Page:Modern Japanese Novels and the West.pdf/29

 to turn back later to Japanese traditions. One outstanding writer in this category was Mori Ōgai (1862–1922). Mori spent four years in Germany, from 1884 to 1888, as a student of medicine, but while there he also read literature and philosophy. He made translations of Goethe, Hans Christian Andersen, and modern French poetry. His first original story, The Dancing Girl, published in 1890, dealt with the unhappy love affair of a Japanese student and a German dancer, an autobiographical subject as we know from other evidence. The story does not imitate any specific European work, but its confessional tone certainly owed much to German romantic fiction. He followed The Dancing Girl with A Record of a Fleeting Life, a wildly melodramatic tale involving a Japanese painter, a beautiful German model, and Ludwig II, the mad king of Bavaria. Mori was later to shock his contemporaries with the detailed self-revelations of his Vita Sexualis.

While Mori was busy writing his most romantic novel, The Wild Goose, word came in 1912 that General Nogi, the hero of the Russo-Japanese War, had committed suicide with his wife. The old couple had not wished to survive their master, the Emperor Meiji, who died earlier in the same