Arishima Takeo

Arishima Takeo (born March 4, 1878, Tokyo, Japan—died June 9, 1923, Karuizawa) was a Japanese novelist known for his novel Aru onna (1919; A Certain Woman) and for his strong humanitarian views.

Arishima was born into a talented and aristocratic family. His younger brothers included the painter Arishima Ikuma and the novelist Satomi Ton. He attended the Peers School (Gakushūin), where he was chosen as a companion to the crown prince, the future emperor Taishō. Although graduates of this school normally became military officers, Arishima disliked arms so much that he decided to become a farmer instead. He went on to Sapporo Agricultural School (now Hokkaido University), which was noted as a centre of modern thought and of Christianity. He excelled in his studies, especially in English (his lengthy diary was kept mainly in English), and became a devout Christian. After graduating in 1896, he went to the United States, where he spent three years at Haverford College and Harvard University. He left Harvard to live in Washington, D.C., where, in the Library of Congress, he read the works of Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, and other modern writers. His first story, set on the Dnieper River, was written in Washington.

After returning to Japan in 1907, Arishima obtained a post in Sapporo teaching English at the university. In 1910 he joined with several other graduates of the Peers School, including Shiga Naoya and Mushanokōji Saneatsu, to publish the journal Shirakaba (“White Birch”), a name that was intended to suggest a clean beauty unsoiled by worldly greed or ambition. The journal was dedicated to disseminating the humanistic and benevolent ideals shared by the young men. Arishima, whose beliefs had gradually shifted to socialism during his time in the United States, struggled most with the social contradictions inherent in his position as a member of a wealthy family who sympathized with the working class. His novel Kain no matsuei (1917; Descendants of Cain), dealing with the miserable condition of tenant farmers in Hokkaido, brought his first fame. Nature is the central character’s enemy; his fierce fight against it, driven by his will to survive, gives the book its power.

Arishima received wider recognition with Aru onna. Yōko, the novel’s heroine, is totally unlike any previous heroine of modern Japanese fiction—strong-willed, decisive in her actions though capricious, and full of intense vitality. For the book’s earliest readers, her independence represented a rejection of women’s traditional place in Japanese society.

In 1922 Arishima published Sengen hitotsu (“A Manifesto”), in which he expressed his despairing conviction that only the labouring classes could help themselves and that there was nothing he, as a member of the upper classes, could do for them. That year he distributed his land and farms in Hokkaido among the tenants; the following year he committed suicide with his mistress, a married woman, at a mountain resort.