Kitamura Tōkoku was a poet and essayist who played a key role in launching the Romantic Movement in modern Japanese literature. A political activist, he played an active role in the Jiyū minken undō (Freedom and People's Rights Movement) during his short life and saw this as closely linked to his fascination with Christianity. Tōkoku's most important literary essays appeared in Jogaku zasshi and its offshoots, Bungakukai and Hyōron. He was also a founding member of the Nihon heiwa-kai (Japan Peace Society) and served as editor of its journal Heiwa, where he published many of his essays on Christianity. His influence on the subsequent generation of authors who can be seen as marking out a Japanese Romantic movement—men such as Kunikida Doppo and Shimazaki Tōson—is hard to exaggerate.

Introduction

On a Tuesday evening, 16 August 1887, Kitamura Tōkoku (1868–1894) left his parents’ home in Kyōbashi, a ward in the old commercial district south of the Imperial Palace, and went to the home of Ishizaka Mina in the more affluent suburb of Hongo ward north of the Palace. Tōkoku was just eighteen years old. Mina, the daughter of a prominent Jiyūtō (Freedom Party) leader, a recent convert to Christianity and three years older than Tōkoku, had been living at home since her graduation from a girls’ mission school in Yokohama a month before, and Tōkoku had visited her often since then. He usually entered the house without a word of greeting to anyone and went straight to her room, a habit that displeased her mother. Tōkoku thought Mina was “glorious.” She was cultivated and intelligent, and they shared the same convictions. She would, he believed, “illuminate the world” with her ideals. As they chatted that night, he could not bring himself to tell her how unhappy he really was. He had no prospects for the future, and his past failures made him feel unworthy of her. Worse yet, her parents had already arranged for her to marry a young doctor named Hirano Tomosuke.

Tōkoku spent the following days struggling over his decision to break off with her, a noble gesture of self-sacrifice that would free her to carry out her mission to “save the Japanese people with the teachings of God.