mustered up the courage to visit Kōyō, who accepted him as a disciple immediately. From the following day Kyōka lived in Kōyō’s house, in a tiny room next to the entrance. He was charged with cleaning the house, keeping track of visitors’ footwear, and running errands. He ate his meals in Kōyō’s house and received in addition the incredibly small monthly wage of fifty sen, which he used to buy paper, brushes, and cigarettes. Kyōka remained in the household for about three years with few breaks. He was the perfect disciple, ever solicitous of his master’s good opinion, and absolutely loyal to Kōyō. The one stark conflict between the two men occurred when Kōyō, discovering that Kyōka was secretly living with a geisha, ordered him to pay the woman and get rid of her…. Kyōka, in difference to his master’s wishes, refrained from marrying the geisha until after Kōyō’s death. Undoubtedly this incident caused Kyōka much anguish, but far from resenting the interference in his private life, he continued even after Kōyō’s death to pay obeisance to his mentor’s photograph every day. Kōyō, it should be said, was an ideal teacher, consecrating innumerable hours to improving Kyōka’s writings and to finding publishers for them.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West page 205

• When Kyouka was feeling down about writing, Kouyou wrote him a letter to encourage him:
  There was little interest in serious fiction during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. Kyōka reportedly was so dejected over his inability to earn enough money to support himself that he contemplated drowning himself in the moat of Kanazawa Castle. Kōyō, sensing the danger, wrote Kyōka, praising his most recent story (which he had arranged to have published) and urging him to rejoice that it was his destiny to be a writer: ‘The great poet’s mind is like a diamond; fire does not burn it, water cannot drown it, so no sword can penetrate its surface, no cudgel can smash it. How much less, then, can it be impaired by hunger for a bowl of rice! Because the time is not yet ripe for your diamond-mind to reveal its full brilliance, Heaven has provided the sand of suffering and the whetstone of hardship to polish it so that it may in a few years shine in all-pervading, eternal radiance.’
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West page 208

Izumi Kyōka and Tanizaki Jun'ichirō

• Tanizaki wanted to show Kyouka his story "The Tattooer" because the world of his story was closely related to Kyouka's:
  After Tanizaki completed the first draft of ‘The Tattooer,’ his first thought was to show it to Izumi Kyōka. At this time, when Naturalism of the most prosaic variety was the prevalent literary mode, only Kyōka continued to include in his works supernatural or irrational elements associated with the writings of the past. Tanizaki’s world was closer to reality than Kyōka’s, but the early works resemble Kyōka’s in their rejection of the cold glare of common sense.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 727

Izumi Kyōka and Tayama Katai

• Kyouka was a contemporary of Kunikida and Katai, but Katai's works didn't become popular as quickly as the others':
  Katai began his career as a writer earlier than either Kunikida Doppo or Izumi Kyōka, but his reputation was quickly eclipsed by theirs. His stories were ordinary and sentimental, and although he was true to himself, he could not yet present his problems in such a way as to arouse sympathy among the public. He managed nevertheless to survive on the meager sums his manuscripts brought in.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 242

Izumi Kyōka and Ueda Akinari

• "Tales of Moonlight and Rain exerted a powerful influence in the twentieth century. Many novelists—including Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939), Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), Ishikawa Jun (1899–1987), Enchi Fumiko (1905–1986), and Mishima Yukio (1925–1970)—were avid readers of the collection. Two of the tales inspired Mizoguchi Kenji’s cinematic masterpiece Ugetsu monogatari (1953; known to Western viewers as Ugetsu), which is widely regarded as “one of the greatest of all films." Deeply rooted in its eighteenth-century cultural context, Tales of Moonlight and Rain is nonetheless a work of timeless significance and fascination."
  - Anthony H. Chambers, Introduction to Tales of Moonlight and Rain by Ueda Akinari

Mori Ōgai and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

• Akutagawa's writing style was influenced by Mori's:
  Akutagawa was more conspicuously influenced by Mori Ōgai. The style of his early works is so indebted to Ōgai’s that one critic believed it would be more accurate to speak of imitation, rather than influence. This critic, the novelist Nakamura Shin’ichirō, went on to state: ‘Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s special virtue as a new writer lay, more than in anything else, in his dry, intellectual manner of dealing with his subjects. The strongest influence Mori Ōgai exerted on Akutagawa, in fact, was embedded in the very foundations of Akutagawa’s creative formation as an author. It may be detected, for example, in the way he preserved his distance from his subjects. If this analysis is correct, it means that Ōgai handed over to Akutagawa the key for unlocking the secrets of modern literature, and that Ōgai created Akutagawa. In that case, this event brought about an important advance in the stages of Japanese absorption of Western literature.’
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 563-4

Mori Ōgai and Higuchi Ichiyō

• Mori praised Higuchi's story "Growing Up":
  [Higuchi Ichiyō’s] ‘Growing Up’ was acclaimed as a masterpiece, especially when the entire work was republished in a single issue of the popular magazine Bungei Kurabu in April 1896, Mori Ōgai… lavishly praised its every feature: …
  (Ōgai): It is not especially remarkable that this author, a member of a literary circle in which the Naturalist school is said to be enjoying a vogue should have chosen to set her story in this place [the Yoshiwara district]. What is remarkable is that the characters who haunt this area are not the brute beasts in human form - the copies of Zola, Ibsen, and the rest - presented by the assiduous imitators of the so-called Naturalist school, but human beings with whom we can laugh and cry together… . At the risk of being mocked as an Ichiyō-idolater, I do not hesitate to accord to her the name of ‘poet.’ It is more difficult to depict a person with individual characteristics than a stereotype, and far more difficult to depict and individual in a milieu than a special person all by himself. This author, who has painted the ‘local coloring’ of Daionji-mae so effectively that one might say it has ceased to exist apart from ‘Growing Up,’ without leaving any trace of the efforts such portraiture must have cost her, must truly be called a woman of rare ability.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, pages 179-80

Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki

• Mori and Souseki are two great Japanese authors, but they tend to attract different readers:
  Many cultivated Japanese, if asked to name the two great authors of modern Japan, would answer without hesitation “Natsume Souseki and Mori Ougai,” though the two men have tended to attract different readers. Souseki’s novels are admired especially by readers who believe that literature should embody humanistic ideal: but Ougai’s works tend to be most revered by writers and other intellectuals who admire his serene, Apollonian manner and his profound respect for Japanese tradition. The two men are more often contrasted than compared, and it is tacitly assumed that a reader who likes one probably will not like the other. This is a simplistic judgment, but it is undeniable that the appeal of these two master writers is strikingly dissimilar.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 355

• Souski and Mori were the first to pioneer "modern" Japanese literature:
  Who would pioneer a new literature, at once Japanese and ‘modern’, that could speak to the change and transformation going on around them? Mori Ogai and Natsume Soseki… were among the first of those who stepped forward to take up this challenge. Certainly no one could have been better equipped for the task: gifted in European languages, they excelled in classical Chinese as well, and had a deep knowledge of Japan’s literary traditions. Yet the task was daunting. Writers of fiction were dismissed as frivolous and vulgar by traditional society, which language for literature, which would reflect how people actually spoke and which could be used to express exciting new concepts like ‘love’ and ‘individualism’, had to be created from scratch… This id not mean, however, that the trail blazed by Ogai, Soseki, and their contemporaries ran parallel to that of Western literature. These were no blind admirers of what the West had to offer - Soseki, for one, felt that he had been somehow ‘cheated’ by English literature. Ogai had studied in Germany, Soseki in England, and both were acutely aware of the features of foreign culture - the language, the customs, and the sense of beauty and form - were altogether different from Japan’s. To create a new, modern Japanese literature, they had to carve new trails, not follow old ones. They had to be experimental writers. This meant that, once they felt they had taken what they could use from Western literature, they moved on. Ogai eventually turned to traditional materials - legends like ‘Sansho the Steward’… and the lives of historical figures - while Soseki, a brilliant theoretician, was able to anticipate developments yet to occur in the West. Through their efforts, and those of the other trail-blazers, by 1910 the Japanese short story was already established as a genre linked with, but not identical to, its counterpart in the West.
  - Theodore W. Goossen, the Introduction to The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories

• Mori mentions Souseki in Vita Sexualis:
  “In due course of time Natsume Soseki began writing his novels. Mr. Kanai read them with great interest. And he felt stimulated by them. But then in rivalry to Soseki’s I Am a Cat, something came out call I too Am a Cat. A book appeared entitled I Am a Dog. Mr. Kanai was quite disgusted on seeing these stories and ended by not writing anything himself.”
  - Mori Ogai, Vita Sexualis

Mori Ōgai and Tayama Katai

• Katai was assigned to the same sector as Mori during the Russo-Japanese War:
  In [1904] Katai volunteered as a correspondent during the Russo-Japanese War and witnessed fighting at various places in China. Katai’s war experiences provided an invaluable background for the development of his writings. He saw men display traits in the face of death - both generous and cold-blooded selfishness - and felt that he was observing the true nature of men, stripped of all pretense. This came as a revelation to Katai, who had hitherto described more petty emotional entanglements as if they were the ultimate human problems. Another unexpected benefit of his service as a war correspondent was that he was assigned to the same sector as Mori Ōgai and spent many hours conversing with the great writer, even then known as an enemy of the Naturalism that Katai was promoting.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 244-5

Nakajima Atsushi and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

• Nakajima is often compared to Akutagawa because their works had a Chinese classical subtext:
  Because of his use of Chinese classical subtexts, Nakajima is often compared to the early Akutagawa, but here he comes out squarely against Akutagawa’s position that plotless fiction is the purest form of fiction; Nakajima insists that the plot is ‘the backbone’ of a story and that contempt for events in fiction is like ‘a child’s forced and unnatural mimetic way of wanting to become a grown-up.’
  - Faye Yuan Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South

• Nakajima tended to stick to the source material he was using to write his stories more than Akutagawa did:
  Nakajima Atsushi’s manner of using Chinese sources… is mostly faithful to the classical source texts, keeping changes to a minimum. Nakajima’s treatment of confucius and his disciples in ‘The Disciple’ (1943), for example, weaves several sources together to create a dynamic story of human interaction, yet he does not easily take liberties with the situations, ideas, or characterizations…. It is important to note that this ‘respect for the classical sources’ is a characteristic that distinguishes Nakajima as a writer from Akutagawa, although some critics have compared Nakajima to Akutagawa on the basis of the two writers’ predilection for using classical source texts. Akutagawa generally reinterprets the events and characters from a modern skeptical perspective, probing the hidden motives and darker emotions of human beings. By contrast, Nakajima focuses on larger, more fundamental issues of human existence - how one should find oneself, how one should live in an unjust world.
  - Nobuko Ochner and Paul McCarthy, the Afterword of The Moon Over the Mountain and Other Stories by Nakajima Atsushi

