Shimazaki Toson

(1872 - 1943)

The son of a village headman in Nagano Prefecture, the novelist Shimazaki Toson cofounded the literary journal Bungakkai in 1894. He left for Paris in 1913 to work as a travel correspondent for a Tokyo newspaper but returned to Japan three years later. “Like the wanderer depicted standing at the nation’s edge, gazing wistfully at an exotic coconut that has washed ashore,” one historian wrote, Toson’s work invokes the “idea of a desirable exterior, a yearning after what lay beyond the nation’s boundaries—the dream of empire.”