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 personal experience, ‘The Dancing Girl’ (Maihime) was written in the first person and was described by Ōgai himself as an Ich Roman. “I have attempted,” wrote Ōgai, “to portray a Japanese who was living in Berlin at the same time as I and who came to grips with the kind of situation described in the story.” Then (as a typical afterthought of the Western-influenced Meiji writer) Ōgai added, “There are a good many European works of fiction with similar plots.” The Dancing Girl is hardly a great work of literature, but it stands out as one of the earliest examples of the shi-shōsetsu (‘I-novel’ and ‘I-story’), the autobiographical, confessional type of writing that has occupied such an important role in modern Japanese literature.

It is one of the peculiarities of this literature that the writers who were most enthusiastically to adopt the shi-shōsetsu should have been the members of the Naturalist School. The introduction into Japan of the writings of Zola and Maupassant had far-reaching effects in literary circles. It accelerated the movement away from traditionalism and, at about the time of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), produced a group of influential writers who proclaimed that the purpose of literature was to search for the truth and to describe it with the detached accuracy of a scientist. Literary embellishments and conventional sentiments had to be discarded in favour of a cold, objective presentation of life as it was actually lived by ordinary men and women. Factual detail was more important than style, form or atmosphere; the modern writer must strive to achieve the unadorned directness of the policeman’s statement or the clinical report.

From the outset, however, Japanese Naturalism began to diverge from the movement in Europe that had inspired it. The publication in 1908 of ‘The Quilt’ (Futon), a novel by Tayama Katai, one of the leading Naturalists, served to establish the autobiographical approach as the standard for Japanese writers of the Naturalist School. This novel deals in exhaustive detail with the events and emotions