Naoya Shiga

Template:Nihongo was a Japanese writer active during the Taishō and Shōwa periods of Japan,<ref name="kotobank">Template:Cite web</ref> whose work was distinguished by its lucid, straightforward style<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> and strong autobiographical overtones.<ref name="traeume">Template:Cite book</ref>

Early life

Shiga was born in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, as the son of a banker and descendant of an aristocratic samurai family.<ref name="kotobank" /><ref name="britannica">Template:Cite web</ref> In 1885, the family moved to Tokyo and Shiga given into his grandparents' custody.<ref name="britannica" /> His mother died when he was twelve,<ref name="awakening">Template:Cite book</ref> an experience that marked the beginning of an obsession with and fear of death both on an individual and a collective level, and which stayed with him until his early thirties.<ref name="awakening" /> At the same time, his relationship with his father became increasingly strained.<ref name="kotobank" /> One conflict resulted from Shiga's announcement that he intended to participate in the protests following the 1907 Ashio Copper Mine incident and his father's forbidding him to do so because part of the family's wealth was derived from a past investment in the mine.<ref name="awakening" /><ref name="refining">Template:Cite book</ref>

Shiga's imagination was inspired by nature, and he was an avid reader of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as of Lafcadio Hearn's stories of the supernatural.<ref name="refining" /> At the age of 18, Shiga converted to Christianity under the influence of Uchimura Kanzō,<ref name="kotobank" /><ref name="refining" /><ref name="miller">Template:Cite book</ref> but struggled with his new religion due to his own homosexual tendencies.<ref name="refining" />Template:Page needed He graduated from the Gakushuin Peer's Elementary School in 1906 and started studying English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, but left two years later without a degree.<ref name="britannica" /> Another family crisis arose when Shiga announced to marry one of the housemaids, Chiyo, with whom he was having an affair. The father terminated his son's plans, and the maid was removed from the household.<ref name="refining" />

Literary career

In 1910, Shiga co-founded the magazine Shirakaba ("White birch"), the literary publication of the Shirakaba-ha ("White birch society").<ref name="refining" /><ref name="britannica_shirakaba">Template:Cite web</ref> Other co-founders included Saneatsu Mushanokōji and Rigen Kinoshita, who Shiga had befriended at Gakushuin Peer's School, and Takeo Arishima and Ton Satomi.<ref name="britannica" /> The Shirakaba-ha rejected Confucianism and Naturalism, and instead propagated individualism, idealism and humanitarianism, for which Russian writer Leo Tolstoy served as a model.<ref name="britannica_shirakaba" /> Shiga contributed the story As Far as Abashiri (Abashiri made) to the first issue.<ref name="kotobank" />

In the following years, Shiga published short stories like The Razor (Kamisori, 1910), Han's Crime (Han no hanzai, 1913) and Seibei and his Gourds (Seibei to hyotan, 1913).<ref name="kotobank" /> The story Ōtsu Junkichi, published in Chūō Kōron in 1912, his first publication for which he received a fee, was an autobiographical account of his affair with the former housemaid Chiyo and the familial conflicts.<ref name="kotobank" /><ref name="refining" /> It also marked the first time that Shiga drew on the method of a narrating self, a distinctive mark of the I-novel genre,<ref name="refining" /> to which many of Shiga's works are ascribed.<ref name="britannica" /><ref name="miller" /> While working on Ōtsu Junkichi, Shiga had read the English translation of Anatole France's novel The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, which he cited as an important influence on his own writing.<ref name="refining" />

In 1914, Shiga married Sada Kadenokōji, a widow with a six-year-old daughter (and a cousin of Mushanokōji),<ref name="kotobank" /><ref name="refining" /><ref name="museum" /> which led to a complete break between father and son. However, 1917 saw the reconciliation with his father, which he thematised in his novella Reconciliation (Wakai, 1917).<ref name="refining" /> He followed with a series of short stories and A Dark Night's Passing (An'ya koro, 1921–1937); the latter, his only full length novel, was serialized in the socialist magazine Kaizō and is regarded as his major work.<ref name="britannica" /><ref name="refining" /><ref name="kotobank_2">Template:Cite web</ref> The novel's protagonist, young struggling writer Kensaku, has often been associated with its author.<ref name="refining" /> Shiga's sometimes confessional stories also included a series of accounts of his extramarital affair in the mid-1920s, among them A Memory of Yamashina (Yamashina no kioku, 1926), Infatuation (Chijo, 1926) and Kuniko (1927).<ref name="nyt">Template:Cite news</ref>

