The many writers associated with Japanese naturalism during its period of greatest influence from 1906 to 1910 each found different ideas and motives borne by it. As a national literary movement that drew support from the provinces and transformed linguistic, intellectual, and artistic sensibilities, naturalism underlay the "bourgeois individualism" of Shimazaki Tson, the Wordsworthian Romanticism in the nature descriptions of Kunikida Doppo, the leveling and simplifying of style advocated by Tayama Katai, the nihilism of Masamune Hakuch, the nationalism of Hasegawa Tenkei, and the aestheticism of everyday life in the works of Shimamura Hgetsu. Iwano Hmei, in both his life and his writing, was the author who most thoroughly embodied these diverse and at times contradictory ideas and motives.

With the possible exception of Shimamura Hgetsu, Hmei was the most intellectually consistent and philosophically grounded theorist of Japanese naturalism, and his thinking has continued to influence Japanese literary, political, and...