Tōson Shimazaki

Shimazaki Tōson (1872-1943), the pen name of Shimazaki Haruki, was a Japanese writer active across the Meiji, Taishō and early Shōwa periods. He started out as a Romantic poet and later became one of the main exponents of Naturalism in Japanese fiction, a shift that helped reshape modern Japanese prose.

He was born in Magome-juku, an old post town in the mountains, and in 1881 his father sent him to Tokyo for schooling. His father, who suffered hallucinations and a worsening mental illness, died when Tōson was fourteen, and that family tragedy later shaped much of his writing. He studied at the Christian-founded Meiji Gakuin and worked as an English teacher in Tokyo and Sendai. His first verse collection, Wakanashū (1897), brought him early fame, but after the turn of the century he devoted himself almost entirely to prose.

His novel The Broken Commandment (1906) is widely considered the first major Japanese Naturalist novel, telling the story of a burakumin schoolteacher who hides his origins. Haru (1908) and The Family (1910-1911), the latter often regarded as his masterpiece, belong to a series of semi-autobiographical works. In Shinsei (1918-1919) he wrote about his affair with his niece Komako, a book that caused a major scandal and estranged him from several relatives and fellow writers. His most popular novel, Before the Dawn (1929-1935), is a historical work about the Meiji Restoration seen through a provincial activist modelled on his father.

In 1935 he became the first president of the Japanese branch of PEN International, which took him to Buenos Aires in 1936. He died in 1943, leaving unfinished a sequel to Before the Dawn. His reputation endures through his role in Japanese Naturalism and through the film adaptations of his novels.