Japanese · 1883–1971
Shiga quarrelled with his rich father for a decade about a copper-mine pollution scandal and about the woman he wanted to marry, and turned that quarrel into most of his work. He belonged to the Shirakaba group, the humanist and Tolstoyan circle that dominated Taishō letters, and became known for a prose so exact that Japanese writers called him the god of the novel and copied his sentences as exercise. He finished only one full-length work, A Dark Night's Passing, which took him seventeen years. Otherwise he wrote short stories about a man watching a bee die on a roof, or a rat thrown into a river with a skewer through its neck, and left them without comment. He lived to eighty-eight, wrote almost nothing after 1937, and remains the model of Japanese prose style that every subsequent generation has had to react against.