Kajii Motojiro distilled the dark spirit of an era into a few seminal works of short fiction. He spent the Taisho years drifting between his native Osaka, Kyoto and technical training in engineering, then Tokyo where he attended the English literature faculty of the Imperial University (present-day Tokyo University) and helped found the literary journal Blue Sky (Aozora) only to withdraw to Yugashima hot springs for a health-cure for his life-long lung ailments. A voracious reader of Western literature, Kajii is often created with having introduced a Berliner Luft and stream-of-consciousness into modern Japanese writing at a time when the rising tide of militarism was exerting pressures upon expressionistic and leftist writings.
