We continue our survey of the Japanese Novel with Part Two - 1905-1912.
(Part One is here.)

In Part One we saw an early-Meiji-period Japan that was so busy modernizing and catching up with the West that there was almost no time to develop a new literature. At the beginning of the twentieth century the modern Japanese novel (with one or two exceptions) had hardly begun to grow beyond the naive political allegories and sentimental stories of the 1880s and 1890s. And when the sons of disenfranchised samurai turned to the study of literature, their texts were the same Japanese and Chinese classics that their fathers had used (resulting in the works of Koda Rohan - how interesting in themselves these are, this was not a truly modern literature). Language reform also was a process of several decades. It was not until the Meiji era was almost finished, that new authors would pioneer a new literature and address the change and transformation going on around them. The challenge was taken up around 1905 by two individualistic writers who had studied in Europe, Natsume Soseki and Mori Ogai, and to a lesser degree by two others, Shimazaki Toson and Tayama Katai, who started the fashion of Japanese Naturalism and the Shishosetsu. And at the very end of Meiji, other writers who would later be counted among the best of the century started their careers: Tanizaki, Shiga, Akutagawa. 
1905
The first great decade of modern Japanese literature was the one which followed the en...