梶井基次郎
Kajii Motojirō
1901–1932
Active in the late Taisho and early Showa years, this writer produced a slim but unforgettable body of work, much of it shadowed by the tuberculosis that would cut his life short at thirty-one. His best-known piece, Lemon, captures in just a few pages the strange exhilaration of placing a single yellow fruit atop a stack of art books in a Kyoto shop. Across roughly twenty stories, he turned a delicate, almost feverish attention on small things: cherry trees, streetlights, the body's own decline. Long admired by writers from Mishima onward, he remains a touchstone for prose that fuses lyric precision with a quietly modern unease.
