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 every other contribution to the literature of the time, The Drifting Cloud was the work of a young man—Futabatei at the time was only twenty-three. Another important literary group of the 1880’s

(the Kenyûsha “Friends of the Inkstone Society”) had for its oldest member a dotard of twenty-four, and ranged downwards to fifteen-year-olds. The writers of the previous decade were too set in their ways to be converted to the new literature, which was largely the product of the new education. Futabatei himself attended a government school where the pupils received most of their education,