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Izumi Kyoka (1873-1939), a writer best known for his exquisitely wrought tales of the occult, remains something of an unmined treasure in modern Japanese literature. In fact, Kyoka was an anomaly, if not anathema, to most of the literary trends of this century, a period that has been dominated by an autobiographic realism first promoted by the Naturalist school. Man considered Kyoka's work, which owed much to the literature of the Edo period (1603-1868), old-fashioned and irrelevant.
At 16 years old, he became the live-in disciple of the popular novelist Ozaki Koyo (1868-1903). He was Koyo's star pupil, but his lack of a formal education (in an age when all other writers had gone to the best universities) gave him the dubious reputation of being something of a literary primitive, a feudalistic wordsmith from a bygone era. The plots of his stories were thought too contrived and convoluted, his characters mere stereotypes, his ornate style the gorgeous icing that concealed a stale piece of cake.
Above all, Kyoka's prediction for fantasy and the supernatural was regarded as irresponsibly escapist. Kyoka's unbridled fantasies seemed too private and anachronistic to read as commentaries on Japan's traumatic modernization. The writer's own stance vis-a-vis the modern world was indeed quixotic and anti-ideological. But it would be wrong to take his brand of romanticism and aestheticism at face value. Just as we see traces of a mystical lyricism in his earliest and most socially committed fiction, we also find evidence of a powerful social critique in his most private fantasies.
Kyoka burst on the literary scene in the 1890s with a number of highly melodramatic stories keenly critical of contemporary mores. Works like "Gekashitsu" (The Surgery, 1895) quickly won the tag of "conceptual" or "problem" novels. Kyoka's subsequent departure into fantastic and intensely lyrical literature seems anomalous to how most critics and literary historians have wished to define the thematic or ideological direction that Japanese literature was taking between 1890 and 1939. Yet if we look beneath the surface ideologies of Kyoka's early fiction, we can identify some of his perennial concerns.
"The Surgery" is about the love between a young doctor and a countess during the Meiji period (1868-1912). Takamine and his friend (the story's narrator) catch a glimpse...