Nakajima Atsushi

Nakajima Atsushi.

Nakajima Atsushi ( Japanese 中 島 敦 ; born May 5, 1909 in Yotsuya ; † December 4, 1942 ) was a Japanese writer .

Life

After attending high school from 1930 to 1934, Nakajima studied Japanese literature at the University of Tokyo . He then taught at the Women's High School in Yokohama until 1941 . During this time he made his debut as a writer with the story Toragari , which he submitted in 1934 to a competition for young authors in the magazine Chūō Kōron .

From 1941 Nakajima lived on the Palau Islands and taught the children of the members of the Japanese occupation administration there. Here he completed the novella Tsushitara no shi about the life of Robert Louis Stevenson . His short story Hikari to kaze to yume was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize .

In March 1942, Nakajima, who had suffered from asthma throughout his life, returned to Japan for health reasons to devote himself entirely to writing. However, he died in the same year as a result of his illness. He left only a narrow literary work, which consists of a few short stories and narratives as well as a biographical work on the life of Stevensons in Samoa ( Riryō , published 1943).

As one of the first Japanese writers, Nakajima received the work of Franz Kafka , as his story Rōshitsuki (published 1942), influenced by his The Metamorphosis , shows. The edition of his complete works Nakajima Atsuji zenshū was awarded the Mainichi Culture Prize in 1949 .

literature

• Evelyn Huang, Massachusetts Institute of Tachnology: "Nakajima Atsushi - Influences of Romanticism and Taoism" , Master thesis, Cambridge 1999

swell

• Louis Frédéric : Japan Encyclopedia . Harvard University Press, 2002, ISBN 0-674-00770-0 , pp. 689 (English, limited preview in the Google Book Search - French: Japon, dictionnaire et civilization . Translated by Käthe Roth).
• William Jefferson Tyler: Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913-1938 , University of Hawaii Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-8248-3242-1 , p. 331
• Laurence C. Bush: Asian Horror Encyclopedia: Asian Horror Culture in Literature, Manga and Folklore , Writers Club Press, 2001, ISBN 978-0-595-20181-5 , p. 132
• Japanese Literature - Nakajima Atsushi

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