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Arishima Takeo is one of Japan's most significant twentieth-century novelists. In using romantic and political themes to create psychological dramas almost Gothic in their emotional intensity, his experiments in the shsetsu, or novel genre, are among the most interesting and adventurous produced by his generation. In addition to translating Walt Whitman into Japanese, Arishima also wrote poetry, plays, and essays on various themes and produced much polemical writing on literature, art, and social and political issues. After his death he became known for having been an assiduous diarist. Covering more than twenty volumes, his diary provides an intimate record of his life, a chronicle of his fears and hopes, both for his own future and that of Japan.
His contemporaries regarded Arishima as a thinker and social critic as much as a novelist. In actively discussing religious and political issues such as female emancipation, class conflict, the suitability of Christianity for Japan, the political role of literature, and the role of the intelligentsia in society, he was an idealist in an age when Japan had embarked on an imperialist path that seemed to brook no dissent from intellectuals.
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