Izumi Kyka (given name, Kytar) was a prolific novelist and playwright who, at a time when Japanese writers were finding inspiration in the realistic European novel, chose to write in a lyrical, imagistic vein that owed much to Edo-period precedents. "How glad I am to owe nothing to [Count Leo] Tolstoy," he insisted in declaring his indifference to those Western narrative conventions that redefined Japanese literature during the Meiji and Taish periods. Although he was relegated to a place outside the literary mainstream of his own day, he of course could not altogether avoid some contemporary trends. With the naturalists he shared an obsession with the self, yet he rejected the notion of a transparent linguistic medium that would supposedly make possible an undistorted representation of reality. Preferring to use the connotative force of literary language as it had developed in symbiosis with the visual arts, he set...