The Similitude of Blossoms

Izumi Kyoka (1872-1939) wrote some 300 stories, plays, and essays. In the first book-length study in English of Kyoka, Charles Shiro Inouye argues that his writings were a refinement of a vision that came into focus around 1900. This narrative archetype formed the aesthetic and ethical bases of his work. Kyoka does not fit the conventional story of Japanese literary modernization. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he did not jettison the Japanese literary tradition in favor of modernist imports from the West. The highly visual mode of figuration that was Kyoka's compromise with the demands of literary modernism allows us to see the continuation of Edo culture in the Japanese modern and expand our understanding of literary reform in the early twentieth century.