Arishima Takeo: Life and Major Works

Born in 1878 in Koishikawa, Tokyo, the eldest son of a Finance Ministry official. He studied at the Gakushūin and then Sapporo Agricultural College, where he was baptized as a Christian under the influence of Uchimura Kanzō. After graduating he studied in the United States, where he encountered Whitman, Ibsen, and socialist thought, and returned to Japan with deepening doubts about his faith. He joined the coterie magazine "Shirakaba," founded by Mushanokōji Saneatsu and Shiga Naoya, and began his career as a writer of the humanist Shirakaba school. In 1917 he published "The Descendants of Cain," depicting the raw vitality and defeat of tenant farmers in Hokkaido, and followed it with the novel "A Certain Woman," a portrait of a passionate woman's life that left a lasting mark on modern literature. In the essay "Love, the Generous Robber" he set out his own philosophy of love, and in his later years he put his ideals into practice by giving the farmland he owned in Hokkaido to his tenant farmers free of charge. In 1923, he died in a double suicide with the married journalist Hatano Akiko at his villa in Karuizawa, at the age of 45.