Harbingers (I): Tōkoku, Doppo, Hōgetsu

Western writers at least since the Enlightenment, steeped in an intellectual tradition that has understood reality to be mediated by the human mind and therefore by the act of writing itself, have regarded imagination as very much a part of reality and fiction as fundamental to the production of literature. Indeed, as Hayden White notes in his discussion of narrative emplotment, imagination necessarily generates a particular reality, and the tropical forms or “modes” of romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire inevitably impose themselves fictively on the “free flow” of life. Early twentieth-century Japanese writers, however, hailed from an intellectual tradition that,