Tarōbō by Rohan Koda: translated by Tsutomu Nagata

Rohan Koda (1867-1947) was born toward the very end of the shogun’s reign of Japan and kept writing for six decades, until his death after the end of World War II. Unlike many other intellectuals of his generation, he did not study abroad or receive Westernized higher education. His works are based on East Asian aesthetics and Buddhist philosophy rather than the European literary trends that dominated Japanese literature in his time. In addition to novels and short stories, his works include large number of historical biographies, essays on classic literature or natural history, and annotation of Basho Matsuo’s haiku corpus