島崎藤村

Shimazaki Tōson

1872–1943

Beginning his career as a romantic poet, he helped usher in modern Japanese verse with the lyrical collection Wakanashu before turning to prose and reshaping the novel itself. Hakai, the searing story of a young teacher hiding his burakumin origins, is often cited as the first true work of Japanese naturalism, and the autobiographical Ie laid bare the slow collapse of a once-proud rural household. His masterwork, the historical epic Yoake mae, traced his own father's life against the upheavals of the Meiji Restoration. Rooted in his native Shinshu mountains, his fiction married confessional honesty with a quiet, elegiac sense of history.