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.