Oda Sakunosuke and Dazai Osamu

• Dazai wrote a eulogy for Oda Sakunosuke:
  Oda wanted to die. . . . I, above all other men, felt and understood deeply the sadness of Oda. The first time I met him on the Ginza, I thought, "God, what an unhappy man," and I could scarcely bear the pain. He gave the vivid impression that there was across his path nothing but the wall of death. He wanted to die. But there was nothing I could do. A big-brotherly warning - what hateful hypocrisy. There was nothing to do but watch. The "adults" of the world will probably criticize him smugly, saying he didn't have enough self-respect. But how dare they think they have the right! Yesterday I found record in Mr. Tatsuno [Yutaka]'s introductory essay on Senancour the following words: "People say it is a sin to flee by throwing life away. However, these same sophists who forbid me death often expose me to the presence of death, force me to proceed toward death. The various innovations they think up increase the opportunities for death around me, their preaching leads me toward death, and the laws they establish present me with death." You are the ones who killed Oda, aren't you? His recent sudden death was a poem of his final, sorry resistance. Oda! You did well.
  - Dazai Osamu’s published eulogy for Odasaku, found in The Saga of Dazai Osamu: A Critical Study and Translation by Phyllis I. Lyons, pages 49-50.

• Oda was a member of the Buraiha literary school, along with Sakaguchi Ango, Dazai Osamu, and Dan Kazuo:

  • Soon after the war ended in 1945 a group of writers, all of whom had acquired something of a reputation before the ward, began to publish works of fiction that set them off from other postwar writers and gave them an identity of their own. The membership of this group was never clearly defined. Three writers - Dazai Osamu, Sakaguchi Ango, and Oda Sakunosuke - undoubtedly belonged to the group, and others, including Dazia’s ‘disciple’ Tanaka Hidemitsu, Ishikawa Jun, and even Itō Sei, the Modernist, were at various times identified with it. At first, the group was known as the ‘gesaku’ or ‘new gesaku’ writers, presumably because of their resemblances to the gesaku writers of the Tokugawa period who presented their criticisms of society in a deliberately comic, even farcical manner. The self-mockery of the ‘new gesaku’ writers implied a rejection of the self-satisfaction of the Shirakaba writers, who were convinced of the importance of their every act, and of the proletarian writers, who were sure that they could explain all human activities in terms of Marxist doctrine. The ‘new gesaku’ writers usually came from well-to-do families, though they made a point of associating with the lower classes - not factory workers or farmers, but city derelicts. Their heavy drinking and sometimes disorderly behavior were notorious. Although most were at one time attracted to Communism, they had become disillusioned, not so much with Marxist theory as with the day-to-day activities of party members. At implicit rejection of the present often led them to display an interest in the past, whether the Edo of the gesaku writers or more distant history. Their existential despair was not easily consoled: several of the group, including Dazai Osamu, the most important member, committed suicide, and others deliberately ruined their constitutions. The combination of intense depression, usually brought on by the loss of hope and a disgust with established values, tended to be expressed not in terms of burning indignation but of farce, and gave the group its most distinctive characteristic.
    - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, pages 1022-3

  • Japanese literary historians show a great fondness for grouping writers in schools, preferably those to which a neat descriptive label can be attached. In the years immediately following the end of the war, when Oda rose to sudden prominence, the tendency in critical circles was to lump him with Dazai Osamu, Sakaguchi Ango, and Ishikawa Jun as a member of what was dubbed the burai-ha, the “hooligan” or “decadent” school of writers. The term burai-ha, which appears first in 1946, was from the beginning rather vague in meaning, the opinions differ as to just what it denotes and to whom it should be applied. In general, however, it is taken to mean writers whose works are distinguished by an attitude of disillusionment and alienation from society, and whose personal lives are marked by dissipation.
    - Stories of Osaka Life Introduction

  • What kind of woman is to your taste?
    Sakaguchi: I feel like the charm of women exists in Osaka, rather than Tokyo. Essentially, when it comes to women, though, there is nothing intrinsic about them. True to form, there are more pretenders than anything.
    Oda: For me, I don't lean toward women in either Osaka or Tokyo...
    Dazai: Women are no good.
    Sakaguchi: Through and through, I prefer women, only... Oda: If you ask me what type of women I like..., I can't give you a clear answer.
    Sakaguchi: Because you are thinking of all sorts of things... about shape, clothes and so on...
    Oda: No, no, no. Each time I like a woman, I do so for different reasons. Now, though, I'm in this period of confusion... Before, I believed, still... my type was the tall, thin, romantic type... so I was thinking all those sorts of things mattered, but now, at thois point, anything is fine.
    Dazai: I want to start a romance with a beggar woman.
    Sakaguchi: Yeah, that's one option.
    Oda: In the end, we're probably fine with any kind of woman whatsoever.
    - 不良少年とキリスト (Furyō shōnen to Kirisuto), by Sakaguchi Ango; translated by Maplopo

Oda Sakunosuke and Sakaguchi Ango

• Ango praised Oda's writings in an interview:
  Ikeda: I would like to ask you about Mr. Oda (Sakunosuke).
  Sakaguchi: Let’s not talk about literature.
  Reporter: I can’t allow that. (laughter)
  Sakaguchi: Oda is a man who formed one generation of readers so in that way his writings are good. His writing reads very smoothly, which is extremely important.
  - Sakaguchi Ango, “Eroticism and Literature” Interview 

• Oda was a member of the Buraiha literary school, along with Sakaguchi Ango, Dazai Osamu, and Dan Kazuo:

  • Soon after the war ended in 1945 a group of writers, all of whom had acquired something of a reputation before the ward, began to publish works of fiction that set them off from other postwar writers and gave them an identity of their own. The membership of this group was never clearly defined. Three writers - Dazai Osamu, Sakaguchi Ango, and Oda Sakunosuke - undoubtedly belonged to the group, and others, including Dazia’s ‘disciple’ Tanaka Hidemitsu, Ishikawa Jun, and even Itō Sei, the Modernist, were at various times identified with it. At first, the group was known as the ‘gesaku’ or ‘new gesaku’ writers, presumably because of their resemblances to the gesaku writers of the Tokugawa period who presented their criticisms of society in a deliberately comic, even farcical manner. The self-mockery of the ‘new gesaku’ writers implied a rejection of the self-satisfaction of the Shirakaba writers, who were convinced of the importance of their every act, and of the proletarian writers, who were sure that they could explain all human activities in terms of Marxist doctrine. The ‘new gesaku’ writers usually came from well-to-do families, though they made a point of associating with the lower classes - not factory workers or farmers, but city derelicts. Their heavy drinking and sometimes disorderly behavior were notorious. Although most were at one time attracted to Communism, they had become disillusioned, not so much with Marxist theory as with the day-to-day activities of party members. At implicit rejection of the present often led them to display an interest in the past, whether the Edo of the gesaku writers or more distant history. Their existential despair was not easily consoled: several of the group, including Dazai Osamu, the most important member, committed suicide, and others deliberately ruined their constitutions. The combination of intense depression, usually brought on by the loss of hope and a disgust with established values, tended to be expressed not in terms of burning indignation but of farce, and gave the group its most distinctive characteristic.
    - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, pages 1022-3

  • Japanese literary historians show a great fondness for grouping writers in schools, preferably those to which a neat descriptive label can be attached. In the years immediately following the end of the war, when Oda rose to sudden prominence, the tendency in critical circles was to lump him with Dazai Osamu, Sakaguchi Ango, and Ishikawa Jun as a member of what was dubbed the burai-ha, the “hooligan” or “decadent” school of writers. The term burai-ha, which appears first in 1946, was from the beginning rather vague in meaning, the opinions differ as to just what it denotes and to whom it should be applied. In general, however, it is taken to mean writers whose works are distinguished by an attitude of disillusionment and alienation from society, and whose personal lives are marked by dissipation.
    - Stories of Osaka Life Introduction

  • What kind of woman is to your taste?
    Sakaguchi: I feel like the charm of women exists in Osaka, rather than Tokyo. Essentially, when it comes to women, though, there is nothing intrinsic about them. True to form, there are more pretenders than anything.
    Oda: For me, I don't lean toward women in either Osaka or Tokyo...
    Dazai: Women are no good.
    Sakaguchi: Through and through, I prefer women, only... Oda: If you ask me what type of women I like..., I can't give you a clear answer.
    Sakaguchi: Because you are thinking of all sorts of things... about shape, clothes and so on...
    Oda: No, no, no. Each time I like a woman, I do so for different reasons. Now, though, I'm in this period of confusion... Before, I believed, still... my type was the tall, thin, romantic type... so I was thinking all those sorts of things mattered, but now, at thois point, anything is fine.
    Dazai: I want to start a romance with a beggar woman.
    Sakaguchi: Yeah, that's one option.
    Oda: In the end, we're probably fine with any kind of woman whatsoever.
    - 不良少年とキリスト (Furyō shōnen to Kirisuto), by Sakaguchi Ango; translated by Maplopo

Sakaguchi Ango and Dazai Osamu

• Sakaguchi Ango talked about Dazai in an interview:
  Reporter: What do you think about Dazai?
  Sakaguchi: He is one of the great authors. He is an author that possesses a keen observation of humans. He will most likely remain one of the world’s top authors. I am very proud of the fact that Japan gave birth to Dazai. Even in France you would be hard pressed to find an author with his talents. This type of writing that observes humanity is not mainstream, but there are few in literary history able to write like him, coming from a sub-stream writing circle. With that in mind, the Japanese can take pride in him. It is possible that he is one of the greatest. I hold his works in high esteem, like rakugo. I think it is the greatest, rakugo, and one should not speak ill of this. Rakugo is enjoyable and amusing. If it is a piece that extends joy eternally, then that merits being called on of the greats. Dazai is one of the greatest rakugo authors, therefore he will have a place in history.
  - Sakaguchi Ango, “Eroticism and Literature” Interview

• Sakaguchi Ango called Dazai Osamu's death a "hangover suicide":
  Appropriately enough, given Dazai’s history of suicide attempts, [his] final act is subject to some doubt. There were rumors that Dazai was the victim of a homicide carried out by his lover Tomie. The basis for this theory consisted of unconfirmed reports, denied by the police, that signs of the corpse indicated possible strangulation. There were also said to be traces of geta (wooden clogs) in the sand, indicating that Dazai might have been dragged into the water. The homicide theory is reinforced by the realization that Dazai’s unfinished work, ominously titled in English ‘Good-bye,’ was not a farewell to life, as might lend credence to the suicide theory, but rather a farewell to ‘women.’ Accordingly, it is proposed that Tomie, sensing a separation, might have lured Dazai to his death. He may have gone along unsuspectingly, or he may have let himself be led, and then resisted, only to be subdued by her determination. Presumably, though, he was in a state of health and mind that would not have discouraged compliance. He may also have been drinking. A writer of similar tendencies, Sakaguchi Ango, invoking Dazia’s tendency toward alcoholic depression, called it a ‘hangover suicide.’
  - Alan Stephen Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan: The Case of Dazai Osamu 

• Sakaguchi was a member of the Buraiha literary school, along with Dazai Osamu, Oda Sakunosuke, and Dan Kazuo:

  • Soon after the war ended in 1945 a group of writers, all of whom had acquired something of a reputation before the ward, began to publish works of fiction that set them off from other postwar writers and gave them an identity of their own. The membership of this group was never clearly defined. Three writers - Dazai Osamu, Sakaguchi Ango, and Oda Sakunosuke - undoubtedly belonged to the group, and others, including Dazia’s ‘disciple’ Tanaka Hidemitsu, Ishikawa Jun, and even Itō Sei, the Modernist, were at various times identified with it. At first, the group was known as the ‘gesaku’ or ‘new gesaku’ writers, presumably because of their resemblances to the gesaku writers of the Tokugawa period who presented their criticisms of society in a deliberately comic, even farcical manner. The self-mockery of the ‘new gesaku’ writers implied a rejection of the self-satisfaction of the Shirakaba writers, who were convinced of the importance of their every act, and of the proletarian writers, who were sure that they could explain all human activities in terms of Marxist doctrine. The ‘new gesaku’ writers usually came from well-to-do families, though they made a point of associating with the lower classes - not factory workers or farmers, but city derelicts. Their heavy drinking and sometimes disorderly behavior were notorious. Although most were at one time attracted to Communism, they had become disillusioned, not so much with Marxist theory as with the day-to-day activities of party members. At implicit rejection of the present often led them to display an interest in the past, whether the Edo of the gesaku writers or more distant history. Their existential despair was not easily consoled: several of the group, including Dazai Osamu, the most important member, committed suicide, and others deliberately ruined their constitutions. The combination of intense depression, usually brought on by the loss of hope and a disgust with established values, tended to be expressed not in terms of burning indignation but of farce, and gave the group its most distinctive characteristic.
    - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, pages 1022-3

  • Japanese literary historians show a great fondness for grouping writers in schools, preferably those to which a neat descriptive label can be attached. In the years immediately following the end of the war, when Oda rose to sudden prominence, the tendency in critical circles was to lump him with Dazai Osamu, Sakaguchi Ango, and Ishikawa Jun as a member of what was dubbed the burai-ha, the “hooligan” or “decadent” school of writers. The term burai-ha, which appears first in 1946, was from the beginning rather vague in meaning, the opinions differ as to just what it denotes and to whom it should be applied. In general, however, it is taken to mean writers whose works are distinguished by an attitude of disillusionment and alienation from society, and whose personal lives are marked by dissipation.
    - Stories of Osaka Life Introduction

  • What kind of woman is to your taste?
    Sakaguchi: I feel like the charm of women exists in Osaka, rather than Tokyo. Essentially, when it comes to women, though, there is nothing intrinsic about them. True to form, there are more pretenders than anything.
    Oda: For me, I don't lean toward women in either Osaka or Tokyo...
    Dazai: Women are no good.
    Sakaguchi: Through and through, I prefer women, only... Oda: If you ask me what type of women I like..., I can't give you a clear answer.
    Sakaguchi: Because you are thinking of all sorts of things... about shape, clothes and so on...
    Oda: No, no, no. Each time I like a woman, I do so for different reasons. Now, though, I'm in this period of confusion... Before, I believed, still... my type was the tall, thin, romantic type... so I was thinking all those sorts of things mattered, but now, at thois point, anything is fine.
    Dazai: I want to start a romance with a beggar woman.
    Sakaguchi: Yeah, that's one option.
    Oda: In the end, we're probably fine with any kind of woman whatsoever.
    - 不良少年とキリスト (Furyō shōnen to Kirisuto), by Sakaguchi Ango; translated by Maplopo

Sakaguchi Ango and Oda Sakunosuke

• Ango praised Oda's writings in an interview:
  Ikeda: I would like to ask you about Mr. Oda (Sakunosuke).
  Sakaguchi: Let’s not talk about literature.
  Reporter: I can’t allow that. (laughter)
  Sakaguchi: Oda is a man who formed one generation of readers so in that way his writings are good. His writing reads very smoothly, which is extremely important.
  - Sakaguchi Ango, “Eroticism and Literature” Interview 

• Sakaguchi Ango was a member of the Buraiha literary school, along with Oda Sakunosuke, Dazai Osamu, and Dan Kazuo:

  • Soon after the war ended in 1945 a group of writers, all of whom had acquired something of a reputation before the ward, began to publish works of fiction that set them off from other postwar writers and gave them an identity of their own. The membership of this group was never clearly defined. Three writers - Dazai Osamu, Sakaguchi Ango, and Oda Sakunosuke - undoubtedly belonged to the group, and others, including Dazia’s ‘disciple’ Tanaka Hidemitsu, Ishikawa Jun, and even Itō Sei, the Modernist, were at various times identified with it. At first, the group was known as the ‘gesaku’ or ‘new gesaku’ writers, presumably because of their resemblances to the gesaku writers of the Tokugawa period who presented their criticisms of society in a deliberately comic, even farcical manner. The self-mockery of the ‘new gesaku’ writers implied a rejection of the self-satisfaction of the Shirakaba writers, who were convinced of the importance of their every act, and of the proletarian writers, who were sure that they could explain all human activities in terms of Marxist doctrine. The ‘new gesaku’ writers usually came from well-to-do families, though they made a point of associating with the lower classes - not factory workers or farmers, but city derelicts. Their heavy drinking and sometimes disorderly behavior were notorious. Although most were at one time attracted to Communism, they had become disillusioned, not so much with Marxist theory as with the day-to-day activities of party members. At implicit rejection of the present often led them to display an interest in the past, whether the Edo of the gesaku writers or more distant history. Their existential despair was not easily consoled: several of the group, including Dazai Osamu, the most important member, committed suicide, and others deliberately ruined their constitutions. The combination of intense depression, usually brought on by the loss of hope and a disgust with established values, tended to be expressed not in terms of burning indignation but of farce, and gave the group its most distinctive characteristic.
    - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, pages 1022-3

