• Ayatsuji Yukito is the author of the light novel Another that the horror anime series of the same name is based on (source)

• He is a famous mystery writer of Japanese detective fiction. He demands the restoration of the classic rules of detective fiction and the use of more self-reflective elements. He is married to Fuyumi Ono, author of The Twelve Kingdoms and creator of Ghost Hunt, Juuni Kokuki, and Shiki, as well as several other manga.
  - Another Wiki

• His real name is Uchida Naoyuki
  - Yukito Ayatsuji Wikipedia Page

• He is one of the founders of Honkaku Mystery Writers Club of Japan and one of the representative writers of the new traditionalist movement in Japanese mystery writing.
  - Yukito Ayatsuji Wikipedia Page

• His first novel The Decagon House Murders was ranked as the No. 8 novel on the Top 100 Japanese Mystery Novels of All Time.
  - Yukito Ayatsuji Wikipedia Page

• In 1992 he won the Mystery Writers of Japan Award for Best Novel (Clock Mansion Murders), in 2004 he was a nominee for the Honkaku Mystery Award for Best Fiction (Dark Mansion Murders), in 2010 he was nominated for the Honkaku again for Best Fiction (Another), and in 2019 he won 22nd Japan Mystery Literature Award.
  - Yukito Ayatsuji Wikipedia Page

• Ranpo debuted as a mystery author with the story “The Two-Sen Copper Coin” in 1923 with a style that was the first of its kind in Japan:
  Ranpo made his literary debut with ‘The Two-Sen Copper Coin.’ The story’s appearance in the April 1923 edition of Shin seinen (1020-1950, New Youth) magazine not only marked the beginning of a long and illustrious career, but also transformed the magazine into the preeminent venue for the development and dissemination of Japanese detective fiction (tantei shōsetsu). Japan had a long tradition of moralistic stories about crime and murder centering on the dangers of ‘poisonous women’ that were intended to promote virtue and chastise vice. It was not until the 1920s, however, that detective fiction evolved as an independent genre informed by the spirit of objectivity and scientific inquiry.
  - From the introduction to Edogawa Ranpo’s “The Two-Sen Copper Coin”

• The crimes and criminals in Ranpo’s stories are always sensational and bizarre:
  Ranpo’s crimes tend to focus on the outré and spectacular, and his criminals are often no less bizarre. In addition to Lupin-esque figures such as the Fiend with Twenty Faces and the decidedly more sinister Black Lizard, Ranpo creates a cast of femmes fatales, sexually-driven serial killers, and desperate youths. Ranpo had a penchant for ero-guro-nansensu (‘erotic, grotesque nonsense’), and this fascination often found an outlet in his stories of crime and detection. Graphic acts of violence both by and against beautiful women are a recurring theme, but Ranpo’s disposition also led him to explore the extremes of ugliness. The disfigured or deformed appear repeatedly in his work as objects of the grotesque imagination, often in contrast with remarkable beauty and in conjunction with graphic scenes of violence and sexuality….  Ranpo’s concern is always more for the sensational effect of bizarre appearances and chilling deeds than for social realities.
  - William Varteresian, the introduction to The Early Cases of Akechi Kogorō by Edogawa Ranpo

• Ranpo included mentions of other detective fiction and authors (sometimes he even references his own stories):
  In many ways, Ranpo’s work is not about crime but the writing of crime. His works are replete with explicit references to the works of other authors of detective fiction, and his characteristically conversational narration directly addresses the preconceptions and expectations of the knowledgeable reader. The history and traditions of the genre are alive in Ranpo’s work. His stories are populated by devoted readers of detective fiction, who are often prompted by their love of the genre to take up roles as criminals and would-be sleuths. Even his own works put in an appearance: Akechi overhears a critique of Ranpo’s stories concerning his exploits in Nanimono (Who), and when the trick of ‘The Human Chair’ reappears in ‘The Black Lizard, characters are quick to recall the similarity to Ranpo’s earlier story. This characteristic reflexivity goes hand in hand with Ranpo’s love of play and marks him from the start as an author interested in not only the production but also the analysis of detective fiction.
  - William Varteresian, the introduction to The Early Cases of Akechi Kogorō by Edogawa Ranpo

• Ranpo embraced Western works and genres and incorporated them into his writing, making him the most forward thinking author in his genre:
  Ranpo was in many ways a forward thinker, ready to champion the possibilities of works and genres most critics regarded as artistically worthless and quickly drawn to the possibilities of new technologies such as film. The progressive Westernization of Akechi Kogorō reflects this attitude in its relentless pursuit of the shifting social landscape of twentieth-century Japan. In embracing the popular entertainment of the detective novel and the cinema, Ranpo’s work also embraces the growing influence of the West on Japanese society of his day.
  - William Varteresian, the introduction to The Early Cases of Akechi Kogorō by Edogawa Ranpo

• Ranpo’s “great detective” character, Akechi Kogorō, was first used in “The Case of the Murder on D. Hill” and was only intended to be in that story, but because his friends and colleagues encouraged him to make Akechi a recurring protagonist the character eventually became to be the great detective that Ranpo is known for:
  The stories in this volume predate [the Akechi Kogorō readers are most familiar with]. Readers familiar with the exploits of the great detective Akechi Kogorō might have trouble recognizing the impeccably dressed and universally respected man of action in the ‘amateur detective’ (shirō-to-tantei), and eccentric twenty-something of little means with disheveled hair and a shabby kimono. The Akechi who appears in this volume is a hobbyist in crime whose identity is not yet fixed either in the eyes of the reading public or in the mind of the creator…. Ranpo initially conceived of Akechi Kogorō only as a protagonist for ‘The Case of the Murder on D. Hill,’ never intending to make further use of the character. But the positive reactions of Ranpo’s friends and colleagues prompted him to make Akechi a recurring protagonist in his detective fiction.
  - William Varteresian, the introduction to The Early Cases of Akechi Kogorō by Edogawa Ranpo

• Akechi, Ranpo's detective, is famous in the Japanese speaking world and rivals that of Sherlock Holmes in the English speaking world:
  The most famous of [Ranpo’s] urban wanderers, and the subject of this collection, is Akechi Kogorō. Akechi is Ranpo’s ‘great detective’ (meitantei) and the character most strongly associated with Ranpo in the public consciousness. Akechi’s fame in his native Japan rivals that of Sherlock Holmes in the English-speaking world. In addition to twenty-one novels and short stories written for an adult audience, Ranpo penned a series of twenty-seven children’s novels starring Akechi’s young assistant, Kobayashi Yoshio, with minor appearances by Akechi himself. These popular novels cemented Akechi’s image in the minds of generations of young readers. They also gave Akechi a recurring nemesis in the person of Kaijin nijūmensō (The Fiend with Twenty Faces). A devious master of disguise who adheres to a strict code in his theft of precious artworks, Twenty Faces is not a Moriarty but a Lupin to Akechi’s Holmes.
  - William Varteresian, the introduction to The Early Cases of Akechi Kogorō by Edogawa Ranpo

• Ranpo has been called the Edgar Allan Poe of Japan, and his pen name (Edogawa Ranpo) is partially inspired by Poe’s name:
  Ranpo has sometimes been called the Edgar Allan Poe of Japan, and his nom de plume, being a phonetic rendering of the American author’s name in Chinese characters, certainly invites the comparison. Ranpo was fond of wordplay and ‘liked Poe so much [he] could break into a dance,’ but there is a deeper meaning in his choice of pen name than a simple literary game or acknowledgment of influence. Throughout his numerous works of detective fiction, and especially in his early pieces, Ranpo continually asserts the right of his creations to be judged and considered on the same terms as those of prominent Western authors. His chosen name, in combination with his frequent allusions to works on crime and detection by mostly Western authors, demands that the reader or critic compare Ranpo’s work with that of the famous Western writers he references and to consider them all as belonging to the same category.… But the name of Poe - and the association with the tradition of Western detective authors it evokes - is not the only message incorporated into Ranpo’s nom de plume. ‘Edogawa Ranpo’ is not a double but a triple entendre. ‘Edogawa’ refers to the Edo River, which borders present day Tokyo to the south… In Ranpo’s day, it was a place where traditional Japanese merchant culture mingled and collided with emerging twentieth-century modernity. … The name ‘Ranpo’ comprises to Chinese ideograms, the first meaning ‘unrest,’ ‘disorder,’ or ‘disturbance’ and the second ‘walk.’ The name has been variously rendered in English as ‘rambler,’ as ‘staggering drunkenly,’ as ‘chaotic rambling,’ and as ‘staggering,’ suggestive of roguishness and menace. All of these conceptions share the idea of erratic, aimless motion. This wayward movement is embodied in the aimless youths living in the less well-to-do district of the capital who people much of Ranpo’s detective fiction.… They are poor students, struggling authors, and recent graduates with no set course in life. These unsettled young men are part of ordinary society but detached just enough from it quotidian routines to provide an outsider’s perspective on events.
  - William Varteresian, the introduction to The Early Cases of Akechi Kogorō by Edogawa Ranpo

• About Ranpo’s start in detective fiction:
  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 wrote nearly 150 short stories and novels and a number of autobiographical essays on horror and detective fiction:
  No single author has had a greater influence on Japanese detective fiction than Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965). In addition to writing nearly one hundred and fifty short stories and novels, Ranpo also produced a number of frequently autobiographical essays on the subjects of horror and detective fiction, especially as relates to their place in the modern Japan literary landscape…. Ranpo’s work helped to transform detective fiction in Japan from a critically neglected genre of popular fiction dominated by translations of Western authors into a thriving and distinctive national tradition.
  - William Varteresian, the introduction to The Early Cases of Akechi Kogorō by Edogawa Ranpo

• His Boy Detective’s Gang stories (featuring hero Kogoro Akechi) were as popular to young readers in Japan as the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries were to American youth of the mid Twentieth Century
  - FamousBirthdays.com

• He was greatly influenced by the work of Edgar Allan Poe and based his pen name (Edogawa Ranpo) on Poe’s name.
  - FamousBirthdays.com

• Another of his interests, especially during the late 1940s and 1950s, was bringing attention to the work of his dear friend Jun'ichi Iwata (1900–1945), an anthropologist who had spent many years researching the history of homosexuality in Japan. During the 1930s, Edogawa and Iwata had engaged in a light-hearted competition to see who could find the most books about erotic desire between men. Edogawa dedicated himself to finding books published in the West and Iwata dedicated himself to finding books having to do with Japan.
  - Wikipedia

• The Edogawa Rampo Prize (江戸川乱歩賞 Edogawa Ranpo Shō), named after Edogawa Rampo, is a Japanese literary award which has been presented every year by the Mystery Writers of Japan since 1955. The winner is given a prize of ¥10 million with publication rights by Kodansha.
  - Wikipedia

• I sometimes wonder if it wasn’t a big mistake that I came to be a writer in the first place. I’m not an especially gifted stylist and I’m not especially well read, so the most I can say is that I have an amateur’s passion.
  - Edogawa Ranpo, "Confessions of Rampo" essay (1927) from The Edogawa Rampo Reader 

• If pressed to say what attracted me to the printed word in my boyhood, I would have to say that it possessed a fantastic quality all its own. It described a place completely unlike the mundane world; an exotic, far-away land of dreams which I deeply longed for. Whenever I looked at print, I discovered a new world. It was truly wonderful.
  - Edogawa Ranpo, “My Love for the Printed Word” essay (1937) from The Edogawa Rampo Reader

