This thesis deals with Yamamuro Shizuka’s reception of Nordic literature, especially that of Selma Lagerlöf. Yamamuro is the first Japanese author who received Nordic literature comprehensively and systematically. I analyze how Yamamuro received Nordic literature and why he did so, to analyze the prototype of Nordic image as a nostalgic idyll and Lagerlöf as a visionary pacifist.

　First, I will write about Yamamuro’s life and thoughts. He was a Marxist and renounced the left (known as “Tenkō” or “changing direction”). After the Second World War he founded the magazine Kindaibungaku (“modern literature”), in collaboration with five other authors who had also changed direction. Their purpose was to provide a national community, because they thought that the callowness of the modern ego had been the cause of militarism and fascism. Yamamuro and the other members often presented Nordic literature in Kindaibungaku.

　Next, I will analyze the relationship between Yamamuro’s ideas about modernism and his reception of Nordic literature. After his ideological change of direction, Yamamuro criticized American, Russian and German literature, which he had previously presented often as a Marxist, stating that the revolution was too superficial and temporary. At that time he empathized with classic literature from Japan and China. But Yamamuro was not engaged in the presentation of classic literature, because in his opinion, the classical authors had no reason, and therefore, no conflict. Therefore, Yamamuro embraced Nordic literature as the periphery of modernity for countries such as Japan, which did not show evidence of high modernity, in contrast to nations such as America, Russia and Germany, which were not stagnant as were the old Japan and China.

　It is well known that Kunikida Doppo was greatly influenced by William Wordsworth and that the influence can be identified in his various works. One of his short stories “Koharu” (“The Indian Summer”), written in 1900, is among them. In my article, I discuss how Doppo’s “Koharu” closely imitates the structure of “Tintern Abbey” (1798), namely, the contrast of the past and the present; he also establishes a close parallel between the two works with regard to their thematic content – the meaning of which he intimately grasps. Therefore, Doppo once more immerses himself in the Wordsworthian world and revives himself, be it though for a brief time. In the story, Doppo accompanies himself with a young painter on his trip to Musashino in a way similar to that in which Wordsworth accompanied himself with his sister Dorothy on his second visit to the Wye as “an incarnation of his earlier self,” ⁽¹⁾ for both of them well knew “[t]he still, sad music of humanity.”⁽²⁾

　In addition to discussing the comparison of the theme and structure of these two works, this article focuses on another intimate relation found in “Koharu” – its creative use of Miyazaki Koshoshi’s Wordsworth (1893), the first Wordsworthian biography written in Japanese, which is mostly based on F. W. H. Myers’s Wordsworth (1885), one of the greatest biographies ever composed on the poet. “Koharu” contains several passages from Koshoshi’s biography which invite Doppo to remember his old days in the country and one of which is taken significantly from Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes. Since no scholar to date has paid attention to this fact, its significance will be emphatically discussed in this article.

　Notes: (1) Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (Faber, 1961), p. 133.

　 (2) Jack Stillinger, ed., William Wordsworth: Selected Poems and Prefaces,Riverside edition (1965), p. 110.