Shiga's work influenced many later writers,<ref name="kotobank" /><ref name="traeume" /> including Kazu Ozaki, Kiku Amino, Motojirō Kajii, Takiji Kobayashi, Fumio Niwa, Kōsaku Takii, Kiyoshi Naoi, Toshimasa Shimamura, Hiroyuki Agawa and Shizuo Fujieda.<ref name="kotobank" /><ref name="refining" /> While his work was praised by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and Sei Itō, other contemporaries like Dazai Osamu, Mitsuo Nakamura and Sakunosuke Oda were strongly critical of it.<ref name="kotobank" /><ref name="refining" /><ref name="self">Template:Cite book</ref> Jun'ichirō Tanizaki praised the "practicality" (jitsuyō) of Shiga's style, in which he discovered, with reference to At Kinosaki, a "tightening up" (higishimeta) of the sentences: "[…] any word that is not absolutely necessary has been left out".<ref name="refining" /><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Shiga was also known for being a harsh moral critic of the literary establishment, blaming Tōson Shimazaki for having written his debut novel The Broken Commandment under such precarious financial hardship that Shimazaki's three young daughters died of malnutrition.<ref name="kisoroad">Template:Cite book</ref><ref name="seigle">Template:Cite book</ref>

Later life

File:The Grave of Shiga Naoya.jpg

Gravestone of Naoya Shiga

Shiga published very few new works in his later years.<ref name="miller" /> These included the short stories A Gray Moon (Haiiro no tsuki, 1946) and Yamabato (1951), or essays like Kokuko mondai (1946), in which he proposed to make French the national language of Japan.<ref name="refining" /> He served as the first post-war president of the Template:Ill from 1947 to 1948,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and was awarded the Order of Culture in 1949.<ref name="kotobank" /><ref name="miller" /> He died of pneumonia on October 21, 1971, at Kantō Central Public Hospital in Setagaya, Tokyo.<ref name="miller" /><ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> His grave is at Aoyama Cemetery in Tokyo. His house in Nara, where he lived from 1929 to 1938, has been preserved and is open to the public as a memorial museum.<ref name="museum">Template:Cite web</ref>

Selected works

• 1910: As Far as Abashiri (Abashiri made)
• 1910: The Razor (Kamisori)
• 1911: Nigotta atama
• 1912: Ōtsu Junkichi
• 1913: Han's Crime (Han no hanzai)
• 1913: Seibei and his Gourds (Seibei to hyotan)
• 1917: At Kinosaki (Kinosaki ni te)
• 1917: The Case of Sasaki (Sasaki no baai)
• 1917: Reconciliation (Wakai)
• 1917: Kōjinbutsu no fūfu
• 1920: The Shopboy's God (Kozō no kamisama)
• 1920: Manazuru
• 1920: Bonfire (Takibi)
• 1921–1937: A Dark Night's Passing (An'ya koro)
• 1926: A Memory of Yamashina (Yamashina no kioku)
• 1926: Infatuation (Chijo)
• 1927: Kuniko
• 1946: A Gray Moon (Haiiro no tsuki)

Translations (selected)

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Further reading

• Agawa, Hiroyuki. Shiga Naoya. Iwanami Shoten (1994). Template:ISBN
• Kohl, Stephen William. Shiga Naoya: A Critical Biography. UMI Dissertation Services (1974). ASIN: B000C8QIWE

External links

• National Diet Library biography
• Prominent people of Minato City Template:Webarchive
• Shiga Naoya’s former residence in Onomichi
• J'Lit | Authors : Naoya Shiga | Books from Japan Template:Webarchive Template:In lang