• In this same study of my father’s, I found an introductory book on astronomy. I learned that the solar system was but a speck of dust occupying a tiny part of the universe, and I trembled at the implications of such things as a ‘light year.’ Even the clouds so far away in the sky were close by comparison. This discovery which I made in my childhood clouded my heart and has colored my view of things ever since.
  - Edogawa Ranpo, “My Love for the Printed Word” essay (1937) from The Edogawa Rampo Reader

• And so, at last having become a fiction writer, I am effectively wedded to the printed word. Still, looking back to the purer emotions of my boyhood, I somehow feel I devolved into a vulgar journalist. I can’t hide behind the excuse that I needed to do whatever it took to make a living. Poverty gave me a marginal degree of business acumen and I learned to make compromises with an ever-changing world. After becoming a writer, I couldn’t hold on to that early pure sentiment. For better or worse, the way I got my start as a writer was no different than most of the popular fiction writers out there today - there was nothing pure about it.
  - Edogawa Ranpo, “My Love for the Printed Word” essay (1937) from The Edogawa Rampo Reader

• There are two personalities that live inside everyone’s heart, and for me they are quite separate. One is the eternal boy, always pure, the idealist content to chase after far-away dreams. He is the one who loves how the magic of printing creates a beautiful bridge to the land of fantasy. The other was educated in the school of hard knocks, and became good at business and socializing. This one may be a weakling who lowers himself in this world for utilitarian reasons, but he too feels incomplete without the romance of the printed word and tries to connect his life to it.
  - Edogawa Ranpo, “My Love for the Printed Word” essay (1937) from The Edogawa Rampo Reader

• I think it was around my first year of junior high school that I suffered from chronic depression and isolated myself in my room upstairs. My condition made me shy away from sunlight, so against my family’s entreaties I kept the window blinds shut tight and sat in the darkness dreaming about the cosmos. Back then there was a popular book of astronomy on my father’s bookshelf from which I learned about the vastness of the universe and the smallness of the Earth. I also felt the insignificance of a person like me, which may partly have exacerbated my condition, for I took no interest in my studies and thought of nothing but the heavens. What really gripped my imagination were the celestial bodies beyond the solar system, which could not be seen with the unaided eye.
  - Edogawa Ranpo, “A Passion for Lenses” essay (1937) from The Edogawa Rampo Reader

• The other day I received a postcard with return postage from a certain magazine asking, ‘What was the most interesting crime story covered in the newspapers this year?’ In reply, I wrote, ‘I have never taken that kind of interest in actual events. The only thing I see when I look at tragic events is human suffering.’
  - Edogawa Ranpo, "The Phantom Lord" essay (1936) from The Edogawa Rampo Reader

• ‘I bet you must take lots of hints for your stories from real crime cases.’ I get asked this sort of thing by people all the time. I invariably reply, ‘No, never. There is no relationship whatsoever between real events and my detective stories. They occupy completely different worlds. I don’t see anything interesting in true crime stories.’
  - Edogawa Ranpo, "The Phantom Lord" essay (1936) from The Edogawa Rampo Reader

• When I was a boy, I had a habit of mumbling to myself for long stretches as I wandered alone down the dark streets at night. For a time I lived exclusively in the lands evoked by Sazanami Snjin’s ‘World Fairy Tales.’ It was a world of exotic places set in the distant past, and it had a more vibrant reality than the children’s games we played during the daytime. I preferred the reality of this land of fantasy to the real world. At night I would whisper out loud, creating voices for the characters that peopled this land. If someone called out to me, the spell would be broken, and I instinctively knew I had to return to what I considered strange and disagreeable. In such instances the vitality would drain from me, and I would timidly adopt an innocent appearance.
  - Edogawa Ranpo, "The Phantom Lord" essay (1936) from The Edogawa Rampo Reader 

• For a boy weak in social graces and physical strength, I knew it was impossible for me to become the king of a real castle here on earth, but in the land of my imagination, I could build a phantom castle and become its lord. Even the neighborhood bully couldn’t do a thing to wreck a castle in the air. It would never even occur to a blockhead like him to climb up the clouds that led the way there.
  - Edogawa Ranpo, "The Phantom Lord" essay (1936) from The Edogawa Rampo Reader

• Edogawa Ranpo loosely based a character in The Vampire (translated into English under the title The Lipless Man) after himself:
  One character in this story appears to be loosely based on Edogawa Ranpo himself! Sonoda Kokkō, a writer of detective fiction, is described in the novel as follows:
  
  It appeared Sonoda Kokkō had written bizarre short stories for a select audience with a taste for his brand of grotesque nonsense. He’d produced one piece of fiction a year, often surprising his editors who’d completely forgotten about him. Nobody had known where he lived or what he looked like; not anyone at the magazine that published his fiction, and certainly not the general public. His manuscripts were never sent from the same post office twice, and his fee had always gone back to whatever post office that had been. His landlord and neighbours hadn’t even been aware he was a writer. He’d no friends, and had always kept his doors and windows locked whether he was in or out. All anyone knew about him was that he’d been a loner. ‘The property we searched was in a very desolate part of Ikebukuro. A small detached house. When we looked inside, it was like wandering around a haunted mansion. There were skeletons hanging in the closets, dolls heads, wet with red ink, left on all the tables, and coloured woodblock prints of the most bloodcurdling scenes plastered on every wall. I’m sure you get the picture.’
  ‘Fascinating,’ Akechi nodded keenly.
  ‘His shelves were filled with books on criminology, criminal history, and true crime stories. In the drawers of his desk were pages and pages of unfinished manuscripts...
  
  At one point in The Lipless Man, a story written by Sonoda Kokkō is referenced and used to discover the hiding place of the book's villain. I won't spoil the surprise entirely, but the short story by Sonoda Kokkō is remarkably similar to a famous story written by Edogawa Ranpo!
  The Lipless Man was published in 1930, and four years later Edogawa Ranpo moved to a home in Ikebukuro where he lived for the next 31 years. The building where he lived is now The Edogawa Rampo Memorial Center for Popular Culture Studies (The Edogawa Rampo Residence). You can find learn more at their website: https://english.rikkyo.ac.jp/research/research_institutes/rampo.html

• When Japan renewed its contact with the West in the mid-nineteenth century, Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901) served his country as one of its most outstanding evaluators and interpreters of Western civilization. The range of his interests extended from Western philosophy to new techniques, such as bookkeeping and public speaking. And he became an effective writer and teacher in propagating the new knowledge. Besides being a successful and widely read writer of books, he founded a school, Keio University; he also started a newspaper, Jijishimpo, to reach an even wider circle of people. At the root of all these activities was his strong belief in freedom and indpendence, concepts which were inherent in his character and reinforced by the ideas he discovered in Western philosophy.:
  - Kazuyoshi Nakayama, Fukuzawa Yukichi on Education Introduction 

• Fukuzawa was a superb translator. He thoroughly understood even the most difficult English texts, excepting a few idioms, and he was a master of Japanese prose. But translation is never a neutral task…. Cultures are usually more miscible than anthropologists like to admit. But at every juncture Fukuzawa had to wrestle with ideas that were foreign to Japan’s culture and make difficult decisions about cross cultural valances. The solutions he arrived at during his translation-writings of the 1860s became the premises of his later original writings. Fukuzawa confessed in his autobiography, ‘In all my life the most bone-breaking activity I ever engaged in was translation and writing.:
  - Albert M. Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment: The Early Thought of Fukuzawa Yukichi 

• During an era when contact with the West was new, Fukuzawa dealt with complex Western ideas and more extensively and with greater facility than most of his compatriots, and found in them a significance that had escaped their original authors. He used the Western idea of ‘stages of history’ prescriptively to plot Japan’s future course, and descriptively to analyze its past and present. In so doing he logically extended Enlightenment thought in a direction unexplored by Western thinkers, and with a greater facility and rigor than any other non-Western thinker.:
  - Albert M. Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment: The Early Thought of Fukuzawa Yukichi 

• Fukuzawa himself claimed to be fond of talking “more so than the average” and enjoyed participating in “boyish arguments”:
  I was fond of talking - more so than the average - an in everything I did I liked to be quick and active, and I was never behind anyone in anything. But there was one thing that I never indulged in. That was the boyish argument in which one would become excited and go on arguing until he won by out-talking the other. I was willing to discuss a subject, but when my opponent grew heated, I would evade his point, thinking to myself, ‘Why does this fool love to make so much noise?
  - Fukuzawa Yukichi, The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi 

• Fukuzawa was well behaved growing up, but he did enjoy drinking like “a boy without any conscience” (source)

• …however much we studied, our work and knowledge had practically no connection with the actual means of gaining a livelihood or making a name for ourselves. Not only that, but the student’s of Dutch were looked upon with contempt by most men. Then why did we work so hard to learn Dutch? It would seem that we were simply laboring at difficult foreign texts for no clear purpose. However, if anyone had looked into our inner hearts, he would have found there an untold pleasure which was our consolation. In short, we student’s were conscious of the fact that we were the sole possessors of the key to knowledge of the great European civilization. However much we suffered from poverty, whatever poor clothes we wore, the extent of our knowledge and the resources of our minds were beyond the reach of any prince or nobleman of the whole nation. If our work was hard, we were proud of it, knowing that no one knew what we endured.
  - Fukuzawa Yukichi, The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi 

• When I first began studying Western learning some twenty years ago, it was very much against the times, and very few relatives and friends approved my choice. Only with the approval of my late mother and late brother was I secretly able to begin my studies, and after much hardship, just as I was beginning to grasp and understanding of western learning, the slogan ‘Drive Out the Foreigners’ was raised. Scholars in Western learning were held in contempt, and in extreme cases, some found their lives in danger. Since time immemorial, some men in the world of learning have sought fame, but the Western scholars of those days were anxious to conceal their names and their abodes as much as possible."
  - Fukuzawa Yukichi, “Letter to Nakamura Ritsuen” from Fukuzawa Yukichi on Education

• When Fukuzawa first spoke to someone from Europe who spoke Dutch he was discouraged because he didn’t understand anything they said:
      The year after I reached [Tokyo] - the sixth year of Ansei (1859) - there was established the so-called ‘Treaty of the Five Nations,’ and the port of Yokohama was formally opened for trade with foreign countries. One day I went to Yokohama for sight-seeing. There was nothing of the town of Yokohama then - a few temporary dwellings had been erected here and there by the foreigners, and in  these the pioneer merchants were living and showing their wares.
      To my chagrin, when I tried to speak with them, no one seemed to understand me at all. Nor was I able to understand anything spoken by a single one of all the foreigners I met. Neither could I read anything of the signboards over the shops, nor the labels on the bottles which they had for sale. There was not a single recognizable word in any of the inscriptions or in any speech. It might have been English or French for aught I knew.
      At last I came upon a shop kept by one [trader by the name of Kniffer]. He was a German and did not understand much of what I said to him, but he could somehow understand my Dutch when I put it in writing. So we conversed a little, I bought a few things from him, and returned to [Tokyo].
      What a self-imposed labor it was on my part! Because of the closing hour of the gate of our compound, which was midnight, I had to leave home just before the closing hour and return home the same hour of the next day. This meant that I had been walking for twenty-four hours, a distance of some fifty miles, going and coming. But the fatigue of my legs was nothing compared with the bitter disappointment in my heart.
  - Fukuzawa Yukichi, The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi

