58
First of all, we can bring to mind that Katai wrote in his essay "My Anna Mahr" that "I determined to put into writing my own 'Anna Mahr' who had been causing me anguish since two or three years earlier--the spring before the Russo–Japanese War began."[1] If we were to read the above motive of Katai for writing Futon without considering the rest of the context, we might be tempted to assume that Katai was going to write a confessional story in Futon. But on close examination of Katai's statement in the proper context, it becomes clear that what Katai intended to write in Futon is mentioned in the following lines of his same essay "My Anna Mahr," as he reminisces about his feelings when he was asked to write a novel for Shin Shōsetsu, a literary magazine: "It was about that time I was deeply stirred by Gerhart Hauptmann's Einsame Menschen. The loneliness of Vockerat seemed to resemble my own state of mind."
Judging from the context of his essay "My Anna Mahr," Katai's intentions in writing Futon were to present the theme originally inspired by Hauptmann's Einsame Menschen: the contrast and tension between the natural and the unnatural, with a strong implication that nature is best, or at least that is preferable to follow nature. After re-examining Katai's motive for writing Futon for the evaluation of the nature of this work, I am still of the opinion that Futon is not a confessional story as Hōgetsu and other critics evaluated it.
The following statement by Katai, which was made about twenty years after Futon was written, and which appeared in his discussions on how to write novels, might coincidentally be in accord with our findings:
- ↑ See p. 24.
