The Historical Fiction of Mori Ogai

by Ōgai Mori, David Dilworth (Editor), J. Thomas Rimer (Editor)

The fiction of Mori Ogai, written after the death of Emperor Meiji in 1912, secured his promiment place in modern Japanese literature. This collection of stories, set in the Tokugawa Period, provide a means for Ogai to deal with contemporary moral and philosophical values and themes.

Genres: Fiction, Japanese Literature, Classics, Japan

440 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1991

About the author

Mori Ōgai, pseudonym of Mori Rintarō (born February 17, 1862, Tsuwano, Japan—died July 9, 1922, Tokyo), one of the creators of modern Japanese literature.

The son of a physician of the aristocratic warrior (samurai) class, Mori Ōgai studied medicine, at first in Tokyo and from 1884 to 1888 in Germany. In 1890 he published the story “Maihime” (“The Dancing Girl”), an account closely based on his own experience of an unhappy attachment between a German girl and a Japanese student in Berlin. It represented a marked departure from the impersonal fiction of preceding generations and initiated a vogue for autobiographical revelations among Japanese writers. Ōgai’s most popular novel, Gan (1911–13; part translation: The Wild Goose), is the story of the undeclared love of a moneylender’s mistress for a medical student who passes by her house each day. Ōgai also translated Hans Christian Andersen’s autobiographical novel Improvisatoren.

In 1912 Ōgai was profoundly moved by the suicide of General Nogi Maresuke, following the death of the emperor Meiji, and he turned to historical fiction depicting the samurai code. The heroes of several works are warriors who, like General Nogi, commit suicide in order to follow their masters to the grave. Despite his early confessional writings, Ōgai came to share with his samurai heroes a reluctance to dwell on emotions. His detachment made his later works seem cold, but their strength and integrity were strikingly close to the samurai ideals he so admired.

Reviews

[Christie Vong · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this several months ago and forgot to add it to my list, apparently.
Mori's historical fiction style that reads quite like "based on a true story" is very new to me and can be quite interesting at times, but I wouldn't say I was completely charmed by it. The storytelling would get very caught up in the minute details of things, and although I have a lot of respect to Mori for carefully doing research to include all those details, it really took away focus from the actual story. Or maybe I just wasn't smart enough to understand the purpose of them or able to focus long enough to glean anything from them.
The introduction was great to understand Mori's impressive life as both a respected academic and a military doctor, historical Japan, and the strong influence this context had on his stories.
To end this on a good note, some of his stories, for example, the one where a girl and boy are forcefully separated from their mother, were particularly well-written and memorable. I'd say for those gems here and there, it was worth reading.

[JoeG · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actually a 2.5 simply due to my lack of specific knowledge of great swathes of Japanese history and personalities. I can't imagine anyone would have the necessary scholarship to follow (and anticipate) all of these disparate stories. Some of them are excellent and reasonably easy to follow, but the last half of the book contains stories so esoteric that even the editors notes are insufficient for understanding.

[mia ╰(*´︶`*)╯♡ · Rating 4 out of 5]

read for my intro to lit class (forgot to add) --> "under reconstruction"