• Before we sailed, the interpreter, Nakahama, and I each bought a copy of Webster’s dictionary. This, I know, was the very first importation of Webster’s into Japan. Once I had secured this valuable work, I felt no disappointment on leaving the new world and returning home again.
  - Fukuzawa Yukichi, The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi 

• On my second journey to America, I had received a much larger allowance than on the previous one. With all my expenses being paid by the government, I was able to purchase a good number of books. I bought many dictionaries of different kinds, texts on geography, history, law, economics, mathematics, and every sort I could secure. They were for the most part the first copies to be brought to Japan, and now with this large library I was able to let each of my student’s use the originals for study. This was certainly and unheard-of convenience - that all students could have the actual books instead of manuscript copies for their use.
  - Fukuzawa Yukichi, The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi 

• The reason the rōnin included us in their attack was that they thought we scholars who read foreign books and taught foreign culture were liars misleading the people and opening the way for Westerners to exploit Japan. So we also became their prey… Whenever I seemed to grow a little bolder and to make something of a venture in my own field, then the rōnin would seem stronger and more active…. All students and interpreters of Western languages continually risked their lives. Yet I could not think of giving up my major interest nor my chosen studies. I decided it would be useless to worry over the predicament. The only thing left was to be moderate in speech and manner, and not to discuss social or political problems to openly, or with anyone I did not know well. So having resolved on this, I lived as discreetly as possible, and spent my time in translating and writing.
  - Fukuzawa Yukichi, The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi 

• I think I have made it clear that I never intended to make enemies. But in an age when anti-foreign sentiment was running high, it was unavoidable that in my position as an advocate of open intercourse and free adoption of Western culture, I should make some adversaries. It is not too much to have enemies who attack by means of words and epithets. But to have enemies who would resort to violent means is a different matter. Nothing can be worse, more unsettling, more generally fearful, than this shadow of assassination. No one without the actual experience can really imagine it. It is something indescribable by any artifice of the writing brush. When there is some physical ailment or some definite soreness in the body, one can describe it to his wife or friend, but in regard to assassination, one cannot ask for sympathy even from those nearest him, for when told, they would worry about it even more than the one in immediate danger, and their anxiety would not relieve the situation in any way. I was not guilty of any crime, and it was no shame to be singled out by the ruffians, but feeling that there was not use in communicating an unpleasant possibility, I bore the anxiety by myself.
  - Fukuzawa Yukichi, The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi 

• He was from a samurai family, but his “one cherished hope was to see the abolishment of the swards of the samurai altogether”:
  …I said that I was determined to kill a man… and I said I knew how to do it. Perhaps that gave the impression that I was a warrior and a lover of swords. But the truth is quite the opposite. My one cherished hope was to see the abolishment of the swords of the samurai altogether.
  - Fukuzawa Yukichi, The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi

• After all, the purpose of my entire work has not only been to gather young men together and give them the benefit of foreign books but to open this ‘closed’ country of ours and bring it wholly into the light of Western civilization. For only thus may Japan become strong in the arts of both war and peace and take a place in the forefront of the progress of the world.
  - Fukuzawa Yukichi, The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi

• Fukuzawa’s writing directly influenced how the Emperor of Japan decided how to lead the country after WWII:
  At the end of World War II, when the entire country came under the supervision of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Douglas MacArthur, it was imperative that Japan reorganize its emperor system to conform with the spirit of democracy. At that time, the most puzzled and troubled person was the emperor himself. He consulted Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru, who was unprepared to offer a clear answer. After requesting a few days’ time to ponder the question, Yoshida Shigeru met people in the government and outside to discuss this. His personal physician, Dr. Takemi Taro, was a professor at Keio University, Faculty of Medicine. He remembered Fukuzawa’s On the Imperial Household. He brought it from his library and, taking it to the prime minister, told him to spend two hours reading and studying the book. Yoshida did so and, feeling enlightened, took the book to the emperor. And a new world is said to have opened before the emperor’s eyes. Thus the present order of the Imperial Household came to be.
  - Eiichi Kiyooka, Introduction to Imperial Household in Fukuzawa Yukichi on Education

• Fukuzawa’s father died when he was 18 months old and he was the only one in his family who did not remember his father’s face, which was one of his greatest hardships in life:
  I lost my father who was 45 years of age. In my whole family (one elder brother and three elder sisters), I am the only one who does not remember our father’s face. Not only am I an unfortunate orphan, I am the most unhappy of the five siblings. Because I was unable to serve my father while he was in this world, I am ever careful not to tarnish his name and reputation after his death, and there has not been a minute, day or night, I have not honored this. Four years ago, I lost my mother, too, but I may consider my having served her for 40 years as one fortunate circumstance in my generally unfortunate life. I learned all about my late father’s worlds and deeds in great detail from my mother while she was living. My father was upright in his moral behavior, yet very remarkable in literary talent, which I deeply esteem, and I trust that you, too, will acknowledge the love I have for my father. If you regard my father as a person who endeavored to follow and study Confucianism and was assiduous in literary activities, then I am the son of that very person, and I earnestly admire and believe in his words and deeds.
  - Fukuzawa Yukichi, “Letter to Nakamura Ritsuen” from Fukuzawa Yukichi on Education

• Fukuzawa founded Keio University, the first university in Japan that taught classes in a Western style:
  The first attempts at giving “speeches” in Japan were made in 1874. these attempts were initiated by Fukuzawa Yukichi and his pupils, studying western speech and debate methods. The next year (1875), a “speech society” was established, and this speaking hall was built in the following year (1876). Built in Western style, the building with wooden structure has a tile roof and namiko-kabe walls. It is said that drawings of various halls were brought in from the United States for reference in designing the building, and cost more than 1,000 yen to build. It was designated an important cultural property in June 1967. Mita Enzetsu-kan is currently used as the venue for biannual meetings of the Mita Oratorical Society (spring and autumn), Fukuzawa Yukichi - Francis Wayland Memorial Lecture, and other events.
  - Keio University website

• Fukuzawa’s most influential publication was titled “Things Western” and was the first book that taught people about Western people, institutions, and culture. Part I sold 150,000 copies (or 250,000 copies if you include pirated editions) making it even more popular than bestselling books at the time:
  Before the publication of “Things Western” [by Fukuzawa], the general Japanese public had no way of learning about Western people or institutions and culture because the only knowledge that had been brought in so far had been confined to medicine and it’s related sciences. “Things Western” became the starting point on which all people, including government officials, built their knowledge and formed their attitudes in coping with the new age. The book was more than a best seller, Part I alone selling 150,000 copies. Including its pirated editions, some 250,000 copies were sold. Considering the size of the reading public at the time, this was a tremendous number, proving the eagerness of the people for the new civilization. This book enabled Fukuzawa to become financially independent and also provide the funds for establishing his own school.
  - Eiichi Kiyooka, Fukuzawa Yukichi on Education Introduction

• Because he lost his mother when he was nine, Kyōka would often write female characters in a way that reflected his young mother:
  In his writings, Kyōka found hope through the careful and insistent deployment of salutary figures. Most frequently they are women, archetypal heroines of beauty, wit, and grace. Reflective of his longing for his young mother [who had died when he was nine], his heroines both seduce and save, tempt and chasten Kyōka’s male characters as they wander in mountainous and watery territories of mystery and awe. By projecting the image of his mother onto these gallant though often unfortunate women, he was able to visit and revisit deprivation in a way that allowed him to find a measure of relief from dread and to vent his disdain for the crass unfeeling world of risshin shusse, the Meiji-period (1868-1912) ethic of ‘success at all costs.’
  - Charles Shirō Inouye, from the introduction to Izumi Kyōka’s Japanese Gothic Tales short story collection

• Never doubting the miracle of a pure heart and the power of language and literature, [Kyōka] 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 

• I use the word ‘unique’ for a purpose. Truly, few other authors have spent their lives within a world so strikingly different from any other. Great artist resemble each other in their extreme individuality, …Sōseki, Ogai, and Kōyō - each of these authors lived in his own world. But the difference among these men is less than that which separates Kyōka from them all… . Often mystical, bizarre, and obscure, his writing is essentially bright, florid, elegant, even artless. Its most laudable quality is its pure ‘Japaneseness.’ Though Kyōka lived during the high tide of Western influence, his work is purely Japanese. All the values that appear in it - the beautiful, the ugly, the moral, the immoral, the chivalrous, the elegant - are native-born, borrowed neither from the West nor from China… . He is at once the most outstanding and the most local writing that our homeland has produced. Shouldn’t we, then, boast of this writer who couldn’t possibly have come from any other country?
  - Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, taken from the Introduction of the Japanese Gothic Tales short story collection by Izumi Kyōka 

• "Izumi Kyōka (1873-1939) has been called the supreme ‘romanticist’ of Meiji literature. His stories often deal with the supernatural; and love - whether the self-sacrificing devotion of a geisha to a young man or the vengeance of a ghost for unrequited passion - is his main theme, rather than the ills of society or the loneliness of the individual. In later years, when attacked by members of the Naturalist school, he defended himself against the charge of being an escapist in these terms: ‘Of late considerable space in newspapers and magazines has been taken up by professions of Naturalism, but I am not interested in Naturalism or anything similar. I have never once while writing a work considered what ‘ism’ I should adopt for it. I have been quite satisfied if I succeeded in making my readers feel exactly what I have felt about the materials conceived within my head by presenting them in works of excellence, in complete works of art… . I have felt that in order to claim the attention of readers for something I have written as a work of art, if must at the very least give them pleasure, make them happy, arouse in them feelings or perceptions of beauty which ordinary people are incapable of experiencing.’ Despite Kyōka’s rejection of labels, the term ‘romanticist’ is not without meaning in his case, if only because it sets him off from the Naturalists, who dominated the literary scene after 1905."
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, pages 202-3 

• Kyōka was a genius and was a pioneer of language who “raised the Japanese idiom to its most extravagant level, to its highest potential”:
  Kyōka was a genius. He rose above his time to deify his own individuality. With a dangerously playful style of Japanese, he cultivated a garden of peonies that steadily blossomed amidst the anemic desert of modern Japanese literature. His accomplishment did not arise from a sense of intellectual superiority nor from any sort of aristocratic pretense; neither did it derive from a contempt for the masses nor from any theory of aestheticism. Bound always to the ordinary sentiment of the people, Kyōka was a pioneer of language, one who raised the Japanese idiom to its most extravagant level, to its highest potential. Using methods of popular historical stories and human-nature stories, he drew from a vocabulary as rich as the sea to craft sentences of lasting stone and to plunge into the deep forest of Japanese mysticism and symbolism. His style, which revived the renga-like leaps of association and the imagistic splendor of the Japanese language that modern Japanese literature had forgotten, was not the result of an intellectually contrived anachronism. He himself became a mirror of the artist’s timeless spirit. Fervently believing both in words and spirits, he rants with E. T. A. Hoffman in the pureness of his romanticism.
  - Mishima Yukio, from the Introduction of the Japanese Gothic Tales short story collection by Izumi Kyōka

