Kikuchi Kan

Kikuchi Kan

Kikuchi Kan

Kikuchi Kan ( Japanese 菊池 寛 , civil with the same spelling: Kikuchi Hiroshi ; born December 26, 1888 in Takamatsu , † March 6, 1948 in Tokyo ) was a Japanese storyteller and playwright. In 1935 he founded the Akutagawa Prize and the Naoki Prize for mass literature.

Live and act

Kikuchi Kan was born in Takamatsu to an impoverished family of samurai scholars. In 1908 he was admitted to the Tōkyō Higher Normal School (later University of Education ). However, he had to leave school because of a minor theft in the bedrooms, although he was not involved in the matter. The following year he was able to enroll at the "National First Higher School", where he made friends with many future writers, among whom Akutagawa Ryūnosuke , Yamamoto Yūzō and Kume Masao are perhaps the best known. Kikuchi then studied English in Kyōto from 1913 to 1916. As a student he read Shaw and later wrote dramas himself.

From 1920 his story "Shinju fujin" was published in a newspaper in Osaka and in Tōkyo as a series, which was extremely well received. Many more melodramatic works were to follow. In the same year his drama "Chichi kaeru" - "A Father Returns" - premiered in a larger commercial theater in Tōkyō. The play was very well received and established his fame as a playwright.

In 1923 Kikuchi founded the publishing house Bungei Shunjū and published the literary magazine Bungei Shunjū . This was partly intended as a counter-position to the aggressiveness of Marxist literature, as it was shown in "Proletarian Literature" . Although the magazine suffered from the social consequences of the Kanto earthquake in 1923 , it recovered and became a widely read, influential magazine.

The most important contributions to the literary world of Japan include the foundation of the Akutagawa Prize and the Naoki Prize in 1935. The Akutagawa Prize is awarded every six months by the Association for Japanese Literature to mostly still unknown young authors. The Naoki Prize honors writers of popular entertainment literature. He founded the Kikuchi Kan Prize in 1938 to honor older, deserving writers.

Kikuchi's first pieces initially received little attention. After his autobiographical novella Mumeisakka no nikki (1918) and the story Onshū no kanata ni (1919) were published, he was temporarily next to Akutagawa as one of the main exponents of neorealism . From 1920 he turned more to the entertainment novel and became a fashion writer of his time. Kikuchi Kan made the modern citizen the subject of his works. In "Dichter und Anlage" (1920) he asserted "that even an average person can develop into a poet [...] and that the door to poetry is open to everyone."

Kikuchi Kan died of stenocardia in 1948 at the age of 59 .

Works

• 1916 Okujō no kyōjin ( 屋 上 の 狂人 ) - The madman on the roof, engl. The Madman on the Roof, 1956
• 1917 Chichi kaeru ( 父 帰 る ) - The father returns, 1935
• 1918 Mumeisakka no nikki ( 無名 作家 の 日記 ) - "Diary of a still unknown poet"
• 1919 Tadanao-kyō gyōjōki ( 忠直 卿 行 状 記 ) - "The way of life of Prince Tadanao"
• 1919 Onshū no kanata ni ( 恩讐 の 彼方 に )
  • “Beyond love and hate”, translated by Kakuji Watanabe. In: Japanese Masters of Narration , Walter Dorn Verlag, Bremen, 1960, pp. 9–28.
• 1920 Shinju fujin ( 真珠 夫人 )
• Ren'ai kekkon seido ( 恋愛 結婚 制度 )
  • "Love marriage custom", German by Hermann Bohner , in: OAG "Nachrichten" 45, 46, Tōkyō 1938.

Further translations into German can be found in: Jürgen Stalph et al. (Ed.): Modern Japanese literature in German translation. A bibliography from 1868-1994. Munich 1995 (iudicium), p. 85.

Beyond love and hate

The short story tells the pathetic story of the cleansing of the culprit Ichikuro, who slays his master and as a cleansed monk does a service to the inhabitants of a village. The story, which takes place in 1725, begins in medias res with the argument between Ichikuro and his master Nakagawa, who is angry that Ichikuro has cheated on him with his concubine and attacks him with the sword. In a scuffle, he kills Nakagawa, who leaves a three-year-old son, and towers Oyumi from Yedo with his adulterous lover . The two refugees arrive at the village of Yabuhara in the Kiso region . Running out of money, they open a tea house on a mountain pass. While Oyumi spies on the guests, Ichikuro intercepts departing guests on their way to slay and rob them. The two of them have been criminal for three years, until one evening after he has murdered a silkworm dealer and his wife, Ichikuro gets into an argument with Oyumi because he forgot to bring the outlaws' hair ornaments. While Oyumi fetches the hair accessories, remorse drives Ichikuro to flee quickly.

He arrives at the Joan-ji temple in Mino, where he prays and confides in a Buddhist priest. He advises him not to face the police and instead to indulge in Buddhism. Following this advice, Ichikuro enters the priesthood as Ryokai monk in order to “redeem himself by sacrificing his life for the human world”. In search of a service to humanity, he makes a pilgrimage to Kyūshū via Kyoto, visits the temples Usa Hachiman-gū and Rakan and finally arrives at the village of Hida, where he is asked to pray for someone who has died. He learns that the man, like many others, was killed on a dangerous boardwalk around a cliff. He sees his chance and decides to pierce the rock over a length of 400 m with a hammer and chisel in order to create a safe path. Laughed by the villagers, Ryokai digs himself three meters deep into the rock within a year. Year after year he works his way through the rock with the villagers changing their attention. Meanwhile, now grown up, the son of the once slain Nakagawa sets out to avenge his father's murder and to restore the family honor. He finds the emaciated Ryokai 19 years after his bloody act and allows him to end the impending breach of the rock. The work dragged on for almost two more years, so that Nakagawa's son experienced the breakthrough to the other side on September 10, 1746 together with Ryokai. Moved to tears that the life's work was successful, they both hug each other and "forgot the past."

Remarks

1. ↑ The National First Higher School, "Daiichi kōtōgakkō" (第一 高等学校) comprised the first semesters of a university.

literature

• S. Noma (Ed.): Kikuchi Kan . In: Japan. An Illustrated Encyclopedia. Kodansha, 1993, ISBN 4-06-205938-X , p. 778.

Web links

• Digital copies of his works at Aozora Bunko (Japanese)
• The madman on the roof (English; PDF file; 36 kB)
• Father came home
• Kikuchi Kan Memorial Museum (Japanese, English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kakuji Watanabe (Ed.): Japanese Masters of Narration . Walter Dorn Verlag, Bremen 1960, p. 199 .

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