  • Japanese literary historians show a great fondness for grouping writers in schools, preferably those to which a neat descriptive label can be attached. In the years immediately following the end of the war, when Oda rose to sudden prominence, the tendency in critical circles was to lump him with Dazai Osamu, Sakaguchi Ango, and Ishikawa Jun as a member of what was dubbed the burai-ha, the “hooligan” or “decadent” school of writers. The term burai-ha, which appears first in 1946, was from the beginning rather vague in meaning, the opinions differ as to just what it denotes and to whom it should be applied. In general, however, it is taken to mean writers whose works are distinguished by an attitude of disillusionment and alienation from society, and whose personal lives are marked by dissipation.
    - Stories of Osaka Life Introduction

  • What kind of woman is to your taste?
    Sakaguchi: I feel like the charm of women exists in Osaka, rather than Tokyo. Essentially, when it comes to women, though, there is nothing intrinsic about them. True to form, there are more pretenders than anything.
    Oda: For me, I don't lean toward women in either Osaka or Tokyo...
    Dazai: Women are no good.
    Sakaguchi: Through and through, I prefer women, only... Oda: If you ask me what type of women I like..., I can't give you a clear answer.
    Sakaguchi: Because you are thinking of all sorts of things... about shape, clothes and so on...
    Oda: No, no, no. Each time I like a woman, I do so for different reasons. Now, though, I'm in this period of confusion... Before, I believed, still... my type was the tall, thin, romantic type... so I was thinking all those sorts of things mattered, but now, at thois point, anything is fine.
    Dazai: I want to start a romance with a beggar woman.
    Sakaguchi: Yeah, that's one option.
    Oda: In the end, we're probably fine with any kind of woman whatsoever.
    - 不良少年とキリスト (Furyō shōnen to Kirisuto), by Sakaguchi Ango; translated by Maplopo

Sakaguchi Ango and Yokomizo Seishi

• Comparing Yokomizo's detective, Kindaichi, to Sakaguchi Ango's detective, Kose:
  "The kind of morality proposed by Ango through the figure of Kose and by Yokomizo through Kindaichi is different from the values that excited people during the Enlightenment but eventually disappointed them. The ideal of universal rationality and faith in progress did not prevent the moderns from being drawn by the grandeur of fascism, and a stronger system of ethics would be needed to combat it in the future.
  "Kindaichi allows an element of chance to affect his ratiocination, acknowledging that there are elements of truth one can never know, or cannot make sense of. Although he strives to be rational in figuring out whodunit, he does not expect the killer to always be rational and consistent in planning and carrying out his or her designs. The series of historical events in Japan - from urbanization to total war - showed Kindaichi and everyone else who lived through them that in modern cause-and-effect relationships are never straightforward, and things are neither entirely deliberate nor completely accidental. It is only by accepting such a precarious worldview that one can escape the assujettissement brought by the realization of truth: the unexpected (and ultimately misguided) reliance on science of the Inugami clan at Sukekiyo's fingerprinting test reinforces this view.
  "However, outsmarting the truth does not entail neglecting self-cultivation through its pursuit. Although Ango and Yokomizo never coordinated their writings, Ango's challenge to the readers - in which the author and readers compete in the game of whodunit on an equal playing field - contributes to Yokomizo's desire to encourage the intellectual and emotional participation of his audience. It is an exercise in subjectivation in which the mediation of the publishing company is kept at a minimum.
  "Both Kose and Kindaichi possess great detective skills, but they refuse to belong to the official institution of investigation and do not allow their expertise - and consequently their reason for being - to be subject to external control. They remain partially uncommitted to their cases in order to preserve their privileged position as disinterested bystanders and pursue their professional activities without compromising their personal values. Such an attitude may be construed as immoral or selfish, but it certainly helps them realize the moral code of subjectivation as proposed by Ango in 'Darakuron.'"
  - Murder Most Modern: Detective Fiction & Japanese Culture by Sari Kawana, pages 217-218

Tayama Katai and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

• Akutagawa read Tayama Katai's works:
  [The middle school teachers] did not hesitate to use any means at their disposal to infect students’ minds with their own prejudices. And in fact one of them, the English teacher they nicknamed ‘Dharma,’ often beat Shinsuke for being what he called a ‘smart aleck.’ What made Shinsuke a ‘smart aleck’ was nothing worse than that he was reading such writers as Doppo and Katai.
  - Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Daidouji Shinsuke: The Early Years”

Tayama Katai and Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Kunikida and Katai read Dostoevsky:
  Katai related that when he and Doppo discussed foreign literature they invariably touched on Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Zola, and Daudet. He shared Doppo’s enthusiasm for Russian literature, but he was attracted especially to French literature, above all to Maupassant.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 243

• Katai read Dostoevsky:
  It was… the frankness of Zola’s works which [Katai] admired, and in this respect he also developed an admiration for Tolstroy, translating the English version of The Cossacks into Japanese as early as 1893. He also read Chekhov, Daudet, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and a whole host of other Western writers…
  - The Introduction of Tayama Katai’s The Quilt and Other Stories