• Kyōka is famous for describing a contemporary Tokyo and using the slang from the time to describe the town, people (especially geisha), and the trends of the time:
  Kyōka is… renowned for his stories describing contemporary Tokyo, particularly the world of geishas and prostitutes. He delighted in using both the language of the Edo old-timers and the most up-to-date Tokyo slang, and he could describe with confidence exactly what a fashionable geisha would wear or how a fishmonger would press his fish on customers. Kyōka’s interest in geishas was no doubt heightened by his having fallen in love with one, and his happy marriage may have lead him to idealize women of this profession. Although he frequently described the hardships of the geisha’s life, whether caused by their patrons or by other geisha’s, he never seems to have questioned the propriety of a system of open or covert prostitution, perhaps because so much of the traditional Japanese life, especially depicted in the old novels and woodcuts, was involved with this system.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, pages 203-4

• 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 

• "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 

• Tanizaki first showed his story “The Tattooer” to Kyōka because his story “resembled Kyōka’s in their rejection of the cold glare of common sense”:
  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

• Kajii Motojirō did write about himself (his works are all autobiographical, no matter how fanciful), but his works do not exactly fit into the I-novel genre. His works don’t engage in confessions, but they do “provide insights into an extraordinarily sensitive and perceptive mind”:
  Kajii Motojirō is often treated as an ‘I’ novelist, … but his works are so distinct as to make him seem something of an anomaly. It is true that he wrote only about himself (whether the subject of the story is called ‘I’ or given another name), but he never engaged in confessions or masochistic self-revelations; instead, his works provide insights into an extraordinarily sensitive and perceptive mind. Numerous commentators have called attention to Kajii’s ability to see things freshly, as if they had never existed until the moment he saw them. This gift of throwing light on even the smallest object was complemented by his absorption with the darkness into which the light eventually fades.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 537

• Kajii only wrote a little over 20 stories in his short life, but all of them were written “with the utmost care and subjected to numerous revisions”:
  Kajii left behind only twenty-odd stories, few of them more than ten or fifteen pages long. Each story was written with the utmost care and subjected to numerous revisions. The result is a series of beautifully wrought works that are composed of lapidary passages that cry out for quotation. … The beauty of the expression and the leaps into fantasy that characterized Kajii’s writings imparted a quality not found in other ‘I novels,’ but they were equally remote from other varieties of fiction being composed in the second half of the 1920s. Some critics have even opined that it was a ‘miracle’ Kajii should have published his maiden work, the story ‘Lemon’ in 1925, at a time when the literary world was divided between the proletarian and the New Sensationalist writers.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 537-8

• Kajii found his voice as a writer very early as not much changed in his style from his first story “Lemon” to his later works:
  Little development as a writer occurred between “Lemon” and Kajii’s last stories, no doubt because he had found his voice surprisingly early. His stories are all autobiographical, no matter how fanciful,  but he seems to have been moving in the late works toward a more easily recognizable ‘I novel’ style. However, his readers have been attracted not by the piercing truthfulness of his stories, nor by the vivid picture they present of a man who was dying of an incurable disease, but by their ravishing beauty as Japanese prose. No doubt Kajii was a minor writer, but his appeal is unique, and his writings represent the furthest development of the poetic possibilities of the mental attitude novel.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 541

• Kunikida Doppo’s poem “Freedom is in the mountain” is was directly inspired by events in his life. In 1896, Doppo was in distress, because his wife had deserted him after only five months of marriage. He was extremely humiliated and wished to escape from Tokyo to start a new life, somewhere in the mountains.
  - “The Jojōshi” by James R. Morita 

• Kunikida and Katai 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

• Kunikida’s poetry collection Doppo-shuu was popular during his lifetime (more popular than his friend Tayama Katai’s works at the time, and Katai was worried enough to write about it in his book 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”. Found in the introduction of Tayama Katai’s The Quilt and Other Stories

• But the real Kunikida Doppo went to college and ended up dropping out and immediately teaching mathematics to about 30 students and never went back to complete his schooling:
  Doppo quit school in order to help support his family in 1888, but left for school in Tokyo in 1889. He studied at the English department of Tōkyō Senmon Gakkō (now Waseda University). Interested in western democracy, his politically defiant attitude toward the school's administration resulted in his expulsion from the school in 1891
  - Wikipedia

• The character Katsura Sousaku in Bungou Stray Dogs is based on one of Kunikida's stories:
  “When I was a boy, I had a friend called Katsura Shousaku. He’s twenty-three now and works for some firm in Yokohama, in the electrical business I believe, but to me there is no man quite like him. It’s not that there is anything very extraordinary about him, and yet he is not ordinary. He’s not a crank or an eccentric or anything like that, and all things considered I think the most apt description of him would be to say that he is an extraordinary ordinary man.”
  - Kunikida Doppo, "The Self-Made Man"

• The character Rokuzo in BSD are inspired by a character in one of Kunikida’s stories:
          There is a close relationship between Doppo’s life and his short stories. Doppo modeled many of his characters after people he had known, and the settings for many of his short stories were based on locales in which he had lived. A good example of this is Haru no Tori (Bird of Spring (1904).
          In September of 1893, at the age of 23, Doppo went to Saeki, Kyushu, to teach English and mathematics at a community school, the Tsuruya Gakkan. He quit at the end of the year because of a controversy with a fellow teacher. Although he lived in Saeki for only one year, he became acquainted with several people who later appear transformed into characters in some of his short stories, and Saeki itself became the locale for several of these stories. The nephew of Doppo’s landlord was a young idiot boy whom we see as the main character of Haru no Tori[, Rokuzo]. Towering above Doppo’s Saeki home was Mount Shiroyama. Most of the action in this story takes place in that home or on that mountain.
          In a short work entitled Yogan Sakuhin to Jijitsu (My Literary Works and Facts) (1907) Doppo wrote the following about the protagonist of Haru no Tori:
  The hero of this story, an idiot boy, is an actual person with whom I became intimately acquainted while I was living in Saeki… . Everything I said about this boy’s condition was true. However, his leaping from the castle wall on top of Shiroyama to his death is my own fabrication.
          The life of the character Rokuzo, the protagonist in Haru no Tori, closely resembled that of the boy Doppo knew and lived with. Rokuzo was a child of nature who loved, most of all, to spend all his time on the mountain. He could run up and down Shiroyama as swiftly and adroitly as if he were on level ground. At times he would leave home early in the morning and be gone all day long. He loved to watch birds, especially crows. Sometimes he imagined he could fly like a bird. One day he climbed to the top of Shiroyama, jumped off, and fell to his death thinking he could fly. Most of the details of this story were true, except for the way he died. The young man who was the inspiration for the character of Rokuzo died, not in an accident, but of natural causes in 1948, some fifty years after Doppo had lived with him.
  - Dennis H. Atkin, “Kunikida Doppo, Child of Fate” essay

• The character Sasaki Nobuko in BSD is inspired by Kunikida’s first wife, but she divorced him shortly after they were married. Kunikida’s published diary contains some entries about this time in his life:
  In [1893], Doppo began keeping a diary, called Azamukazaru no Ki (An Honest Record), in which until 1897 he described his daily joys and sorrows. Though not intended as a literary work, it is peculiarly affecting and is perhaps Doppo’s finest creating. It is filled with apostrophes to love, resolute declarations of his mission in life, quotations from admired authors, plans for study, and reports on his other activities. … Doppo’s diary is particular moving in its account of his short-lived marriage. He fell madly in love with Sasaki Nobuko and idealistically decided that the unspoiled spaces of Hokkaidō would provide the most suitable setting for their married life. Nobuko’s mother was far from agreeing, and in the face of her fierce opposition, Doppo stayed only briefly in Hokkaidō, retaining, however, memories of the lonely landscapes that would appear in his later writings. In November 1895 he was married to his beloved Nobuko despite her mother’s objections. In his diary he expressed his joy: ‘This evening at seven o’clock Nobuko and I were married. My love has at least triumphed. I have at last triumphed. I have at last won Nobuko.’ But their happiness did not last long. In April 1896 he wrote in his diary: ‘I am now sitting at my desk writing a biography of Lincoln. But I feel as if a leaden lump of grief has sunk and rolled to the bottom of my heart. My dear, my beloved Nobuko is no longer in my house. Her laughing voice no longer echoes here. Where is she now? … But i tell myself: Act like a man. Endure. Show love in your every act. Do not lose your temper.’ A few days later he learned that Nobuko wanted a divorce. Apparently the combination of her parents’ opposition and Doppo’s poverty had induced her to leave him, even though she was carrying his child. A friend, to comfort Doppo, lent him Byron, Wordsworth and ‘The Sorrows of Werther;’ later the same day he read Dante, but to no avail: ‘My grief since Nobuko disappeared seems to have affected my spirit in some extraordinary manner,’ he related. ‘Life is earnest. Death is a fearsome voice.’ The next day he wrote, ‘I feel as though I am about to be thrown naked into the midst of this terrifying universe. A dark rain falls on eternal ‘time.’ At the edges of the boundless sky I hear voices of burning fire. What is love? What is beauty? What is life? I bear a whole pack of griefs. But I shall not attempt to forcibly cure them.’
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, pages 229-30

• "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’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 

• Doppo was not an important poet, but as he related in the preface to a collection of poems, Doppo Gin (1897), his readings in European poetry had made him realize how neglected poetry was in the new Japan. None of the modern Japanese poetry he had read seemed to convey the excitement of the age of change that swept over Japan since the opening of the country. ‘Liberty in Europe was the hot blood of the poets, but when transplanted to Japan it become nothing more than the orations of ‘patriots’ at the theater.’ Modern Japanese civilization, he was convinced, had fallen into the sin of materialism, and religion itself had been debased. ‘Electric lamps shine in vain; the temple of the divine spirit of the people is dark as night. I believe that the failure in Japan to develop a suitable poetic form has been a major factor in crippling the new Japanese culture.’
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, pages 231-2 

• Gradually Doppo found his vocation as a writer. He declared: ‘I am to be a poet of God. I have been studying all this time so that I might become a poet. I will walk my own path. I am convinced that I have been granted the destiny of a poet. I will devote my full efforts to this heaven-sent mission. Truly I must be a poet. I have nothing else to recommend me. I have not been trained to be a politician, nor to be a pastor. My development to this day has been directed solely at becoming a poet. I am satisfied with my destiny.’
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West page 231 

• Uchimura Kanzō suggested that Doppo visit him in Kyoto [after Sasaki Nobuko divorced him], but Doppo courageously responded, ‘I have consecrated myself to seeking and propagating the way of God.’ He made up his mind to become a missionary. ‘I must go to America. God grant me the mandate of an apostle. My sufferings are the work of providence; it is intended hat I should save this degraded Japan.’ For all his consecration, Doppo in the end did not go to America. He broke off his diary at this point, as if rejecting his ties with the past. When he resumed it three months later, in August 1896, a new note sounded. Nature had become an important consolation: ‘Nature seems to be gradually coming closer to me and man gradually growing more distant. Nature is beauty and truth, but man is a self-seeking and mendacious creature.’ He sensed divinity in the mountains, but was struck, on the other hand, by the rarity of beauty in the characters of men.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, pages 230-1 

• Doppo was the illegitimate son of a samurai and a servant girl. After receiving a rather irregular education, in 1888 he entered the Tōkyō Semmon Gakkō, the antecedent of Waseda University, where he studied English literature. Doppo intended to become a politician, but promulgation of the Meiji Constitution and the establishment of the Diet in 1890 put an end to romantic dreams by ushering in an age of practical (and sometimes sordid) politics. His disillusion with political action may have led him to Christianity. He was baptized in 1891 and, as was true of many other Christian converts, his religion expressed itself in a concern for social problems.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West page 228 

