SOURCE: "Western Dark Romanticism and Japan's Aesthetic Literature," in Reality and Fiction in Modern Japanese Literature, M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1980, pp. 70-81.

In the following essay, Lippit assesses the influence of such western writers as Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire on Japanese writers.

The strong response of such major writers of modern Japanese literature as Tanizaki Junichiro, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Hagiwara Sakutaro and Mishima Yukio to Western writers of dark romanticism (such writers as Poe, Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde) can be readily understood in the light of their shared artistic concerns. Like their Western counterparts, the Japanese writers were concerned with the question of evil, the role of the grotesque and the ugly in art, and the relation of art to life, and they pursued these questions even after they moved away from the obvious influence of the Western writers. This is most evident in the Japanese writers...