Tayama Katai and Izumi Kyōka

• Kyouka was a contemporary of Kunikida and Katai, but Katai's works didn't become popular as quickly as the others':
  Katai began his career as a writer earlier than either Kunikida Doppo or Izumi Kyōka, but his reputation was quickly eclipsed by theirs. His stories were ordinary and sentimental, and although he was true to himself, he could not yet present his problems in such a way as to arouse sympathy among the public. He managed nevertheless to survive on the meager sums his manuscripts brought in.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 242

Tayama Katai and Kunikida Doppo

• Katai and Kunikida were good friends:
  [Katai’s] most important friend was Kunikida Doppo, whom he met through the poet Miyazaki Koshoshi. The two men were totally dissimilar in personality, Doppo being cheerful and Katai gloomy, but the found endless pleasure in each other’s conversations. Kunikida read Wordsworth to Katai, and Katai responded with readings of Heine. The two months that the two men spent at a temple in Nikkō were invaluable to both: Doppo wrote ‘Old Gen,’ and Katai learned from Doppo’s criticisms that he would have to describe reality, rather than romantic imaginings, in his writings. Katai took the criticism to heart. He recalled in later years, ‘This was why I am able today to confess unabashedly whatever is in my heart, making a clean breast of everything.’ The characteristic manner of both men had been established. Katai abandoned his lyrical, subjective style and turned toward objective realism, developing elements that had been present even in his earliest writings.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 242-3

• Katai began his writing career earlier than Kyouka or Kunikida, but they were popular sooner than him:
  Katai began his career as a writer earlier than either Kunikida Doppo or Izumi Kyōka, but his reputation was quickly eclipsed by theirs. His stories were ordinary and sentimental, and although he was true to himself, he could not yet present his problems in such a way as to arouse sympathy among the public. He managed nevertheless to survive on the meager sums his manuscripts brought in.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 242

• How Katai and Kunikida's friendship started:
  In November 1896 Tayama Katai first visited Doppo in Shibuya. Katai, an aspiring novelist, tracked Doppo down to his little house behind a dairy, and the two men at once became friends. Katai was entranced by Doppo’s familiarity with Wordsworth, Carlyle, Emerson, and Tolstoy, and was especially struck by his plaster bust of Goethe. This meeting marked the beginning of a long and close friendship. It was Katai who suggested in April 1897 that he and Doppo go to Nikkō to write undisturbed by city life; while there Doppo began his serious work as an author.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 232

• Katai references Kunikida's short story collection Musashino in his novel Country Teacher:
  The short story collection ‘Musashino’ was also there. He lost himself in its pages… When [he] got fed up with [working] he took ‘Musashino’ out of his cloth-wrapped bundle and read it with the keenness of one thirsting for something new. He felt a strong personal appreciation of the emotions expressed by the author in the story ‘Unforgettable People,’… From time to time he simply had to lay the book down and give himself over to the thoughts that came flooding into his mind.
  - Tayama Katai, Country Teacher

• Katai talks about being jealous of Kunikida's success in "Thirty Years in Tokyo":
  In the literary world, Tōson’s Hakai [The Broken Commandment] had appeared and had received a great deal of praise, and Doppo’s Doppo-shū [Doppo Collection] had also been popular for some time and looked like it would be reprinted. ‘It looks like our time has arrived,’ Doppo had laughed. I alone felt left behind… . I couldn’t stand it. I had to write something… . This time I had to put everything I had into the work, I realized.
  - Tayama Katai, “Thirty Years in Tokyo”

Tayama Katai and Mori Ōgai

• Katai was assigned to the same sector as Mori during the Russo-Japanese War:
  In [1904] Katai volunteered as a correspondent during the Russo-Japanese War and witnessed fighting at various places in China. Katai’s war experiences provided an invaluable background for the development of his writings. He saw men display traits in the face of death - both generous and cold-blooded selfishness - and felt that he was observing the true nature of men, stripped of all pretense. This came as a revelation to Katai, who had hitherto described more petty emotional entanglements as if they were the ultimate human problems. Another unexpected benefit of his service as a war correspondent was that he was assigned to the same sector as Mori Ōgai and spent many hours conversing with the great writer, even then known as an enemy of the Naturalism that Katai was promoting.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 244-5

Tayama Katai and Ozaki Kōyō

• Katai tried to be one of Kouyou's students:
  At first Katai could not make up his mind whether to devote himself to Chinese or English literature, or perhaps to law and politics, but in March 1891 he decided to become a writer. He wrote Ozaki Kōyō asking to become his disciple, and sent along a sample manuscript. Kōyō corrected one page and appended a note in which he criticized Katai’s failure to achieve rhythm in his prose. Katai nevertheless felt encouraged to pay Kōyō a visit, and the two men had a friendly chat about Saikaku and Zolo. At Kōyō’s suggestion he went to see Emi Suiin (1869-1935), another Ken’yūsha member, and began to publish stories in the magazine Suiin was editing as an outlet for budding Ken’yūsha writers.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, pages 239-40

Yokomizo Seishi and Edogawa Ranpo

• Yokomizo mentions Edogawa Ranpo and Mushitaro Oguri in his novel The Honjin Murders:
  "The collection comprised every book of mystery or detective fiction ever published in Japan, both domestic and foreign. There was the whole collection of Arthur Conan Doyle, Maurice Leblanc's Lupin series, and every translated work with the publishers Hakubunkan and Heibonsha had ever released. Then there was the Japanese section: it began with nineteenth-century novels by Ruiko Kuroiwa, and also featured Edogawa Ranpo, Fuboku Kozakai, Saburo Koga, Udaru Oshita, Takataro Kigi, Juza Unno, Mishitaro Oguri all crammed in together. And then as well as Japanese translations of Western novels, there were the original, untranslated works of Ellery Queen, Dickson Carr, Freeman Wills Crofts, and Agatha Christie, etc. etc. etc. It was a magnificant sight: an entire library of detective novels."

