The similitude of blossoms

Izumi Kyoka (1873-1939) wrote some 300 stories, plays, essays and travelogues. Along the way, his voice as a writer would undergo a number of significant modulations, allowing him to develop the idiosyncratic yet powerfully affecting worldview for which he is famous. In this, the first book-length study in English of this prolific writer, Charles Shiro Inouye argues that Kyoka's writings were largely a refinement of a vision that came into focus around 1900. The resulting narrative archetype formed the aesthetic and ethical bases of his work. Kyoka does not fit neatly into the conventional story of Japanese literary modernization and has been relegated to a place outside the mainstream. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he did not distance himself from the Japanese literary tradition in favor of adaptations of imports from the West. The highly visual mode of figuration that was Kyoka's compromise with the demands of literary realism allows us to see the continuation of early-modern (kinsei) Edo culture in late-modern (kindai) Japan and to expand our understanding of literary and artistic reform in the early twentieth century.