• It is hard to fit Doppo into any school. He was basically a romantic, and like such writers as Kitamura Tōkoku he expressed in lyrical prose a sense of wonder before nature and man with burning sincerity. He himself acknowledged above all his indebtedness to Wordsworth. He declared, ‘Once I had become a believer in Wordsworth I could not think of man as being separate from nature.’ In later years he also absorbed influences from Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Maupassant, but never lost his faith in Wordsworth, and he even complained that the Naturalist writers failed to display a sufficient interest in nature, in the manner of Wordsworth.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West page 227 

• "Another strain in Japanese Naturalism was an absorption with nature itself. Kunikida Doppo is generally treated as a member of the Naturalist movement, ever since Shimazaki Tōsen called him one in 1906, but if he merits this distinction it is probably because of his success in describing nature… Doppo himself professed to be bewildered by his reputation as a Naturalist writer. Although his stories revealed a careful observation of society, only a few late works treated the hard lives of the lower classes in the Naturalist manner [of portraying people who belonged to the lower depths of society, emphasizing their sexual passion as the most obvious feature of their animal-like nature]. Most of Doppo’s stories were lyrical and tinged with idealism…"
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West page 227 

• Shibusawa, although discouraged, was not deterred, and continued to write works on eroticism and to translate the works of de Sade, as well as other French authors; he also produced essays and art criticism, and became a specialist in the study of medieval demonology. In September 1970, Shibusawa made his first overseas trip, a vacation to Europe. He was seen off at Haneda Airport by his close friend Mishima Yukio. Madame de Sade by Mishima (1965) is entirely based on Shibusawa’s The Life of Marquis de Sade (サド侯爵の生涯, 1964); but on the other hand, today it is known that Shibusawa himself plagiarized his own work largely from Vie du Marquis de Sade by Gilbert Lely (1961). In The Temple of Dawn (1969), Mishima created Yasushi Imanishi (今西 康 Imanishi Yasushi) based on Shibusawa’s personality."
  - Wikipedia

• About his suicide:
  Let us here juxtapose the two postwar suicides of Dazai and Mishima in order to elicit a problematics of reading postwar Japanese literature and history. Beyond the relational similarity that has suggested this analysis (i.e., that both men were writers, that police dossiers designated them as suicides, and that the reports of their deaths elicited intense emotional reaction throughout Japan), there are also suggestive differences between these two events. First, in terms of public response, although with dissenting minorities on each side, it is possible to discern a predominantly tearful empathy for Dazai in 1948 as against an outraged antipathy for Mishima in 1970. The polarization here is all the more striking when it is seen as a reversal of an idealized system of feudal values, whereby a ‘proper’ samurai death would put to shame a trivial sordid affair involving a lower-class woman. Yet, there can be no question that Dazai’s anguished self-destructive decadence sparked a warm current of sympathy and a sense of loss, whereas Mishima’s ‘theatrical suicide’ elicited an indignant outcry of consternation, emblematized by then Prime Minister of Defense Nakasone’s labeling of him as an ‘enemy of democracy and order’ and Prime Minister Satō’s remark that Mishima had to be ‘mad.’ Second, there is the stark contrast in the approaches to and methods of suicide: Dazai’s death by drowning while drunk coming as an almost anticlimactic denouement to a series of failed suicide attempts, whereas Mishima’s, from all accounts, was planned years in advance to the day and hours with a precision as razor-sharp as the dagger used to perform the seppuku. But above all, what may be said to define the locus of difference here is the nature of the respective life-narratives generating and generated by these two suicides. Mishima’s textualization of death in his writing, no less than the honing of his body through disciplined exercise, is, as it were, authenticated by the obsessive punctuality of his life and death, a punctuality testified to by his manuscripts and letters, as by the already famous anecdote to the effect that he delivered the last installment of his final tetralogy, ‘The Sea of Fertility,’ to his publisher on the very day of his death. The apparent clarity of intent in Mishima renders all the more ambiguous the murky circumstances surrounding Dazai’s death, whose very status as a suicide… was itself subject to doubt. Pair the loose ends of this narrative of suicide with Dazai’s unfinished manuscripts and fragmentary style and we can begin to consider the implications of this polarity for reading the postwar period.
  - Alan Stephen Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan: The Case of Dazai Osamu

• 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

• 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

• Ōgai Mori (1862-1922) stands in the foremost rank of modern Japanese novelists. His professional success as an army surgeon was outstripped by his even more brilliant ascent in the literary world of the Meiji and Taisho eras. His work is characterized by a strong humanistic element, a romantic quality effectively tempered by realism, and a lucid style that often rises to lyric intensity…
  - Kingo Ochiai, the introduction to Mori Ōgai’s The Wild Geese 

• The eyes of Mori Ōgai are gifted ones. They observe, sometimes with affection, sometimes with irony, but always accurately. And the main impression they leave behind is that of the writer’s sensitive compassion for man. That no simple answers emerge in the narrative, that no problems are solved, that the story comes full circle on the wings of dilemma, that more is implied than stated, that the novel’s ‘uneventfulness’ is nevertheless part of the world of tension and conflict - these are major elements in the art with which Mori Ōgai accomplished this mature work.
  - Kingo Ochiai, the introduction to Mori Ōgai’s The Wild Geese

• The problems that the Japanese encountered when translating European novels can hardly be exaggerated. The most common allusions to the people, places, or customs of the past had to be explained - or omitted. Mori Ōgai’s much-admired translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Improvisatoren,’ over which he labored from 1892 to 1901, is a rare combination of accuracy and elegant Japanese expression; but it is interspersed with innumerable notes elucidating points in the original that would have been self-explanatory to any educated European. Ōgai used a German translation of the original Danish… Ōgai invented many Japanese translations of European words. He rendered such words as ‘symphony,’ ‘concerto,’ and ‘sonata’ by words that sometimes went back to their original etymologies but more usually conveyed only the general sense. The names of unfamiliar objects, such as ‘piano,’ ‘violin,’ or ‘cello,’ might merely be transcribed, but abstract words had to go through a series of provisional translations before the definitive term - often devised by Ōgai - gained currency.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, pages 69-70

• His travels abroad had profound effects, for the year after Ōgai’s return to Japan in 1888, he translated and published an anthology of French and German poems, and at one time or another during his career he brought to Japan’s literary public selections from Hans Christian Andersen, Goethe, Ibsen, Wilde, Shakespeare, and many other European novelists and dramatists.
  - Kingo Ochiai, the introduction to Mori Ōgai’s The Wild Geese 

• When Tayama Katai volunteered as a correspondent during the Russo-Japanese War he was assigned to the same sector as Mori and they spent many hours conversing:
  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

• Ōgai moved to Tokyo in 1872, when he was ten years old, and began to learn German in preparation for medical studies. Formal training in medicine began two years later, and he graduated from the Medical Department of Tokyo University in 1881. He was at once appointed as a medical officer in the army, in keeping with his samurai background. His superiors were impressed with his ability, and in 1884 he was sent to Germany, where he spent four years studying public hygiene.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 356 

• As an author Mori did not write about himself or his feelings:
  Ōgai rarely disclosed in his writing details of his private life or his feelings. He habitually wore a mask, revealing to his readers only as much of himself as he deemed appropriate. The mask made him seem austere, even unapproachable, but to his admires Ōgai’s mask, like a Nō mask, was a thing of beauty itself, a dignified, noble abstraction of the man. Ōgai reticence often induced him to leave unspoken even the central point of a story; he so faithfully recorded the material things of daily life that his stories make excellent documentation for the period, yet he rarely informed the reader what was passing through a character’s mind or what the significance was in an ambiguous word or gesture. So much is left unsaid that a quick reading of a story by Ōgai is likely to be disappointing; it may seem no more than an anecdote or sketch, and only after some reflection will the reader perceive the insight into human nature that has been presented.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 360

• Akutagawa was conspicuously influenced by Mori’s style of writing:
  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’s first story to reach the public was “The Dancing Girl” in 1890, which is actually autobiographical:
  ‘The Dancing Girl’, published in 1890, was Ōgai’s first work to reach the Japanese reading public, and it remains one of his best-known and most highly appreciated works of fiction. Fiction, perhaps; yet what drives this romantic tale of love, madness, and death are the authentic feelings articulated by the narrator, whose adventures in Germany, and his emotional response to those adventures, closely resembles those of the author. The story thus possesses a considerable resonance. The dilemmas caused by the pain of a gradual self-awakening experienced by the protagonist, developed during his years in Europe, were to represent for Ōgai during the whole span of his artistic career a central tension in Japanese contemporary civilization that he believed his countrymen must learn to acknowledge. Once awakened to the demands of the individual self, the author inquires, how can one find the courage, and a necessary sense of resignation, to say nothing of the appropriate means, to reintegrate oneself into a society that seeks an ideal of communal compliance, particularly when there were, from a national point of view, a number of compelling reasons to do so. In many ways these concerns, first expressed in 'The Dancing Girl,’ form a thread that binds together many of Ōgai’s later important works…
  - Introduction to Mori Ōgai’s “The Dancing Girl”

• Nakajima Atsushi suffered from asthma, and he included his perspective and feelings about it in his writing:
  Stubborn cough and wheezing, arthritic pain, coughing up blood, fatigue. Why should I prolong my life? Since my malady has brought my desire for action to a halt, only literature remains in my life. To create literature. There is neither joy nor agony in it. As a consequence, my life is neither happy nor unhappy. I am a silkworm. A silkworm, regardless of whether it is happy or not, cannot help but weave its cocoon. I am just using the thread of my words to weave the cocoon of my tale. Alas, the pitiful sickly silkworm is about to finish the cocoon. His existence no longer has any purpose whatsoever. ‘No, you do have a purpose,’ a friend said. ‘You transform. Become a moth, chew through the cocoon, fly away!’ It is indeed a well-placed metaphor. But the question is whether my body and my spirit still have any strength left to break through the cocoon.
  - Nakajima Atsushi, Light, Wind, and Dreams

• Despite his health problems Nakajima Atsushi was a lively and vibrant youth:
  Like his mother, who died of tuberculosis at age thirty-five, Nakajima had persistent health problems and suffered from severe asthma beginning in his late teens. Most readers and critics assume Nakajima to have been a fragile poetic genius, but in fact as a young man he was lively and vibrant. During his college years he was obsessed with ballroom dancing, playing mah-jongg, horseback riding, and girls. In an interesting episode that reflects his youthful exuberance, he once organized a group of dancers from Asakusa to perform in Taiwan. He is said to have written all the scripts and music for the tour. Though the tour was never realized, this incident shows that, at least in his youth, Nakajima was full of energy and ideas.
  - Faye Yuan Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South

• He taught English and Japanese literature at a girl’s school in Yokohama, but had to stop teaching because of his asthma:
  After graduating from Tokyo Imperial University, Nakajima found a position teaching English and Japanese literature at a girl’s high school in Yokohama, but he often missed work because of his asthma and eventually, in 1940, he had to take a year off from his job. During this period he established a family but also found time to travel, visiting both the Bonin Islands and China. He even tried graduate school but had to drop out after a year because of his health.
  - Faye Yuan Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South

