Building upon the work of Ashiya Nobukazu, this article illustrates the influence of Constance Garnett’s English-language translations of two stories by Ivan Turgenev̶ ‘The Old Woman’ (in ‘Poems in Prose’, 1897) and ‘The Dream’ (1897)̶upon Kunikida Doppo’s short story ‘Unmei Ronja’ (The Fatalist, 1903). I argue that ‘The Dream’ inspired the thematization in ‘The Fatalist’ of certain “forces of fate” that surpass the “powers of man” and that are linked to the “mystery” of a character’s “secret birth.” I further demonstrate that ‘The Old Woman’ and ‘The Fatalist’ share the common motif of a personified “fate” that drives man downwards into a “hole.” Indeed, ‘The Fatalist’ presents a plot that could be interpreted as portraying the power of “fate” to lead a person to commit suicide.
Natsume Soseki read ‘The Fatalist’ upon its republication in Doppo’s collection of short stories, Unmei (Destiny, 1906), and stated that he found something “new” in the story. Around this time, Soseki published chapter eleven of Wagahai wa Neko de Aru (I Am a Cat, 1906), in which the protagonist, a cat, remarks, “Human fate ends in suicide.” The experience of reading ‘The Fatalist’ may have encouraged Soseki to describe suicide as “human fate”̶a point of great literary-historical interest given that Soseki would later speak of the “fatedness” of “K’s” suicide and of “Sensei’s” likely suicide in the novel Kokoro (The Heart, 1914).
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