Naoya Shiga

Shiga was born in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, as the son of a banker and descendant of an aristocratic samurai family. In 1885, the family moved to Tokyo and Shiga given into his grandparents' custody. an experience that marked the beginning of an obsession with and fear of death both on an individual and a collective level, and which stayed with him until his early thirties. Shiga's imagination was inspired by nature, and he was an avid reader of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as of Lafcadio Hearn's stories of the supernatural. but struggled with his new religion due to his own homosexual tendencies. He graduated from the Gakushuin Peer's Elementary School in 1906 and started studying English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, but left two years later without a degree. Another family crisis arose when Shiga announced to marry one of the housemaids, Chiyo, with whom he was having an affair. The father terminated his son's plans, and the maid was removed from the household. ==Literary career==

In 1910, Shiga co-founded the magazine Shirakaba ("White birch"), the literary publication of the Shirakaba-ha ("White birch society"). Other co-founders included Saneatsu Mushanokōji and Rigen Kinoshita, who Shiga had befriended at Gakushuin Peer's School, and Takeo Arishima and Ton Satomi. The novel's protagonist, young struggling writer Kensaku, has often been associated with its author. Shiga's work influenced many later writers, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki praised the "practicality" (jitsuyō) of Shiga's style, in which he discovered, with reference to At Kinosaki, a "tightening up" (higishimeta) of the sentences: "[…] any word that is not absolutely necessary has been left out". Shiga was also known for being a harsh moral critic of the literary establishment, blaming Tōson Shimazaki for having written his debut novel The Broken Commandment under such precarious financial hardship that Shimazaki's three young daughters died of malnutrition. ==Later life==

Shiga published very few new works in his later years. and was awarded the Order of Culture in 1949. His grave is at Aoyama Cemetery in Tokyo. His house in Nara, where he lived from 1929 to 1938, has been preserved and is open to the public as a memorial museum. ==Selected works==

• 1910: As Far as Abashiri (Abashiri made) • 1910: The Razor (Kamisori) • 1911: Nigotta atama • 1912: Ōtsu Junkichi • 1913: ''Han's Crime (Han no hanzai'') • 1913: Seibei and his Gourds (Seibei to hyotan) • 1917: At Kinosaki (Kinosaki ni te) • 1917: The Case of Sasaki (Sasaki no baai) • 1917: Reconciliation (Wakai) • 1917: Kōjinbutsu no fūfu • 1920: ''The Shopboy's God (Kozō no kamisama'') • 1920: Manazuru • 1920: Bonfire (Takibi) • 1921–1937: ''A Dark Night's Passing (An'ya koro'') • 1926: A Memory of Yamashina (Yamashina no kioku) • 1926: Infatuation (Chijo) • 1927: Kuniko • 1946: A Gray Moon (Haiiro no tsuki) ==Translations (selected)==