• "In time, Nakajima developed an affinity for the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson that was no doubt based to some degree on significant parallels between their lives.":
  -  In time, Nakajima developed an affinity for the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson that was no doubt based to some degree on significant parallels between their lives. Both were precocious and ambitious writers who were plagued by ill health and died young. By the age of fifteen Stevenson knew he was born to be a writer, though his family wanted him to follow in his father’s footsteps as an engineer… Nakajima too began writing and publishing when he was fifteen, though the fact that both his father and grandfather were educators may have made a life of scholarship and writing more acceptable to his family…. Both suffered from a chronic disease that eventually curtailed their careers (tuberculosis for Stevenson, asthma for Nakajima) and sought refuge in the warm, languorous climate of the tropics.
  - Faye Yuan Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South

• Nakajima’s fascination with [Robert Louis Stevenson] was encapsulated in a work that he initially titled ‘Death of a Storyteller.’ Based on the life of Stevenson in Samoa and his battles there with the colonial government, it was written before Nakajima ever saw the South Seas. The storyteller of this tale is Stevenson but represents Nakajima himself, as well, and the death of the title is both Stevenson’s tragic end on Samoa and the death that loomed constantly over Nakajima because of his illness.":
  Nakajima’s fascination with [Robert Louis Stevenson] was encapsulated in a work that he initially titled ‘Death of a Storyteller.’ Based on the life of Stevenson in Samoa and his battles there with the colonial government, it was written before Nakajima eer saw the South Seas. The storyteller of this tale is Stevenson but represents Nakajima himself, as well, and the death of the title is both Stevenson’s tragic end on Samoa and the death that loomed constantly over Nakajima because of his illness. On the recommendation of Fukuda HIsaya, a close friend to whom Nakajima had entrusted the manuscript, the editor of Bungakukai agreed to publish it, providing that Nakajima shortened the piece and changed the inauspicious title to something more appealing, ‘Light, Wind, and Dreams: Excerpts from the Five Rivers Manor Diary’ When the novella finally appeared in Bungakkai (May 1942) it was well received and indeed was considered for the Akutagawa literary award. The change of title shifted the attention of the average reader from the act of writing to the exotic locale, setting the course for the dominant reading of the novel to this day: as a lyrical meditation on the life in the South Pacific. But this change has obscured the author’s original intent to focus the work on the author, Robert Louis Stevenson, and his struggle with writing.
  - Faye Yuan Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South

• Nakajima began to read Stevenson during the summer of 1940. Intrigued by Stevenson’s solitary opposition to British colonial policy in Samoa, he read everything he could find of Stevenson’s writings and any biographical material he could lay his hands on.":
  Nakajima began to read Stevenson during the summer of 1940. Intrigued by Stevenson’s solitary opposition to British colonial policy in Samoa, he read everything he could find of Stevenson’s writings and any biographical material he could lay his hands on. The narrative he created interweaves meticulously researched accounts of Stevenson’s life with observations and contemplations on topics such as literature and philosophy offered by an anonymous narrator. Often Nakajima, through the narrator, attributes to Stevenson his own views. A deliberation on ‘plotless fiction,’ for example, echoes the famous 1927 debate on this topic between Akutagawa Ryunosuke and Tanizaki Junichirou. 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 Atsushi,] the narrator is sympathetic toward Stevenson’s complaints about overcoming creative blocks and enduring criticism… But the subject/object distance is almost obliterated when Nakajima ponders the imminent death awaying Stevenson (and himself). When Stevenson compares himself to another Scottish poet, Robert Fergusson (1750-1774), recalling their similar youthful passion for poetry, their illness, and later their death, he was foreshadowing his own end and Nakajima’s. The relationship between creation and death, which resonates in the original title of the story [‘Death of a Storyteller’], is best capture din the following diary entry dated August 1894: ‘Stubborn cough and wheezing, arthritic pain, coughing up blood, fatigue. Why should I prolong my life? Since my malady has brought me desire for action to a halt, only literature remains in my life. To create literature. There is neither joy nor agony in it. As a consequence, my life is neither happy nor unhappy. I am a silkworm. A silkworm, regardless of whether it is happy or not, cannot help but weave its cocoon. I am just using the thread of my words to weave the cocoon of my tale. Alas, the pitiful sickly silkworm is about to finish the cocoon. His existence no longer has any purpose whatsoever. ‘No, you do have a purpose,’ a friend said. ‘You transform. Become a moth, chew through the cocoon, fly away!’ It is indeed a well-placed metaphor. But the question is whether my body and spirit still have any strength left to break through the cocoon.’
  - Faye Yuan Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South

• Nakajima Atsushi, raised by a father who spent much of his life as an educator in the Japanese empire, grew up in the colonies. His first literary creations focused on the injustices perpetrated by the colonial system upon its native subjects. In the stultifying intellectual environment of wartime Japan, he retreated to historical novels about the distant past, using a foreign setting and characters to disguise his anguish at being unable to write the stories he wished. He found a kindred soul in Robert Louis Stevenson, a man of precocious talent and failing health, who was forced to write in clichéd genres but found escape in the lush tropical beauty of the South Seas.
  - Faye Yuan Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South 

• In his new position with the Department of Regional International Affairs, Nakajima was commissioned to create Japanese textbooks to be used b the islanders [in the South Seas]. Leaving Yokohama on a rainy day in late June 1941, Nakajima made the week long journey to Palau alone. Arriving at the island on July 6, he immediately suffered a series of severe asthma attacks, dengue fever, and bouts of malaria. The heart was unbearable and the food unpalatable. Nevertheless Nakajima traveled throughout the region, visiting island after island, surveying the condition  of Japanese-language education. In his diary he mentions that his only relief from asthma attacks was while in boats on the open water. His excursion among the islands became ‘the only time I could feel relaxed amid this despicable, unbearable bureaucratic existence.’ From July 1941 to March of the next year, during his short nine-month stay, Nakajima wrote home to his wife and sons. The engaging and observant letters he wrote during this period, telling of his experiences on the islands, his illness, his homesickness, and his joy, remain one of the best examples of epistolary writing by a modern Japanese author.
  - Faye Yuan Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South

• After completing his paean to Stevenson, Nakajima went off to the South Pacific hoping to find his utopia, a natural wonderland that would heal his tortured body and provide a place for him to express his altruistic tendencies. He found instead a dystopia…. Disillusioned he returned to Japan where his tale of Stevenson’s tragic fate was now, ironically, winning him recognition; but true to the tragic arc of his fate, he died almost immediately.
  - Faye Yuan Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South 

• As a mature writer, Nakajima turned his hand to materials familiar to him from his family tradition of Chinese learning. He established a reputation for deep appreciation and training in Chinese and classical literature through a series of allegorical historical tales based on Chinese classical stories. At one point Nakajima was hailed as the second coming of Akutagawa Ryunosuke precisely because of his familiarity with both Eastern and Western classics and his fluency in retelling them in modern Japanese.
  - Faye Yuan Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South 

• It is perhaps inevitable that [Nakajima Atsushi] should be compared with Akutagawa, since they resemble each other closely in their delicate health and fastidious spirit (perhaps based on stoicism), extraordinary memory and knowledge, bashful disposition, and self-consciousness and self-respect; on this latter point Akutagawa was perhaps more extreme, as well as being more the dandy and cynic.
  - Akira Miwa, Translator’s Preface in Nakajima Atsushi’s Light, Wind, and Dreams 

• Nakajima’s outlook was more pessimistic:
  -  ‘Light, Wind, and Dreams’ was based on the life of Robert Louis Stevenson. But as Donald Keene has pointed out: ‘Nakajima has infused much of his own beliefs into his portrait.’ There are the inevitable stylistic transformations, as well, so that Stevenson’s diary entries as penned by Nakajima reflect Nakajima’s pessimism rather than Stevenson’s general optimism.
  - Faye Yuan Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South

• [In ‘Light, Wind, and Dreams’ Nakajima Atsushi] defends Stevenson’s romantic adventures from the English critics and the onslaught Zola’s realism, while at the same time defending his own literary creations against the dominant I-novelist tradition in Japan. Through the character Stevenson, Nakajima relates his thoughts on the relationship between reality and literary work: ‘I have heard that the literary scene in Western Europe is rampant with Mr. Zola’s tedious realism. Do they think they can represent natural reality by recording everything their eyes can see? The hideousness is laughable. Literature is choice. The eyes of a writer are eyes that choose. To depict the absolute truth? Who can capture the entire reality? Reality is leather. Literary works are shoes. Shoes are made of leather, but they are not just leather.’ Through this metanarrative, Nakajima reclaims the novel as his own creation; Stevenson’s life is the material (the leather) but the narrative is all his.
  - Faye Yuan Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South

• War is war. Literature is literature…If you are not able to write, then don’t write. I don’t see any reason to force oneself…Renounce the title of ‘writer’ and participate as an ordinary citizen, taking care of all the necessary chores that need to be done to carry out the war.
  - Nakajima Atsushi

• After reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s letters and accounts of Samoa, and from his own experiences living and traveling in other countries, Nakajima Atsushi opposed white supremacy and there is an antiwhite bias in his writing:
  Nakajima Atsushi (1909-1942) is never discussed by Japanese critics in terms of having been a war writer, though the works for which he is remembered were all published during the war. … Nakajima’s stories at first glance do not even remotely evoke the ideals of the Greater East Asia War. Not only are most set in the distant past, but in some cases they are so closely based on Chinese sources as to be scarcely more than translations into exceptionally felicitous Japanese. But the case is rather different with ‘Light, Wind, and Dreams,’ Nakajima’s longest work, where the unconscious assumptions of a Japanese writing in wartime rise to the surface. Nakajima has been criticized for having transformed Stevenson into a likeness of himself, but this was no mean achievement, considering the usual Japanese reluctance to describe the thought process or emotions of non-Japanese. Certainly Nakajima was well acquainted with the letters and other accounts of Samoa written by Stevenson, especially the Vailima Letters, but in comparing Stevenson’s opinions with those expressed by the character of the same name in Nakajima’s story, we become aware that Nakajima has infused much of his own beliefs into his portrait. … Again and again in Nakajima’s account of Stevenson one finds a specifically aintiwhite bias, though it is not always immediately apparent, if only because the protagonist is a white man. Nakajima is indignant that the whites have imposed Western civilization on the rest of the world and consider that it is universal. He insists that the East, including Samoa and other islands not usually associated with Asia, has a civilization of its own that is of equal or perhaps even greater value; this civilization is described in Nakajima’s stories of ancient China, the counterpart to his rejection of the modern West.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, pages 940-2

• Nakajima Atsushi hailed from a satamachi merchant clan that had made palanquins for generations in the Nihonbashi area of Tokyo. His grandfather, Keitarou, had forsaken the family business to become a Confucian scholar. This tradition was carried on by his sons and grandsons, many of whom become sinologists or were active in the colonial administration in Manchuria. Atsushi’s father taught Chinese in high school.
  - Faye Yuan Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South 

• One might ask why Nakajima turned to ancient China for material for his stories instead of contemporary Japan. What compelled him to write about Confucius and his disciples; about a cavalry commander and a court historian, an archer in quest of the ultimate mastery of his art, dukes’ and princes’ rise and fall, a poet metamorphosing into a tiger, and a river monster searching for self-identity?…Nakajima’s grandfather, father ,and three of his uncles studied and taught the Chinese classics. He grew up among the texts of ancient Chinese philosophy, history, and literature, gaining familiarity with many of them. This was a time-honored branch of intellectual activity in traditional Japan.
  - Nobuko Ochner and Paul McCarthy, the Afterword of The Moon Over the Mountain and Other Stories by Nakajima Atsushi 

