Koda Rohan

Kōda Rohan ( Japanese 幸 田 露 伴 ; *  August 20, 1867 in Shitaya , Edo , today Tōkyō ; †  July 30, 1947 in Ichikawa ), actually Kōda Shigeyuki ( 幸 田 成行 ), was a Japanese writer.

Koda Rohan

Life

Kōda Rohan was the son of an official who came from an impoverished Samurai noble line. He studied Chinese classics and Buddhist literature as an autodidact. He worked as a telegraph operator in Hokkaidō at the age of 15 , but returned to Tokyo after 2 years. There he later held a university professorship for a time, but also worked in the editorial department of the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper from 1889 .

First honored for Fūryūbutsu , he consolidated his place in the literary world with works such as Gojūnotō or Ummei . Together with Ozaki Kōyō he founded the later so-called Kōro era (where Kōro is a suitcase word from Kōyō and Rohan , the two proper names).

Kōda Rohan was a representative of classicism and trained in classical literature and religious teachings. In addition to numerous essays and historical novels, he also left academic treatises on classical literature.

At the first award of the Japanese Cultural Order in 1937, he was one of the honored. In 1943 he received the Noma Literature Prize . His house, which he himself called the snail shell (Kagyū-an), in which he lived in Sumida for ten years , is now in the Meiji Mura open-air museum .

His daughter, Kōda Aya , was also a writer.

Works

• Encounter with a skull. Two novellas from Japan at the turn of the century. Edition q 1999. ISBN 9783861245025
• Fūryūbutsu ( 風流 仏 ), German title "The graceful Buddha", 1889.
• Gojūnotō ( 五 重 塔 ), German title "The five-story pagoda", 1892.
• Ummei ( 運 命 ), e.g. German "Destiny", 1919.

literature

• Siegfried Schaarschmidt and Michiko Mae (eds.): Japanese literature of the present. Hanser Verlag, Munich 1990. ISBN 3-446-15929-0

Web links

Commons : Kōda Rohan  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Kōda Rohan in the catalog of the German National Library

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus, Kōda is the family name, Rohan the first name.