• Yokomizo, "Ranpo's friend and fellow detective writer," wrote "the love for the same sex, which had been a long-standing desire of [Edogawa Ranpo], had finally been incorporated into [Kōto no oni]"
  "After his literary debut in 1923, Ranpo quicly became one of the most popular and widely read detective writers of the early twentieth century Japan, and during the 1920s and 1930s his novels were serialized in virtually every important periodical of popular literature. In the late 1920s the Japanese publishing industry began publishing numerous multivolume sets of inexpensive books on various themes, and because of the vast popularity of Ranpo's work, any multivolume collection of detective fiction and popular literature almost inevitably included his stories. In 1931 and 1932 the publisher Heibonsha published the first editions of Ranpo's complete works of fiction in thirteen volumes. Within just three years, they released a second twelve-volume set of his work, and soon Sinchōsha, another of Japan's largest publishers, quickly followed suit with a ten-volume collection. One reason Ranpo's work appealed to such a broad audience was his willingness to treat various nonheteronormative aspects of sexual desire, including male-male eroticism, which medical practitioners and sexologists had started describing as 'perverse' (hentai). Publishers often emphasized the 'astonishing' and even 'perverse' content of Ranpo's writing to market his work. For example, advertisements for Kōto no oni in book form, tey ran a series of advertisements in the Tokyo edition of the daily newspaper Asahi sinbun that declared the work to be 'the shocking masterpiece of Edogawa Ranpo, Japan's answer to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.' Specifically, it points to 'the extreme perversion [kyokudo no hentai] and the brilliant spectical of sick love [byōteki no aijō]' in the plot. Other adversiements describe the presence of male-male love in less sensational terms, but still draw attention to it as a means of capturing the attention of curious readers. In the advertising blurb for Kotō no oni, written for the first edition of Ranpo's complete works published in 1931 and 1932, Ranpo's friend and fellow detective writer Yokomizo Seishi (1902-81) wrote, 'the love for the same sex, which had been a long-standing desire of the author [sakka no hisashiki ganbō de atta dōseiai], had finally been incorporated into this novel.' An insert to another multivolume collection of Ranpo's works published in 1938 and 1939 emphasizes in boldface type that Kotō no oni is 'a work in which the author dealt with the topic of same-sex love.'"
  - Writing the Love of Boys by Jeffrey Angles, pages 14-15

Yokomizo Seishi and Mushitaro Oguri

• Yokomizo mentions Edogawa Ranpo and Mushitaro Oguri in his novel The Honjin Murders:
  "The collection comprised every book of mystery or detective fiction ever published in Japan, both domestic and foreign. There was the whole collection of Arthur Conan Doyle, Maurice Leblanc's Lupin series, and every translated work with the publishers Hakubunkan and Heibonsha had ever released. Then there was the Japanese section: it began with nineteenth-century novels by Ruiko Kuroiwa, and also featured Edogawa Ranpo, Fuboku Kozakai, Saburo Koga, Udaru Oshita, Takataro Kigi, Juza Unno, Mishitaro Oguri all crammed in together. And then as well as Japanese translations of Western novels, there were the original, untranslated works of Ellery Queen, Dickson Carr, Freeman Wills Crofts, and Agatha Christie, etc. etc. etc. It was a magnificant sight: an entire library of detective novels."

Yokomizo Seishi and Sakaguchi Ango

• Comparing Yokomizo's detective, Kindaichi, to Sakaguchi Ango's detective, Kose:
  "The kind of morality proposed by Ango through the figure of Kose and by Yokomizo through Kindaichi is different from the values that excited people during the Enlightenment but eventually disappointed them. The ideal of universal rationality and faith in progress did not prevent the moderns from being drawn by the grandeur of fascism, and a stronger system of ethics would be needed to combat it in the future.
  "Kindaichi allows an element of chance to affect his ratiocination, acknowledging that there are elements of truth one can never know, or cannot make sense of. Although he strives to be rational in figuring out whodunit, he does not expect the killer to always be rational and consistent in planning and carrying out his or her designs. The series of historical events in Japan - from urbanization to total war - showed Kindaichi and everyone else who lived through them that in modern cause-and-effect relationships are never straightforward, and things are neither entirely deliberate nor completely accidental. It is only by accepting such a precarious worldview that one can escape the assujettissement brought by the realization of truth: the unexpected (and ultimately misguided) reliance on science of the Inugami clan at Sukekiyo's fingerprinting test reinforces this view.
  "However, outsmarting the truth does not entail neglecting self-cultivation through its pursuit. Although Ango and Yokomizo never coordinated their writings, Ango's challenge to the readers - in which the author and readers compete in the game of whodunit on an equal playing field - contributes to Yokomizo's desire to encourage the intellectual and emotional participation of his audience. It is an exercise in subjectivation in which the mediation of the publishing company is kept at a minimum.
  "Both Kose and Kindaichi possess great detective skills, but they refuse to belong to the official institution of investigation and do not allow their expertise - and consequently their reason for being - to be subject to external control. They remain partially uncommitted to their cases in order to preserve their privileged position as disinterested bystanders and pursue their professional activities without compromising their personal values. Such an attitude may be construed as immoral or selfish, but it certainly helps them realize the moral code of subjectivation as proposed by Ango in 'Darakuron.'"
  - Murder Most Modern: Detective Fiction & Japanese Culture by Sari Kawana, pages 217-218