Portrait of a Poet with a Painter's Eye: A Study of Satō Haruo's Den'en no Yū'utsu (Pastoral Melancholy)

Abstract

How did Satō Haruo's devotion to oil painting before his debut as a writer affect his later literary activity? The Post-Impressionists Satō favored expanded the concept of “realism,” which was originally supposed to be objective, to include the state of subjectivity. The resulting confusion became the theme of Satō's first short story “Enkō” (“The Halo”). His masterpiece Den'en no Yū'ustsu also contains excessively visual imagery intended, in accordance with Post-Impressionist theory, to capture the will of an object, creating a conflict with the protagonist's literary sensibility which, it may be argued, structures the work. The conflicts among the sensibilities that different artistic genres require was a theme Satō pursued throughout his life, and originates in his experience as an oil painter at the beginning of his career.