• Nakajima grew up in colonial Korea under Japanese rule:
  Not much, however, has been translated or written about [Nakajima Atsushi’s] stories set in colonial Korea under Japanese rule (1910–45), yet those stories occupy an important place in the identity and emotional landscape of a writer who was after all every bit a child of expansionist Japan. Nakajima spent six years of his youth (1920–26) attending elementary and middle school in the Imperial capital of Keijō in Korea as his father worked as a middle school teacher. He gained firsthand knowledge of colonial Korea, the setting for this story…
  - Angela Yui, from the introduction to “Landscape with an Officer”

• He was one of the first Japanese writers to have existentialist themes in his works:
  Stories about China by the Japanese writer Nakajima Atsushi… brings to English-speaking readers a reading experience quite different from that of most contemporary Japanese fiction of the last half-century. There are no cherry blossoms, languishing women, philandering husbands, or mad pursuit of material gods. Instead, the world depicted in Nakajima’s works abounds in characters in search not of money, power, or women but of the ultimate meaning of their own lives. It is a precursor to the Existentialist world-view, the fundamental question of the meaning of existence, arising from despair over the senseless destruction of war. It is a philosophical stance that became widespread internationally in the decades immediately after World War II. Nakajima predates this philosophical movement by a few years, dying prematurely from asthma in December of 1942. Thus, his proto-Existentialist writings are not influenced by the prevalent trends of his time. Rather, they stem from his abiding personal philosophical preoccupations. He was deeply involved with the question of ‘the first principles’ - why things are what they are, and what the 'self’ is.
  - Paul McCarthy and Nobuko Ochner, The Moon Over the Mountain Afterward

• Nakajima refused to write anything that would support Japanese government policy during the war:
  Because of increasing censorship within Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s, writers were forced to produce works supporting the Japanese government’s policy, or to write something totally unrelated to the time. Nakajima’s personal essay written in 1942 expresses his view that literature should be separate from politics, and that if one did not have a topic one truly wished to write about, one should not write. Writing about ancient China was a way of expressing his own existential search for the meaning of self and of the world in a society that severely limited what one could write.
  - Nobuko Ochner and Paul McCarthy, the Afterword of The Moon Over the Mountain and Other Stories by Nakajima Atsushi

• Nakajima didn’t write any autobiographical stories (during this time the I-novel genre was immensely popular) because he thought his life as a school teacher wasn’t exciting enough. Instead he chose “to tell the story of his philosophical wanderings by describing the struggles of the protagonist, a completely fictitious character”:
  Nakajima had another reason for choosing to write about someone else, outside Japan and in the remote historical past, rather than about himself… Nakajima came to realize that life as a schoolteacher was not interesting enough material or a broad enough canvas to depict the general human condition: the search for meaning in a possibly meaningless world. He chose instead to tell the story of his philosophical wanderings by describing the struggles of the protagonist, a completely fictitious character…
  - Nobuko Ochner and Paul McCarthy, the Afterword of The Moon Over the Mountain and Other Stories by Nakajima Atsushi

• Nakajima was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize and even now his stories are included in Japanese textbooks, despite only publishing stories for less than a year before he died:
  In the case of Nakajima, he was a virtually unknown writer until shortly before he died from asthma at age thirty-three in December of 1942. He had just made his literary debut with the publication of two stories in February of 1942, then published a long work in May, and two collections of stories in the summer of 1942, becoming a candidate for the Akutagawa Prize in September, just before his death. Within a short time after his death, however, his complete works were published, in 1948…. His stories, particularly ‘The Moon over the Mountain,’ have become well established in the Japanese canon by becoming incorporated into high school textbooks… Atsushi Nakajima has a secure place in Japanese literary history.
  - Nobuko Ochner and Paul McCarthy, the Afterword of The Moon Over the Mountain and Other Stories by Nakajima Atsushi

• Oda Sakunosuke Timeline:
  1913: Oda was born on October 26 in Osaka. In his family he was the fourth child with three older sisters. One younger sister would be born after him, making a total of five children in his family. His father came to Osaka from Kyoto and ran a fish store.
  1931: Oda did well in his studied. After middle school he was admitted to a prestigious higher school in Kyoto, which was considered a remarkable achievement considering his modest background. His older sister payed for his school expenses, despite her husband’s wishes, so he could move to the student lodgings in Kyoto.
  At the higher school, Oda, “stimulated and distracted by his new surroundings, soon became so engrossed in literary interests that he neglected his classes. Although he eventually completed three years of school work, he was in the end disqualified from graduating because of his poor attendance record. Already, it should e noted, he had contracted the tuberculosis of the lungs that was eventually to prove fatal, and he had to suspend his high school studies for a period to recuperate. Meantime both his parents died, which meant that he no longer had a home in Osaka to return to.”
  1936: Oda moved to Tokyo, spending two years “dabbling in the life of the capital and continuing the efforts at writing”. His first literary works were plays, but they were not well received and he began writing fiction.
  1939: Oda moved back to Osaka because he wanted to make the everyday life in that city the subject of his writing. In July he married Miyata Kazue. “The two had become acquainted some years earlier, when Oda was a high school student and Miyata a waitress in a drinking establishment…for a while they had lived together. But the romance was a stormy one, troubled by Miyata’s previous involvement with another man and Oda’s jealous rages.
  1940: Oda published “Meoto Zenzai” or “Hurray for Marriage, or Sweet Beans for Two!” (included in the book). It was immediately popular and the story gained widespread recognition.
  1944: Censorship in literature had gotten strict which made it hard for Oda to get any of his work published. Oda’s wife died from cancer, which left Oda even more depressed and frustrated with life.
  1945: With the end of the war brought less rigid literary censorship, so Oda was able to find more publishers who could print his works. He soon found himself to be a popular writer.
  1946: Oda remarried. From here on he “worked at a frantic pace to fulfill his literary commitments, often employing drugs to spur on his flagging energies, it became apparent that disease had fatally sapped his strength.”
  1947: Oda collapsed on a trip to Tokyo and died in a hospital there on January 10th at the age of 33.
  - This timeline is based on the introduction to Stories of Osaka Life

• He was an avid reader in school. One of the authors he liked was Kunikida Doppo:
  When I was young I was an avid reader of juvenile magazines such as ‘Young People’s Club’ and 'Anthill’, and also an avid contributor to their readers’ columns. Whenever it was about time for a new issue to appear, I would make two or three trips daily to the bookstore to see if any of the funny stories I had submitted had by chance come out in print. Zenshodo also carried secondhand books and books for lending, and they had the Tachikawa paperback series as well. I was a sixth grader at the time and immersed in reading things like Kunikida Doppo’s 'An Honest Man’, Moria Sohei’s 'Smoke’, and Arishima Takeo’s 'The Descendants of Cain’. In fact I spent so much time browing around the shelves of Zenshodo that I almost didn’t get into middle school.
  - Oda Sakunosuke, “City of Trees”

• When Oda died Dazai wrote a eulogy for him in the paper blaming his death on the literary critics:
  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.

• 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. 

• On the Buraiha:
  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

• Sakaguchi Ango said that Oda is “a man who formed one generation of readers” and “His writing reads very smoothly”:
  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, as a member of the Buraiha (Decadent School of Literature), was known for drinking and drug addiction:
  Oda Sakunosuke was closely associated with the burai-ha, especially during the last years of his brief life. He would meet Dazai Osamu and Sakaguchi Ango at bars in Tokyo, sometimes for the ostensible purpose of having their conversations recorded in a magazine, and he drank heavily, in the manner expected of a believer in the burai ideals. Oda died of tuberculosis at thirty-four, his premature death having been hastened not only by drink but by drugs: a widely publicized photograph showed Oda injecting philopon into his arm with a hypodermic needle. Like other members of the group, he admired French literature, was pleased to think of himself as an outsider constantly at odds with society, and expressed strong dislike of the writings of Shiga Naoya and his followers. For a time, especially during the years immediately after the war, his writings enjoyed considerable popularity, and he wrote prolifically in response to the demand for manuscripts, but most of his hastily composed manuscripts have been forgotten…
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 1081

• “Oda had the gifts of a gesaku writer, and his evocations of the plebian, commercial city of Osaka are adroit”:
  Oda’s stories, regardless of the incidents related or the effective details, tend to lack structure or shape. One incident is related after another, sometimes with only a word or two to indicate that several years have elapsed, and there is seldom a cumulative effect to the successive anecdotes. The stories start and stop more or less arbitrarily. Oda had the gifts of a gesaku writer, and his evocations of the plebian, commercial city of Osaka are adroit…
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 1083

• At first Oda tested the intelligence of the potential audience for fiction by including absurdities in his lectures on literature; he discovered that most people in the audience took him quite seriously, not realizing that’ the novelist is as big a liar as the theologian, the educator, the politician or the swindler.’ Critics of literature assume there is a ‘model’ for every character, that the novelist, out of a sense of professional duty, invariably inspects the scenes where his stories are set, and that the novelist never describes women unless he has extensive experience in them. Oda was sure that the critics were mistaken. He mentions that in his story ‘Sesō’ (The State of the Times, 1946) he had described reading court records of the trial of the notorious Abe Sada; the critics believed him, but he had actually invented the ‘records’ and had never read any evidence concerning the trial.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 1083-4

• The story ‘The State of the Times,’ perhaps the best of Oda’s postwar writings, revealed how frequently he relied for his materials on personal experiences or the experiences of people he knew despite his insistence to the contrary. ‘The State of the Times,’ however, is in no sense an ‘I novel.’ Oda transcended the limitations of the autobiographical materials by introducing anecdotes and reminiscences that are only casually related to the narrated facts, and by arranging the materials in nonlinear time.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 1084 

• Dazai, Oda, and Ango were "probably fine with any kind of woman whatsoever," said Oda during a conversation at Bar Lupin on the Ginza on November 25, 1946:
  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

• She was a Japanese mystery writer who studied under Natsume Souseki
  - Japanese Wikipedia

• In 1947, Ango Sakaguchi wrote an ironical murder mystery, ‘Furenzoku satsujin jiken’ (‘The Non-serial Murder Incident’), for which he received in 1948 the Mystery Writers of Japan Award:
  - Wikipedia

• "Sakaguchi Ango has been called the ‘nucleus’ of the buraiha writers, an appellation he received because his works typified the sometimes farcical, sometimes nihilistic manner of the group, and because his life itself seemed to be a series of acts of rebellion against the established morality and intellectual assumptions of his age."
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West

• He graduated from middle school at age 19 and worked as a substitute teacher at an elementary school. He submitted a manuscript for a prize but didn’t win so he became less interested in pursuing literature as a career. When Akutagawa committed suicide in 1927 it shocked all of Japan and made Sakaguchi Ango consider a career in literature again
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West 

• Sakaguchi was an eccentric author who did not “accept conventionality or established social institutions. … Practically none of the established moral or social values could escape his ridicule”:
  [Sakaguchi Ango’s] eccentricity, as reflected in the titles he chose (‘Overcoat and Blue Sky,’ ‘Wind, Light, and I at Twenty,’ ‘A Woman Who Washes the Loincloth of a Blue Ogre,’ ‘Tales of Nippon - a History Begins with Sukiyaki,’ etc.), did not permit him to accept conventionality or established social institutions. His life was devoted to a search for a flowering utopia amid the chaos of worldly cares. In this respect he is reminiscent of Dazai Osamu. The yardstick that he used was himself. He therefore almost completely disregarded existing rhetorical mannerisms and created a unique style of his own. Practically non of the established moral or social values could escape his ridicule.
  - Ivan Morris, from the introduction to Sakaguchi Ango‘s “The Idiot” in Modern Japanese Stories: An Anthology

