T-maru's photo blog 書籍レビュー(特に白井喬二、小林信彦)、囲碁、音楽、昔のSF系TVドラマ、野鳥の写真などの話題をお届けしています。 This site offers review of books (especially of Kyoji Shirai and Nobuhiko Kobayashi), of music, old Sci-Fi TV dramas, topics related to Go (board game), and photos of birds.
Kyoji Shirai’s photo (from his autobiography) when he was living at Asahigaoka, Nakano in Tokyo (1926 – 1933). Kyoji loved slow but steady steps of a cow, and he practiced “Fabian tactics” in literature.
As I stated in the previous article, Kyoji Shirai was one of the most important novelists in an emerging stage of public romance. Let me now describe his life and some of his works in detail.
Kyoji Shirai was born in Yokohama in 1889, as the first son of Takamichi and Tami Inoue, who were both from Samurai (warrior) class of Tottori prefecture. When he was born, Takamichi was working as a policeman of Yokohama city. Kyoji inherited the sense of justice from his father. Because of the frequent changes of his father’s working place, Kyoji kept on the move from Ome, Kofu, Urawa, and to Hirosaki in Aomori prefecture. In 1902, he finally settled in his parents’ home town, Yonago in Tottori. While he was attending Yonago east high school, he wrote two novels and they were put in two local newspapers, showing his precocious talent as a writer.
He entered then Waseda university but he soon moved to Nihon university by his father’s request that he should become a lawyer. While he was studying at Nihon university, he translated many works of Saikaku Ihara (“井原西鶴”) and Monzaemon Chikamatsu (“近松門左衛門”) into the modern Japanese for Hakubunkan (“博文館”), which was one of the biggest publishers at that time in Japan. These works gave him deep knowledge of the Japanese literature in Edo period, and he utilized many episodes or anecdotes in this period later in his works.
After he graduated Nihon university, he started to work at a few publishers and got married with Tsuruko Nakajima, a daughter of a baron Masutane Nakajima, in 1916.
In 1919, he wrote “Kai-kenchiku juni-dan gaeshi” (“怪建築十二段返し”) as his first work under the name “Kyoji Shirai” and the manuscript was offered to Hakubunkan. The publisher put the work in the January issue of “Kodan zasshi” (“講談雑誌”) in 1920. This first work was welcomed and he received requests for other works one after another. Ryunosuke Akutagawa (“芥川龍之介”) praised Kyoji’s “Ninjutsu Koraiya” (“忍術己来也”) enthusiastically and “Shimpen Goetsu Zoshi” (“神変呉越草紙”) also got a favorable reception.
In 1924, he started to write two most famous works, namely “Shinsen-gumi” (“新撰組”) and “Fuji ni tatsu kage” (“富士に立つ影”), and established his fame by these two great novels. The former was put at the head of a weekly magazine “Sunday Maichini” (“サンデー毎日”), which was the first weekly magazine in Japan, and the magazine could get enough number of readers to survive as an independent magazine by his novel. The latter was serialized in the Hochi newspaper (“報知新聞”), which was one of the biggest newspapers at that time, and it continued for more than 1000 times. The hero in this novel, Kimitaro Kumaki (“熊木公太郎”), attracted the readers overwhelmingly by his honest and decent character. As I introduced before, Ryunosuke Tsukue (“机龍之助”) in Dai Bosatsu Touge (“大菩薩峠”) was the first typical character type in public romance with his nihilism and cruelty, but Kyoji created then a completely different type of bright character with this novel. (to be continued)
English Journalの2018年3月号について。この号で買い始めてから丁度丸4年になります。
しかしながら、この号はこの雑誌の悪い所が出ていると思います。
(1)収録CDが今号は60分弱くらいしかない。ちなみに先月は80分近くありました。私は、まず一回通して流し聞きし、次に30分ずつ2回に分けてテキストを見ながら聴くというのを2回やります。時間が毎月大幅にぶれるとこうした計画的な学習がやりにくくなります。
(2)特集記事の意味の無さ。今号の特集は、「TOEICテストが劇的にアップする「コスパ最高の」英単語」ですが、挙げられているのが、「上級語49」となっているので、delivery(配送、配達)、material(素材)、production(生産)、application(申込書)などで、どこが「上級」なのか理解に苦しみます。上級じゃないのは、interview(インタビュー)、busy(忙しい)、position(位置)、market(市場)とかではっきり言って中学生レベル。そりゃこのレベルの単語を知らない人がこれらを覚えればTOEICの点数はアップするでしょうが、この雑誌を買って読むような人はそんなレベルじゃないと思います。(そうじゃないと英語の生インタビューなんか聴いてもまったく理解できず役に立たないでしょう。)