Mori Ōgai was the literary name of Mori Rintarō, the son of the doctor to the daimyō of Tsuwano province (in present-day Shimane Prefecture). Ōgai’s mother was a strict disciplinarian who pushed Ōgai toward the pursuit of academic excellence throughout his youth. At the domain’s Yōrōkan school, Ōgai acquired a solid foundation in the Confucian classics and also in Dutch studies. Ōgai was subsequently sent to Tokyo, where in 1874 he enrolled in the preparatory course of the medical department at Tokyo University, adding two years to his age in order to get in. He graduated from the university at the age 19, becoming the youngest ever to do so, and started a career as an army surgeon.

In 1884,Ōgai was sent by the army to study medicine in Germany. There he came under the influence of the physician Robert Koch, immersing himself in the study of military hygiene. At the same time, with typically prodigious application he familiarized himself with European philosophy and literature. He returned to Japan with a deep awareness of the gap between the civilizations of Europe and Japan.

After returning to Japan in 1888, Ōgai immediately undertook efforts to modernize both Japanese medicine and Japanese literature. In 1889, he published a collection of translated poetry called Omokage (Vestiges). This is considered the first poetic anthology in Japanese to successfully convey a sense of the aesthetic qualities of Western poetry. Ōgai also started the influential literary magazine Shigaramizōshi (The Weir, first published in 1889), giving rise to what is sometimes called the “Kō-Rō-Shō-Ōe Period,” after the names of four prominent authors who were active at this time: Ozaki Kōyō, Kōda Rohan, Tsubouchi Shōyō, and Ōgai himself. Novels published by Ōgai during this period (based to a large extent on his own experiences abroad) include Maihime (The Dancing Girl, 1890), Utakata no ki (Foam on the Waves, 1890), and Fumizukai (The Courier, 1891). These works, together with Futabatei Shimei’s Ukigumo (The Drifting Cloud, 1887), are often considered to mark the beginnings of a truly modern Japanese literature.

Numerous clashes with superiors over medical policy, and their disapproval of Ōgai’s literary activities, resulted in 1899 in Ōgai’s transfer to the cultural backwater of Kokura in Kyushū. During this time Ōgai published no novels, but the experience did give him time to mature both as a human being and as a writer, and seems to have provided him with much of the material that he later used when writing his historical fiction.

In 1907, five years after returning to Tokyo from Kokura, Ōgai was promoted to the position of army surgeon general. No longer faced with the need to concern himself with the opinions of the superiors and stimulated by the work of Natsume Sōseki as well as by the rise of naturalistic fiction, he once again began publishing novels in Subaru (The Pleiades) magazine. Ōgai’s first story in the colloquial style, Hannichi (Half a Day, 1909), was followed in rapid succession by Ita sekusuarisu (Vita Sexualis, 1909), Seinen (Youth, 1910), Fushinchū (Under Reconstruction, 1910), Mōsō (Delusions, 1911), and Gan (The Wild Goose, 1911).

The suicides in 1912 of General Nogi Maresuke and his wife in the wake of the death of the Emperor Meiji came as a great shock to Ōgai, prompting a turn to historical materials that resulted in Okitsu Yagoemon no isho (The Last Testament of Okitsu Yagoemon, 1912). Other novels in the same vein were Abe ichizoku (The Abe Family, 1913), Ōshio Heihachirō (ōshio Heihachirō, 1914), Yasui fujin (The Wife of Yasui, 1914), Sanshō dayū (Sanshō the Steward, 1915), Saigo no ikku (The Last Phrase, 1915), Takasebune (The Boat on the Takase River, 1916), and Kanzan Jittoku (Han-shan and Shih-te, 1916). From about 1915, Ōgai began to advocate a more strictly factual approach in dealing with the treatment of historical personages, and put this policy into practice with the publication of such biographical works as Shibue Chūsai (1916) and Izawa Ranken (1916). These two different types of historical fiction characterizing Ōgai’s final period are generally classified by critics as historical novels (rekishi shōsetsu) and historical biographies (shiden).

Ōgai died in 1922 from atrophy of the kidneys while still at work on several historical studies. He left behind no direct disciples to carry on his work, but the extraordinary range of his activities, the high seriousness of his purpose, and the enormous influence he exerted on both contemporary and later writers have caused him to be ranked with Natsume Sōseki as one of the preeminent writers of the Meiji period.

• The Historical Fiction of Mori Ōgai. Ed. David A. Dilworth and J. Thomas Rimer. 1977. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991. A one-volume paperback edition of an earlier two-volume collection of stories.
• Modern Japanese Stories: An Anthology . Ed. Ivan Morris. 1961. Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1966. Contains "Under Reconstruction."
• Sansho-Dayu and Other Short Stories. Trans. Tsutomu Fukuda. Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1970.
• Vita Sexualis. Trans. Kazuji Ninomiya and Sanford Goldstein. 1972. Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 200.
• The Wild Geese. Trans. Ochiai Kingo and Sanford Goldstein. Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 1959.
• The Wild Goose. Trans. Burton Watson. 1995. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 1998.
• Youth and Other Stories (collection of stories). Ed. J. Thomas Rimer. 1994. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995.

• Bowring, Richard J. Mori Ōgai and the Modernization of Japanese Culture. University of Cambridge Oriental Publications 28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
• Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984.
• Marcus, Marvin. Paragons of the Ordinary: The Biographical Literature of Mori Ōgai. 1993. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995.
• McClellan, Edwin. Woman in the Crested Kimono: The Life of Shibue Io and Her Family Drawn from Mori Ōgai's Shibue Chusai. 1985. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.
• Rimer, J. Thomas. Mori Ōgai. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Group, 1975.

 

 

The Mori Ogai Memorial:  A one-page introduction to a memorial site in a boarding house in Berlin where Ōgai stayed briefly after his arrival in Germany.

The Museum Meiji-Mura:  This site includes a photograph of the house shared (at different times) by both Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki in Tokyo, now relocated to this outstanding open-air architectural museum in Aichi Prefecture.