“Who would pioneer a new literature, at once Japanese and ‘modern’, that could speak to the change and transformation going on around them? Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki… were among the first of those who stepped forward to take up this challenge. Certainly no one could have been better equipped for the task: gifted in European languages, they excelled in classical Chinese as well, and had a deep knowledge of Japan’s literary traditions. Yet the task was daunting. Writers of fiction were dismissed as frivolous and vulgar by traditional society, which language for literature, which would reflect how people actually spoke and which could be used to express exciting new concepts like ‘love’ and ‘individualism’, had to be created from scratch… This id not mean, however, that the trail blazed by Ōgai, Sōseki, and their contemporaries ran parallel to that of Western literature. These were no blind admirers of what the West had to offer - Sōseki, for one, felt that he had been somehow ‘cheated’ by English literature. Ōgai had studied in Germany, Sōseki in England, and both were acutely aware of the features of foreign culture - the language, the customs, and the sense of beauty and form - were altogether different from Japan’s. To create a new, modern Japanese literature, they had to carve new trails, not follow old ones. They had to be experimental writers. This meant that, once they felt they had taken what they could use from Western literature, they moved on. Ōgai eventually turned to traditional materials - legends like ‘Sansho the Steward’… and the lives of historical figures - while Sōseki, a brilliant theoretician, was able to anticipate developments yet to occur in the West. Through their efforts, and those of the other trail-blazers, by 1910 the Japanese short story was already established as a genre linked with, but not identical to, its counterpart in the West.”
