Page:Tayama Katai and His Novel Entitled Futon (Reece).pdf/41

 the Keien school: "Kanjyō o itsuwaranai," or "Be true to your emotions." Matsuura's quiet personality and his realistic principles of art inspired Katai to write about ordinary daily events as his emotions dictated.

At the age of eighteen, Katai began to study English from Nojima Kinhachirō, the son of a former clansman, whose father was working at the Ministry of Home Affairs in Tokyo, and from whose library Katai borrowed European books.

He continued to study English at Meiji Gakkan, a private school, for about three years. During this time Katai stayed with his elder brother Miyato. In 1891 Katai wrote in his spare time his first story, or. is a short story written in the Saikaku style. The princiaplprincipal [sic] characters in this story are three children of ten and eleven years old. They go to a farm field to steal melons. They succeed, only after receiving a beating by the field keeper, but the melons are not yet ripe and are tasteless. The story is simple but it is noteworthy because Katai has written in about his own personal experience, which often was his source in later stories.

From 1892 to 1899 Katai wrote twenty short stories. He studied the Japanese stories of Saikaku and Chikamatsu, as well as the Russian novels of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Gorky at the Ueno Library