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decisively pointed Katai in a new creative direction. The following description of Katai's state of mind upon reading Maupassant's After-Dinner Series supports this point in more detail.
Until then I had yearned only after Heaven. I didn't know about earthly things. Absolutely nothing. I was a shallow idealist! From now on I would become a child of the earth. I would no longer disdain to creep on the ground like an animal. Rather than dreaming in vain of a star in Heaven. . . .[1]
Another characteristic of this naturalistic period was his publication of travel sketches. Katai by nature liked to travel and seemed to enjoy writing with what he called "Heimen byōsha," or "Plain delineation," of what he saw and heard.[2] For example, from January 1901 to April 1902 Katai wrote eighteen essays, two poems, and forty travel sketches for publication in his employer's newspaper Taiheiyō, or The Pacific.[3]
(3) It was after the year 1906 that Katai's naturalism became assertive. He advocated naturalism through his literary magazine, Bunshō Sekai, founded in 1906. The characteristics of Katai's works of this period can be summarized as follows: among the fourteen stories that he wrote during this time, seven are subjective narrations, wherein the author uses the first person singular, and an equal number are objective descriptions, wherein the principal character is referred to in the third person; however, the subjective narrations show a gradual
- ↑ Tayama Katai, Tokyo no Sanjūne, op. cit., pp. 335–36.
- ↑ Plain delineation means a method of relating, with no subjectivism, the author's experiences in the real world just as they had been when he had seen, heard and felt them.
- ↑ Wada Kingo, Shizenshugi Bungaku ("Naturalism Literature") (Tokyo: Shibundō, 1966), p. 168.
