The first is the Zen Buddhist lay-priest Basho, who took excursions to remote regions, composing as the mood struck him, so that his poetry is set within travel accounts, the prose sections of which are also significant. He is revered as the greatest of Japanese poets for his sensitivity and profundity and is particularly noted for his Narrow Road Through the Deep North (1964; trans. 1966). The second is Yosa Buson, whose haiku express his experience as a painter. The third is Kobayashi Issa, a poet of humble origin, who drew his material from village life. Comic poetry, in a variety of forms, also flourished during the Edo period.

Modern Period (1867 to the present)

Throughout the modern period Japanese writers were influenced by other literatures, primarily those of the West, and they refashioned many foreign literary concepts and techniques in fiction and poetry.

19th Century

The humorist Kanagaki Robunis a transitional figure who attempted vainly to adapt himself to the new age but basically adhered to the comic style of the Edo period. Translations from Western literature, at first primarily from works of British authors, gave impetus to the political novel, an interesting if not highly literary genre that prevailed throughout the 1880s. Kajin no kigu (Chance Meeting with Two Beauties), by Tokai Sanshi, is an extravagant and unintentionally humorous work tracing the travels and fortunes of a young Japanese politician. The critical work Shosetsu shinzui (The Essence of the Novel, 1885), by the writer Tsubouchi Shoyo, argues for a prose art grounded in realism, on the Western model. The next step forward in modernization was The Drifting Cloud (1887; trans. 1967) by Futabatei Shimei, the first serious novel in the colloquial language.

The Kenyusha (The Society of the Friends of the Inkstone), a student literary society founded by the novelist and poet Ozaki Koyo, became important in Japanese literary life after 1890. The society influenced the creation of a new literature that maintained traditional aesthetic values while incorporating Western techniques. A young writer so influenced, Higuchi Ichiyo, deftly traces the psychology of children and young lovers in a number of short stories. Her Growing Up (1896; trans. 1956) is generally considered her masterpiece.

20th Century

French naturalistic fiction attracted young Japanese authors, who soon developed a naturalism of their own with less social content and far greater subjectivity. The leading figure in this naturalistic style is Shimazaki Toson, whose Hakai (The Breaking of the Commandment, 1906), describing the confession of an outcast youth, firmly established the movement. Two exceedingly important figures, Mori Ogai and Natsume Soseki, stood aloof from this dominating French tradition. Ogai drew his inspiration primarily from German literature. He was active in writing poetry, drama, novels, and historical biography. Perhaps his best work of fiction is The Wild Geese (1911-13; trans. 1959), which examines with remarkable acuity the feelings of a girl who is forced to be the mistress of a usurer. Soseki was a scholar of English literature before he turned to imaginative writing. His monumental achievement in the psychological novel makes him unquestionably one of the greatest writers Japan has produced in modern times. In his works written between 1905 and his death in 1916 he created a fictional world that constitutes a ruthless indictment of modern egoism. His incomplete last work, Meian (Light and Darkness), is perhaps the only modern Japanese novel that in scope and depth resembles the achievement of the Russian masters.

In the period from 1910 to 1930 Akutagawa Ryunosuke, a disciple of Soseki, created a highly structured, polished short-story form that, in English translation, has found admirers throughout the world. "Rashomon" (1915), which was made into a motion picture, is one of his tales that was translated in Rashomon and Other Stories (1952).