Naoya Shiga
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 Shiga Naoya |
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| Born: | 20 February 1883 Ishinomaki, Miyagi, Japan |
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| Died: | 21 October 1971 |
| Occupation: | Writer |
| Genres: | short stories, novels |
| Literary movement: | I Novel |
- This is a Japanese name; the family name is Shiga.
Naoya Shiga (志賀 直哉 Shiga Naoya?, 20 February 1883 – 21 October 1971) was a novelist and short story writer active in Taisho and Showa period Japan.
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[edit] Early life
Naoya was born in Ishinomaki city, Miyagi prefecture. His father, the son of a samurai, was a banker. The family to Tokyo when Shiga was three, and they lived with Shiga's grandparents, who were largely responsible for raising him. Shiga's mother died when he was thirteen, and his father remarried not long after. Shiga graduated from the Gakushuin Peer's School, and attended Tokyo Imperial University, where he met Uchimura Kanzo (who converted him to Christianity). However, he left university without graduating.
[edit] Literary career
While he was at the Gakushuin, he became friends with Mushanokoji Saneatsu and Kinoshita Rigen. His literary career began with a handwritten literary magazine Boya ("Perspective"), which was circulated within their literary group at school. In 1910 he contributed the story Abashiri made ("To Abashiri") to the first issue of the literary magazine Shirakaba ("White Birch").
Shiga is considered by literary critics to have perfected the indigenous I Novel literary form, which uses the author's subjective recollection of his own daily experience. He established his reputation with a number of short stories: Kamisori ("The Razor", 1910), Seibei no hyotan ("Seibei and the Gourd", 1913), Manazuru ("Manazuru", 1920). These were followed by longer works, including Otsu Junkichi (1912), Wakai ("Reconciliation", 1917), and his seminal novel, An'ya Koro ("A Dark Night's Passing", 1921-1937), which was serialized in the radical socialist magazine Kaizo.
His terse style influenced many later writers, and was praised by Akutagawa Ryunosuke and Agawa Hiroyuki. However, other of his contemporaries, notably Dazai Osamu were strongly critical of this "sincere" style.
During his lifetime, Shiga moved more than 20 times, which inspired him to write stories connected with these places, including Kinosaki ni te ("At Cape Kinosaki"), Sasaki no bai ("In the case of Sasaki"). He lived in the hot spring resort town of Atami, Shizuoka from the war years onwards. Frequent visitors to his house included writer Hirotsu Kazuo and film director Ozu Yasujiro.
[edit] Later life
Shiga was awarded the Order of Culture by the Japanese government in 1949.
Shiga suffered the fate of many authors who are successful in their early years, combined with the fatal weakness of authors specializing in the autobiographical novel – after a while there is nothing more left to write about. He lived the last 35 years of his life off of his reputation, occasionally appearing as a guest writer in various literary journals, where he reminisced about his early association with various Shirakaba school writers, or his previous interest in Christianity. He was given the moniker shosetsu no kamisama (“the god of fiction”) by his fans, but produced very little new work in the post war era.
He died of pneumonia after a long illness at the age of 88.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Agawa, Hiroyuki. Shiga Naoya. Iwanami Shoten (1994). ISBN: 4000029401
- Kohl, Stephen William. Shiga Naoya: A Critical Biography. UMI Dissertation Services (1974). ASIN: B000C8QIWE
- Starrs, Roy. An Artless Art - The Zen Aesthetic of Shiga Naoya: A Critical Study with Selected Translations. RoutledgeCurzon (1998). ISBN: 1873410646
