Selected Prose

Takeo Arishima (1878-1923) was born into a family of noble samurai, raised in a strict Confucian tradition, but at his father's insistence, he learned English. He graduated from the "School of Peers" for aristocratic children, then attended agricultural college in Hokkaido, and in 1903 he went to the USA, where from 1904 he studied at Harvard University graduate school. After returning to Japan, he got married, but six years later his wife died of tuberculosis, leaving him with three children. In 1922, Arishima fell in love with a married woman, and she reciprocated his feelings. This became known to her husband, and on June 9, 1923, Takeo Arishima and his beloved committed double suicide in the mountains of Karuizawa.

During his lifetime, the writer published several novels, numerous stories, and critical articles. But the culmination of Arishima's work is the novel "Woman" and the novella "The Descendant of Cain," written in the later years of his life and considered one of the peaks of modern Japanese literature.