Futabatei Shimei

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(1864–1909), Japanese novelist and translator. Futabatei Shimei (pseudonym of Hasegawa Tatsunosuke) was born in Edo (now Tokyo) to a samurai family. He is the author of Japan's first modern novel, Ukigumo (The Drifting Cloud, 1887–1889), which he began while still a student at Tokyo Gaikokugo Gakko (now Tokyo University of Foreign Studies). Futabatei's studies in Russian language and literature resulted in many fine translations, which he continued to produce until his death, including those of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Goncharov, and Chekov. He was able to achieve a literary style appropriate to the realistic fiction of contemporary Japan known as gembun itchi ("fusion of spoken and written language"). Futabatei also accomplished a psychological realism that his mentor, Tsubouchi Shoyo, had originally proposed in his Shosetsu shinzui (Essence of the Novel, 1885–1886) but could not himself realize. Futabatei had little trust in the public reception of his art and, unable to make a living from writing, took up a government post in 1889, withdrawing from literary circles but continuing to devote his time to writing. His ambivalence toward being a novelist is reflected in his choice of a pseudonym that sounds like the profanity kutabatte shimae, "go to hell." In the last years of his life, he again received critical attention for a novel on the common Japanese practice of adopting a son-in-law into a family that has no heir, Sono omokage (An Adopted Husband, 1906). The author's bitter attitude toward his literary milieu is summed up in his final novel Heibon (Mediocrity, 1907), a semiautobiographical study. Hired as a newspaper correspondent in Russia, he took ill soon after arrival and died on his return trip to Japan.

Lewell, John, ed. (1993) Modern Japanese Novelists: A Biographical Dictionary. Tokyo: Kodansha.

Ryan, Marleigh Grayer, trans. (1965) Japan's First Modern Novel: Ukigumo of Futabatei Shimei. New York: Columbia University Press.