• Ango was on the first postwar literary baseball team, formed in 1949. He played as the starting pitcher.
  - Bungeishunju, Ango Sakaguchi protects the outfield with a cigarette

• Dazai, Oda, and Ango were "probably fine with any kind of woman whatsoever," said Oda during a conversation at Bar Lupin on the Ginza on November 25, 1946:
  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

Suehiro Tetcho “was a politician, novelist, journalist, and proponent of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement. Born of samurai lineage in what is now Ehime Prefecture, he graduated from the local samurai school and became a teacher in 1869. Thereafter, he moved to Tokyo and worked for the Ministry of Finance for six years before going into the newspaper business. He was imprisoned twice for challenging the existing free press laws and was instrumental in forming the first national political party. He wrote a political, proto-science fiction novel Setchubai (Plum Blossoms in the Snow, 1886), and in 1890 he was elected in the first national election, but was later ousted because he left the Liberal Party. Suehiro died in 1896 of tongue cancer and is buried in Ehime.”
- enacademic.com

• Santōka frequently concludes a poem with an image drawn from the natural world, appending it to the end of the poem without any indication of just how it is meant to relate to what has gone before… Here it is clear that what he is venturing deeper and deeper into, at least on the literal level of the poem, are the green mountains of the Japanese countryside. The verb he employs, wakeiru, however, suggests some pushing or forcing his way through a dense and resisting mass: the green mountains, the poem implies, are perhaps not as pleasant or as passable as they seemed from a distance, and there is a hint that the traveler may in fact never come out on the other side.
  - For All My Walking introduction

• 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 

• Eventually, after a particularly bad periods in which he and his brother contacted typhoid, [Katai] decided to take positive steps to earn money from his one definite skill, writing, and in May 1891 he approached Ozaki Kouyou (1867-1903), the leading literary figure of the day, and requested patronage. (This seeking of literary patronage was by no means uncommon in the Meiji literary world. Many an aspiring writer would seek to become a protege of some well-known literary figure, who would then offer advice and use his good name and contacts to launch their literary careers. Katai himself had, at various stages of his life, at least four proteges, including the heroine of “Futon.”) By sheer good fortune (fate was not always against Katai, though he tended to overlook such moments) the somewhat aloof Kouyou was at that precise moment making plans for a magazine Senshibankou (A Thousand Purples, Ten Thousand crimsons), specifically to launch new young writers, and he accepted Katai. He himself paid little further attention to the newcomer, but the magazine’s editor, Emi Suiin (1869-1934), had had a very similar set of experiences to Katai, was greatly sympathetic, and proved to be an enormous aid and mentor, arranging publication of his stories in other well-known professional magazines and newspapers and establishing Katai as a professional writer.
  - The Introduction of Tayama Katai’s The Quilt and Other Stories, translated and with an introduction by Kenneth G. Henshall 

• Katai read Western authors like Zola, Chekhov, Daudet, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, among others:
  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

• 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”, found in the introduction of Tayama Katai’s The Quilt and Other Stories 

• 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 

• 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’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 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 volunteered as a correspondent during the Russ-Japanese War and was assigned to the same sector as Mori Ogai. The two talked for many hours:
  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

• The true story that inspired “Futon”:
  Katai had become friendly with a young woman named Okada Michiyo, who had written him describing her vast admiration for his writing. At the time it was rather unusual for a woman to receive a good education, but she had been trained at a mission school in Kobe where she had become passionately fond of literature. Katai, incurably infatuated with love itself and ready to fall in love with any woman who came within his range, evinced considerable interest in Miss Okada. … Katai was entranced, not so much by the girl’s beauty as by her vitality and idealistic conception of literature. He had grown quite bored with his wife and children, and having this adoring young pupil nearby was intoxicating. After a month it was decided, at the insistence of Katai’s wife, who had noticed the change in her husband, that Miss Okada would with with the wife’s sister. Katai’s service at the front [of the Russo-Japanese War] temporarily interrupted his ambiguous relationship with the girl, but after his return his anguished love again obsessed him. In his capacity as Miss Okada’s mentor he had encouraged her to think and act as a new Japanese woman, but it came as a painful shock to learn that she had taken him quite literally and had become intimate with a student. When the young man gave up his studies of divinity to marry the girl, Katai felt as if all pleasure in life had been destroyed, but he was resolved to do his duty as her teacher: he persuaded her parents to allow the marriage (which turned out unhappily). Katai’s relations with Miss Okada provided the subject matter of his story ‘The Quilt,’ a work that created a sensation. … The extraordinary success of ‘The Quilt’ was inescapably bound to the non literary fact that it was an undisguised confession by a rather well-known author. The conclusion of the story created the greatest impression in its day and is all that most readers still remember.
  - Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 245-6

• Yokomizo Seishi's appeal for rationality in post war Japan:
  "The early years of the American Occupation saw a 'generally unpredictable efflorescence of popular sentiment and initiative' in which such a search for subjectivity figured prominently. As in decades past, the genre of detective fiction beckoned writers and readers alike as a prime site for the literary exploration of identity. Perhaps sensing the popular excitement over the prospect of new freedoms, Yokomizo Seishi issued the following call to action from his home in rural Okayama to his readers around the country in 1946:
  "'Our current misery stems from the fact that the Japanese do no read detective fiction as much as they should. I say this at the risk of sounding self-serving. But we all have to admit that we neglected to practice how to think and act rationally [in prewar Japan] . . . Detective fiction as upheld rationality (rizume na bungaku) since its birth, so to make it as rational as possible is a duty for all those who call themselves detective writers (tantei sakka). Staying faithful to that duty was discouraged during the war. However, now that the war is over, and ended in a painful defeat, we detective writers need to write rational (gōriteki na) and intellectual (chiteki na) detective fiction in order to enlighten our readers. Only when such works materialize and many supporters are wiling to follow our lead, can we begin to build a [new] Japanese culture.'
  "Yokomizo's call for rationality reflects a larger societal trend to reexamine the war and Japan's defeat before facing the future. The utter destruction wreaked upon the entire country during the war made many question the wartime actions of their government and themselves: how could Japan engage in a doomed battle for so long, and why did so many educated people willingly submit to the ideals of the wartime fascist government? For Yokomizo, rationality was the tool with which to combat the irrational spiritualism, superstition, and prejudice that had led Japan into a hopeless war. This rational faculty was also synonymous with ethics and would function like a moral backbone according to which one made decisions and judgments. It was the quality that made the military writer in Oguri Mushitarō's 'Kaikyō tenchi kai' pursue the truth while the soldiers looked to overpower reality with brute force.
  "Detective fiction's search for rationality and subjectivity resonates within the shutai ronsō (debates over subjectivity) between Marxist literary critics and the proponents of the journal Gendai bungaku. Curiously, some key players in this debate, including Hirano Ken (1907-78), Ara Masahito (1913-79), and Oi Hirosuke (1912-76), sought refuge in detective fiction during the war. However, while they focused on how the Japanese people can assume sovereignty of their country and the function of intellectuals in that project, detective fiction authors such as Yokomizo and Sakaguchi Ango (1906-55) concentrated more on the project of possessing oneself - the quest to find one's intellectual (ideological) identity independent from externally mandated ethical constructions such as the institutions of ie (household), capitalism, and nationalism.
  "The appeal for rationality was far from the modan urban aesthetic and cultural values that Yokomizo advocated during his days as a young Shinseinen editor in the late 1920s. He was adamant about contributing to the rebuilding of Japanese society and was convinced that detective fiction could most effectively drive this nationwide project of rationalization by getting readers to ratiocinate with the detective. In his view, a classic locked-room mystery fit the bill perfectly: a body with a dagger in the back is found in a sealed environment. An irrational mind accepts that it was the deed of someone with preternatural powers, or the doing of a supernatural force. A rational mind, however, will use rationality and method to find a mechanism by which an equally rational mind killed the victim and locked the room from the outside.
  "Many other detective writers expressed support for Yokomizo's appeal especially during the decade of 1945-55, when memories of hardship, suffering, and devastation were still fresh in their minds. Edogawa Ranpo, for one, urged other writers to 'create a new literature of logic' (ronri bungaku), while Ango sponsored a contest to guess whodunit in his first detective fiction 'Furenzoku satsujin jiken' (The Nonconsecutive Murder Case; 1947). These authors sensed that their country was facing a change, from bad to good, and hoped that detective fiction would not lag behind but rather lead the movement."
  - Murder Most Modern: Detective Fiction & Japanese Culture by Kawana Sari, pages 187-188

• 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 magnificent 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 quickly 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, they 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 spectacle of sick love [byōteki no aijō]' in the plot. Other advertisements 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

• 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 Kawana Sari, pages 217-218 

• “Yumeno Kyūsaku is known for his science fiction, mystery, and fantasy.”
  Yumeno Kyūsaku is known for his science fiction, mystery, and fantasy. His representative work is ‘Dogura magura’ (1935), a magnum opus that took him ten years to write and features an amnesiac experiencing ‘a sort of hell inside the brain’ (nōzui no jigoku) in a mental hospital where he becomes implicated in a series of past crimes that may or may not have anything to do with him. The first-person sustained soliloquy and the use of the epistolary form are trademarks of Yumeno’s style, both of which he uses with sophistication in ‘Hell in a Bottle.’ In addition to that, Yumeno is fascinated with enclosed and contained space: a solitary cell in an insane asylum, a desert island, a letter inscribed with abject desire and suffering tucked in a bottle like a genie or a fetus in a womb. His stories feature a space sealed off from the rest of the world physically and temporally, a world governed by its own rules in every aspect and challenges conventional understanding of normality.
  - The introduction of Yumeno Kyūsaku’s, “Hell in a Bottle”

• His pen name is based on ‘yumeno kyūsaku’ which refers to an aimless dreamer. His father used the term to describe his writing, so he used it as his penname:
  In the Hakata area in Kyūshū, ‘yumeno kyūsaku’ refers to a aimless dreamer in the local dialect. A term that Sugiyama Taidō adopted as his pen name when his Nationalist father Shigemaru used that to deride his writing.
  - The introduction of Yumeno Kyūsaku’s, “Hell in a Bottle”

• “Known for his imaginative, bizarre, and sometimes gruesome tales, Kyūsaku often experimented with presenting the world as it appears in an abnormal state of mind.”:
  Known for his imaginative, bizarre, and sometimes gruesome tales, Kyūsaku often experimented with presenting the world as it appears in an abnormal state of mind. The most famous example is ‘Dogura magura’ (1935, ‘Dogra Magra’), a long, nightmarish novel concerning a victim of amnesia who, incarcerated in a mental hospital, futilely attempts to learn his identity from doctors who are intent on misleading him. It is also a work of metafiction in which the novel continually comments on itself and argues for the nonessentialist nature of the self. ‘Dogura magura,’ its author tells us, is ‘extremely grotesque, frankly erotic, completely in the style of detective fiction, and start-to-finish nonsense. A sort of hell inside the brain.’
  - Yumeno Kyūsaku, “Love after Death” Introduction