widowed daughter-in-law acting as his amanuensis. He died at the age of eighty-one, after a career as an author of more than sixty years. The amount of saleable "copy" produced by Bakin can have few equals in literary annals. His pen was never at rest, and the rapidity with which he composed may be inferred from the circumstance related by himself, that one of his novels (of about two hundred pages) was completed by him in a fortnight, "to stay the demands of an importunate publisher." He is said to have written no fewer than two hundred and ninety distinct works, many of which were extremely voluminous. Some authorities put the figure still higher.
Bakin was not an amiable man. He is described as upright, but obstinate and unsociable. A single word which offended him made of him an enemy for life. Even Kiōden, to whom he owed so much, could not get on with him. The famous artist Hokusai, who illustrated many of his novels,[1] had also reason to complain of his morose and intractable temper. Edmond de Goncourt, in his life of Hokusai, says that the quarrel between the painter and Bakin occurred in 1808, and was caused by the immense success of the illustrations to the Nanka no Yume, of which Bakin was jealous. It was smoothed over by friends, but broke out again with great violence in 1811, when a continuation of that novel was brought out. Bakin accused Hokusai of paying no attention to his text, and demanded that the drawings should be altered. But the publishers had already engraved both text and pictures.
It was in consequence of Bakin's recriminations on
- ↑ See Mr. W. Anderson's Catalogue of Japanese Pictures in the British Museum, p. 357.
