Tsubouchi Shōyō

Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859-1935) was a Japanese writer, critic, playwright, translator, editor and professor at Waseda University. Born as the feudal order was giving way to the Meiji era, he is regarded as a central figure in the renewal of Japanese fiction and drama in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and his name is almost always mentioned when the origins of modern Japanese literature are discussed.

He came from a family of samurai who had served the Tokugawa clan. His father wanted him to have a classical education based on Chinese texts, but his mother encouraged him to read popular literature, and he grew up with an interest in both. After the family moved to Nagoya, he studied English and the basics of Western science, literature and history. In 1876 he went to Tokyo to study political science, though his real passion was literature and theatre. He briefly took part in political life but soon stepped away from it and avoided political subjects in his writing. His first translations were of Shakespeare, followed by works by Walter Scott and Bulwer-Lytton.

His best-known theoretical work, The Essence of the Novel, argued that fiction should focus on human feeling and social life rather than on moral instruction. He also proposed a middle style between the elegant and the colloquial, so that characters could speak naturally. In the theatre he sought to join the Kabuki tradition with Western modernity, and his plays had a lasting effect on later drama. At Waseda he founded and edited the magazine Waseda bungaku and conducted a long debate with Mori Ōgai on realism and idealism.

His legacy is twofold. His ideas on the modern novel shaped a generation of writers, and the theatre museum named after him at Waseda preserves his papers and his complete translation of Shakespeare.