Atsushi Nakajima

Atsushi Nakajima (Tokyo, 1909 - 1942) was a Japanese writer who published his major works during the war years. He died before the postwar period, so he is not usually counted among postwar authors, although he belongs to the same generation as Osamu Dazai. His models were earlier writers such as Natsume Sōseki and Mori Ōgai. He came from a family of kangaku scholars devoted to Chinese learning, and his command of the Chinese classics shaped much of his fiction.

His childhood was unsettled. His parents separated shortly after he was born, and he spent much of his early years with his grandparents in Saitama, later moving between households as his father took up teaching posts. The stepmothers who came and went in his home treated him harshly, and the absence of his birth mother left a mark that shows in stories such as Haha no Fuzai (Mother Absent). He lived in Korea under Japanese rule, then studied Japanese literature at the University of Tokyo. He taught at a secondary school in Yokohama, and in 1941 took a post with the Japanese administration in Micronesia, partly because he hoped the warmer climate would ease his asthma.

His writing blends exotic settings in China or Korea with questions about identity and the meaning of life. He showed little interest in politics. He read Kafka closely, and Sangetsuki (1942), in which a frustrated poet turns into a tiger, is often read as his own take on The Metamorphosis, though with a protagonist who keeps his dignity and conscience. His last works included stories about Micronesia and the novel Light, Wind and Dreams, a fictionalized life of Robert Louis Stevenson.

He fell ill with pneumonia in 1942 after returning from Palau and died later that year, at 33. He published little in literary magazines during his lifetime, but his reputation grew afterwards. The Moon Over the Mountain appears in many Japanese school textbooks, and his figure has been reimagined in contemporary popular culture.