It has been generally thought that the extant edition of Hasedera-genki was completed in the early Kamakura Period. It is indisputable that the work was started in 1200 as the year is mentioned in the seventeenth episode of the first volume. But the date of its completion seems to be founded on very weak reasoning; the book must have been finished in the early thirteenth century because there is no description of the destruction by fire of Hase Temple which occurred in 1219. Relying on textual evidence rather than circumstantial one, hereI will demonstrate that Hasedera-genki was finished not in the early but in the late thirteenth century.
In one of his letters Takizawa-Bakin boasted of his adroitness in writing a story of "kyokaku (a man of chivalry)," and he successfully demonstrated it in Kaikan-kyoki-kyokaku-den. In the preface of the novel the author defined the meaning of word "kyo" as the act of "jin (benevolence)" at the sacrifice of oneself. Thus "kyokaku" refers not only to a mere hero but also to one who unselfishly does virtuous deeds. To fully represent such a Confucian aspect of "kyokaku," Bakin used the two Chinese stories Hoshin-engi and Tuzoku-buou-gundan as the source books for his novel. Both based on the alleged fact that the Zhou Dynasty destroyed the Yin Dynasty in the cause of justice, the stories are written in the style of a historical narrative. But the philosophy of "jin" is so emphatically foregrounded in them that they greatly inspired Bakin to write the "kyokaku" story.
The literary magazine A was started in November 1924 by a literary circle in Dalian. It is very interesting that the magazine was published in Dalian, for the place was then a cosmopolitan city where China, Russia, and Japan were culturally mixed. Among the contributors Fuyue Anzai and Takeshi Takiguchi are most important as their poems artfully convey such an international atmosphere of the city. The aim of this article is to examine an interaction between the city and their poems, the characteristics of the magazine, and the influence of it on Japanese literature.
In the preface of Chumon-no-oi-ryori-ten, Kenji Miyazawa earnestly hopes that some of his short stories will "finally become something real and pure to eat for you." If you take the author's wish seriously, you must read his stories not in a routine common-sense way but in a very subjective perspective. In other words, you are required to accept Shozo Omori's philosophical proposition that what one perceives is cognitively true. In this sense, the stories can be called "textual fables" because they are so radically open-ended that every attempt to find a single meaning objectively is destined to fail.