Kubokawa Tsurujirō

Kubokawa Tsurujirō ( Japanese. 窪 川 鶴 次郎 ; born February 25, 1903 in Kikugawa , Shizuoka Prefecture ; † June 15, 1974 ) was a Japanese literary critic.

Life

After Kakegawa Middle School, he went to what was then Kanazawa High School and met Nakano Shigeharu . This made him enthusiastic about literature, although he tended to the natural sciences. Because of his thirst for literature, he dropped out of high school, went to Tokyo and worked in a postal savings bank. Together with Nakano, who had come to Tokyo because of his studies, he began to do literary work again and became a member of the magazine Roba ( donkey ), which also included people like Hori Tatsuo . During this time he met Tajima Ineko and married her. At his and Nakano's suggestion, Ineko published Kyarameru-kōba kara ( From the candy factory ) and appeared under Kubokawa Ineko as an aspiring author of proletarian literature , while Tsurujirō had little success. Only the poem Satogo ni yarareta okei , published in the November issue of NAPF 1930, was turned into a song and was widely distributed.

From 1931 Kubokawa was recognized as a literary critic. He joined the Japanese Communist Party in January 1932 , and was arrested on March 24th and charged on May 4th. The following year he relapsed tuberculosis in prison and was released on bail in November on condition that he no longer participated in politics. After the Writers' Association was dissolved in 1934, he expanded his field of activity to include literary and cultural-political magazines. There were magazines such as Gendai Bungaku Ron ( essays on modern literature ) published by Chūō Kōron-Verlag in 1939, which is now regarded as essential . In these collections of essays, Tsurujirō warned of war-prone literature and strove for the model of literature that should portray actual society.

Because of Tsujirō's affairs, however, the marriage with Ineko deteriorated. In 1938 a relationship with Tamura Toshiki, who was 19 years her senior, came to light; They divorced in 1945 and Ineko changed her writer name to Sata Ineko . She then wrote a few novels based on their relationship.

After the war, Tsurujirō took part in the founding of the New Japan Literary Society and continued his criticism from the standpoint of democratic literature, but by the 1950s he concentrated his engagement on teaching at Nihon University and barely noticed his criticism. Instead, he did a lot of tanka discussions, in which Ishikawa Takuboku research played a central role, and in his later years he was known as a Takuboku researcher.

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