He was born the second son of the Tayama family in what is now Tatebayashi, Gunma Prefecture. His real name was Rokuya. The Tayama family had for generations been samurai serving the Akimoto house, which ruled Tatebayashi. He would later become a leading naturalist writer and also be known as a master of travel writing about places throughout Japan.
His father had become a police officer in Tokyo, and the family had moved there. But when the Satsuma Rebellion broke out his father went to war and lost his life in fighting in Kyūshū. Young Rokuya returned with his family to Tatebayashi. The early loss of his father cast a long shadow over the family's later life.
After serving in a merchant house in Ashikaga, he became a live-in apprentice at a bookshop in Kyōbashi, Tokyo. But for reasons that are unknown, he returned to Tatebayashi the next year. This experience of going out to work as a child is thought to have informed his later novels, which looked closely at poverty and people's lives.
In Tatebayashi he attended a school of Chinese learning where his brother served as head student, studying Chinese poetry and prose. He is said to have been so absorbed that he compiled his own collection of Chinese poems while still a boy. He also came to enjoy waka and Western literature. His eldest brother Tayama Minoru later became a scholar known for compiling historical sources and served as a model for characters in Katai's novels.
He followed his brother to Tokyo, and that year met Yanagita Kunio, later known as a folklorist. The two became friends who talked about literature and kept up their friendship for life. Living in Tokyo, Rokuya came to aim seriously at making his way as a novelist.
He became a pupil of the popular writer Ozaki Kōyō and, on Kōyō's instructions, was guided by Emi Suiin. That year he published his first story, "Melon Field," under another name, and from the next year took the pen name Katai. At first he wrote works influenced by Kōyō's Ken'yūsha, but he had not yet won recognition as a writer.
That year he met Kunikida Doppo and Shimazaki Tōson. The next year he published the poetry collection "Lyric Poems" with Doppo, Yanagita Kunio and others, which included forty of Katai's poems. Tōson became a lifelong friend, and the two would later be called the leading writers of naturalism side by side. His friendships with fellow writers greatly transformed his literature.
That year he married and, through an acquaintance's introduction, joined the publisher Hakubunkan, making his living as a proofreader correcting manuscripts. As his life settled down, he was strongly influenced by the French writer Maupassant and began to aim at a new literature depicting people as they really are.
He published the novel "The End of Jūemon," written especially for a book series, and for the first time won recognition of his ability as a writer. Set in a mountain village and portraying a man shunned by the villagers, the work clearly showed Maupassant's influence. It was a success he finally achieved after turning thirty.
When the Russo-Japanese War began, he joined the Army's Second Army as a war correspondent with the photography unit. In Hiroshima he called on the chief army surgeon Mori Ōgai and met him for the first time, and they saw each other often at the front. Katai had long been an avid reader of Ōgai's criticism. That same year he also published the essay "Unvarnished Description," urging that things be portrayed as they are.
He published the novel "The Quilt" in a magazine. It portrayed a middle-aged writer's complicated feelings toward a young female pupil, and the scene in which the man, after she leaves, buries his face in the bedding she had used and weeps, deeply shocked readers and the literary world. The work had a great influence on Japanese naturalist literature.
Following the trilogy of novels "Life," "Wife" and "Ties," he published the full-length novel "Country Teacher," written especially for book publication. With this work, which portrayed the life of a young man who died young as a rural schoolteacher while still holding his dreams, he became a leading naturalist writer alongside Shimazaki Tōson.
In the Taishō era naturalism declined and new writers appeared, and Katai gradually drifted from the mainstream of the literary world. Still he kept writing novels and also made his name with travel writing from journeys across Japan. He toured hot springs throughout the country and wrote many books about them, publishing "Hot Spring Tours" that year.
In his last years he turned to religion and left many spiritual works. He was hospitalized with a brain disorder, also suffered from a throat illness, and his condition worsened. He is said to have told Shimazaki Tōson, who came to visit, of his complex feelings in the face of death. He then died at his home in Tokyo. Tōson chose his posthumous Buddhist name, and his grave is in Tama Cemetery.
Ozaki KōyōShimamura HōgetsuKunikida DoppoShimazaki Tōson
Kunikida DoppoKōtoku ShūsuiHiguchi IchiyōShimazaki TōsonHata SahachirōHishida ShunsōNoguchi HideyoYosano Akiko
People of the Meiji period ・ People by period
Based on facts found in textbooks and biographies. Uncertain points are marked as such.