Born in Tokyo to a bureaucratic family. Real name Sokichi. From childhood he knew kabuki and yose halls, absorbing downtown culture since Edo.
He studied fiction under Hirotsu Ryuro and wrote dark-themed works. Conflict with his father also made the literary path uneven.
Partly by his father's will he went to America, then to France. Urban Western life supplied material for American Stories and French Stories.
Back home he published American Stories, noted for foreign manners and lyricism. French Stories followed, securing his place as a rising writer.
He became a Keio University professor and edited the magazine Mita Bungaku, nurturing juniors while continuing to write.
He left the university and lived thereafter as a writer of the streets. Strong aversion to bureaucratic letters and power marked a solitary stance.
He loved pleasure quarters and old streets, recording what modernization erased. Irony toward civilization mixed with mourning for vanishing beauty.
He published A Strange Tale from East of the River, set in the Tamanoi pleasure quarter. Quiet prose on fading downtown mood became a major work.
Though air raids cost him books and home, he kept diaries. After the war he kept distance from power and mass society as a stubborn man of letters.
He died near Ichikawa, Tokyo, at seventy-nine. Literature of Edo sensibility and defiance influenced many later writers.
Yanagita KunioUemura ShōenYoshino SakuzōArishima TakeoKawakami HajimeNoguchi UjōSuzuki MiekichiSaitō Mokichi
People of the Taishō period ・ People by period
Based on facts found in textbooks and biographies. Uncertain points are marked as such.