Naoya Shiga

Japanese Writer

Naoya Shiga was born in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan on February 20th, 1883 and is the Japanese Writer. At the age of 88, Naoya Shiga biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.

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Date of Birth
February 20, 1883
Nationality
Japan
Place of Birth
Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan
Death Date
Oct 21, 1971 (age 88)
Zodiac Sign
Pisces
Profession
Dramaturge, Novelist, Writer
Naoya Shiga Height, Weight, Eye Color and Hair Color

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Naoya Shiga Religion, Education, and Hobbies
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Naoya Shiga Spouse(s), Children, Affair, Parents, and Family
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Naoya Shiga 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 Shirakaba-ha rejected Confucianism and Naturalism, and instead propagated individualism, idealism and humanitarianism, for which Russian writer Leo Tolstoy served as a model. Shiga contributed the story As Far as Abashiri (Abashiri made) to the first issue.

In the following years, Shiga published short stories like The Razor (Kamisori, 1910), Han's Crime (Han no hanzai, 1913) and Seibei and his Gourds (Seibei to hyotan, 1913). The story Ōtsu Junkichi, published in Chūō Kōron in 1912, his first publication for which he received a fee, was an autobiographical account of his affair with the former housemaid Chiyo and the familial conflicts. It also marked the first time that Shiga drew on the method of a narrating self, a distinctive mark of the I-novel genre, to which many of Shiga's works are ascribed to. While working on Ōtsu Junkichi, Shiga had read the English translation of Anatole France's novel The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, which he cited as an important influence on his own writing.

In 1914, Shiga married Sada Kadenokōji, a widow with a six-year-old daughter (and a cousin of Mushanokōji), which led to a complete break between father and son. However, 1917 saw the reconciliation with his father, which he thematised in his novella Reconciliation (Wakai, 1917). He followed with a series of short stories and A Dark Night's Passing (An'ya koro, 1921–1937); the latter, his only full length novel, was serialized in the socialist magazine Kaizō and is regarded as his major work. The novel's protagonist, young struggling writer Kensaku, has often been associated with its author. Shiga's sometimes confessional stories also included a series of accounts of his extramarital affair in the mid-1920s, among them A Memory of Yamashina (Yamashina no kioku, 1926), Infatuation (Chijo, 1926) and Kuniko (1927).

Shiga's work influenced many later writers, including Kazu Ozaki, Kiku Amino, Motojirō Kajii, Takiji Kobayashi, Fumio Niwa, Kōsaku Takii, Kiyoshi Naoi, Toshimasa Shimamura, Hiroyuki Agawa and Shizuo Fujieda. While his work was praised by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and Sei Itō, other contemporaries like Dazai Osamu, Mitsuo Nakamura and Sakunosuke Oda were strongly critical of it. 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.

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