Futabatei Shimei (redirected from Futabatei, Shimei)

Futabatei Shimei

 orig. Hasegawa Tatsunosuke

(born April 4, 1864, Edo, Japan—died May 10, 1909, at sea in Bay of Bengal) Japanese novelist and translator. He is best known for Ukigumo (1887–89; “The Drifting Clouds”), his first novel, and for his translations of stories by Ivan Turgenev. In these he used a style called gembun itchi (“unification of spoken and written language”), one of the first attempts at a modern colloquial idiom. His later works include the novels An Adopted Husband (1906) and Mediocrity (1907). He is credited with bringing modern realism to the Japanese novel.

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Futabatei Shimei 

(pen name of Tatsunosuke Hasegawa). Born Feb. 28, 1864, in Tokyo; died May 10, 1909, in Singapore. Japanese writer; the founder of Japanese critical realism and the modern Japanese literary language.

Futabatei studied in the department of Russian at the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages. His works were strongly influenced by Russian literature. Futabatei’s article “A General Theory of the Novel” (1886) formulated his views on the essence of art and on realism as a creative literary method. The novel Drifting Clouds (1887–88) depicted a superfluous man who was disillusioned with modern bourgeois life. Other well-known novels by Futabatei included His Image (1906) and Mediocrity (1907). Futabatei translated into Japanese works by N. V. Gogol, I. S. Turgenev, I. A. Goncharov, V. G. Belinskii, N. A. Dobroliubov, and M. Gorky.

WORKS

Zenshu. vols. 1–8. Tokyo, 1937–38.
In Russian translation:
“Moi printsipy khudozhestvennogo perevoda.” In Vostochnyi al’manakh, fase. 1. Moscow, 1957.

REFERENCES

Karlina, R. “Tvorcheskie sviazi Khasegava Ftabateiia s russkoi literaturoi.” In Iaponskaia literatura: Issledovaniia i materialy. Moscow, 1959.
Rekho, “Dostoevskii i iaponskii realisticheskii roman kontsa XIX v.” Narody Azii i Afriki, 1972, no. 1.
Nakamura Mitsuo. Futabatei Shimei. Tokyo, 1953.

K. REKHO