Japanese · 1872–1943
Tōson began as a Romantic poet whose 1897 collection helped invent modern Japanese verse, then abandoned poetry for prose because he decided verse could not carry what he wanted to say. The Broken Commandment in 1906 made him the leading Japanese naturalist and put burakumin discrimination into national literature for the first time. He funded its self-publication partly by selling his possessions while three of his children died of malnutrition, a fact he later wrote about. In 1913 he fled to Paris after fathering a child with his niece, and on returning published a confession of it, which is either the most honest or the most self-serving act in modern Japanese letters depending on which critic you read. Before the Dawn, his last long work, tells the story of the Meiji Restoration through his own father, who went mad and died locked in a storehouse.