Futabatei Shimei

(pen name of Tatsunosuke Hasegawa). Born Feb. 28, 1864, in Tokyo; died May 10, 1909, in Singapore. Japanese writer; the founder of Japanese critical realism and the modern Japanese literary language.

Futabatei studied in the department of Russian at the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages. His works were strongly influenced by Russian literature. Futabatei’s article “A General Theory of the Novel” (1886) formulated his views on the essence of art and on realism as a creative literary method. The novel Drifting Clouds (1887–88) depicted a superfluous man who was disillusioned with modern bourgeois life. Other well-known novels by Futabatei included His Image (1906) and Mediocrity (1907). Futabatei translated into Japanese works by N. V. Gogol, I. S. Turgenev, I. A. Goncharov, V. G. Belinskii, N. A. Dobroliubov, and M. Gorky.