Hello again! Thanks for previous answer it helped me a lot! This time I have actual BSD question! So thanks you to your blogs about Bungou to Alchemist (or more like thanks to fans who asked about it) I started playing the game and ce to really like it. Anyway there is this character Shusei Tokuda and since you know a thing or two about real BSD authors fo you happen to know anything about his real counterpart? Asking you became a habit i of mine. Oh also what fo you think he would be like inBSD
Shusei Tokuda is an author I have heard of. I haven’t read any of his works, unfortunately. Only one of his works, Rough Living, is available in English (you can find the Amazon listing here). But it is much easier to find information on him than it is for a lot of other authors, so I’ll list some sources and facts here:
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Tokuda Shusei (1871-1943) was thought by Kawabata Yasunari to be the most Japanese of all modern novelists; Nakamura Murao stated that, after Saikaku, only Shusei portrayed the true characteristics of the Japanese people. One of the reasons for this adulation may have been that Shusei was among the earliest modern writers to concern himself with “lower-class” characters, to abandon upper-class Meiji aspirations and to reflect the actual life, the “true characteristics,” of Taisho/Showa people.At the same time, this was the audience for whom he was writing — a popular audience for whom he adhered to generic conventions. As translator Richard Torrance has explained, he “punished the rich and powerful and sympathetically portrayed the weak and oppressed.”Shusei is thus usually classed as a “naturalist,” though he was sometimes denied the literary standing of his almost exact contemporary, Shimazaki Toson. Perhaps it was this “lower-class” identification that disputed his literary status. Natsume Soseki complained that “Rough Living” contained (in Donald Keene’s paraphrase) “nothing that was ennobling, nothing that could bring comfort or relief, nothing to suggest the joy of life.”
- “At long last, Tokuda Shusei” by Donald Richie, from The Japan Times
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Tokuda Shūsei, pseudonym of Tokuda Sueo, (born Dec. 23, 1871, Kanazawa, Japan—died Nov. 18, 1943, Tokyo), novelist who, with Masamune Hakuchō, Tayama Katai, and Shimazaki Tōson, was one of the “four pillars” of naturalism.
Shūsei left Kanazawa in 1894 to become a disciple of Ozaki Kōyō, then the leader of the literary world. Shūsei’s talents were not suited to Kōyō’s lush romantic style, and he was slow to gain recognition. But when, after the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), the tide of literary taste began to turn toward realistic, objective description, Shūsei came into his own. His direct, terse style, seemingly drab by earlier standards, was the perfect vehicle for his sharp, unsentimental portrayal- of people living economically and emotionally depressed lives.
- “Tokuda Shusei: Japanese Novelist” from Encyclopedia Britannica
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Trivia from the Bungo to Alchemist Wiki:
His real name is Tokuda Sueo.
He first met Izumi Kyouka when he and a friend came to Tokyo resolving to become writers and went to see Ozaki Kouyou, the most prominent writer of the literary world at the time. Kyouka turned them away, but accepted their manuscripts for Kouyou to read. Kouyou ultimately returned the manuscripts. Half a year later he returned to Tokyo and met Kyouka again, who encouraged him to become Kouyou’s pupil.
Among Kouyou’s disciples, Shuusei was a different presence. He took political issues more seriously; his works dealt with class conflicts, discrimination, womens’ rights, etc., themes that are also present in Shimazaki Touson and Arishima Takeo’s works.
After Kouyou’s death in 1903, while other members of Kouyou’s group polished formulas inherited from the past, like Izumi Kyouka, Shuusei incorporated other stylistic innovations to meet the challenges of the naturalism genre. He was the only one of Kouyou’s disciples to survive as a professional realist novelist into the second decade of the twentieth century.
Kawabata Yasunari wrote that Shuusei was ‘a master of the novel, a master that maintained no school and who was the most Japanese of all modern novelists in the sense of being in touch with his own society.’
His works are generally dark and depressing. His characters lead meaningless lives, finding their only pleasures in the senses. Kunikida Doppo is said to have remarked on his deathbed that no one in his condition would want to read a novel by Shuusei.
He died at age 71 due to pleural cancer.
By some definitions, he can be considered the personification of Japanese naturalism as a period when the nation has entered a new stage of self-awareness and gained a new perspective to their own humanity.
He, Izumi Kyouka, Yanagawa Shunyo & Oguri Fuyo were called the Shitenno (Four Heavenly Kings).
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I’m not sure what he might be like in BSD (the way the authors are portrayed in Bungo Stray Dogs and Bungo to Alchemist are so different sometimes even though they are based on the same author), but I would imagine that he would be similar to Katai because they both part of the “four pillars of naturalism.” But while Katai and Shuusei got along, but maybe Kunikida wouldn’t really be drawn to him because of how sad and hopeless his writing seems to be.
Enjoy Bungo to Alchemist! And thank you for the ask! I am always happy to look into authors and their works!
