Sato Haruo and the culture of Taisho

This dissertation reevaluates the prewar fiction of Sato Haruo (1892--1964). As poet, painter, essayist, and novelist, Sato displayed a remarkable range of artistic ability. Previous scholarship in Japan has focused on the close relationship between Sato's personal life and his fiction. This study considers the close interaction between contemporaneous discourses and Sato's experiments with fantastic literature, melancholy, detective fiction and film, and his writing on colonial Taiwan. I combine close readings of texts with a broader exploration of cultural and social issues of the Taisho period (1912--1926). The study begins with a consideration of Sato's use of the fantastic as a response to literary naturalism. I then consider Sato's canonical works, which are closely identified with melancholy. Relating Sato's use of melancholy to contemporary discourses on mental illness, nerves, and urbanization, I suggest that Sato used melancholy as a framework for exploring the nature of modernity. Further, Sato's detective fiction is closely linked to the popular culture, particularly film, of his day. I examine the intersection of high and popular culture in Sato's detective fiction and discover a close symbiotic relationship between print and film and that Sato was a perceptive observer of the cinema. Finally, I consider Sato's colonial fiction based on a trip he took to Taiwan in 1920. Sato's work begins as an exotic escape to the colony but develops into a mature vision of civilization critique. The image of Sato that emerges is not one of an aesthetic escapist but rather one of a creative and ambivalent writer whose works incorporated many of the social and colonial contradictions of his time.