The Stories of MAEDAKO Hiroichiro in his ‘American’          Period

NAKADA Sachiko

doi:10.20613/hikaku.41.0_106

For Maedako Hiroichiro (1888-1957), a proletarian writer active mainly in the 1920s, his years in Chicago and New York (1907-20) seem to hover over most of his subsequent writing days, involving such American issues as democracy, capitalism, socialism, anti-Japanese sentiment, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and the like.　Such pieces of his as “The Unity of Asia,” “The Mikado’s Crane Room” (both 1912)，and “The Monument” (1913) were written in English and were printed in such socialistic journals as The Progressive Woman and The Coming Nation. “Green Houses,” originally “The Cherry Blossom”（1916)，was a sort of Japanology “collaborated” on with Floyd Dell. Maedako recollects that Theodore Dreiser and H.L.Menken, too, eagerly urged him to write such “Japanese” stories，that is, stories which were exotic and romantic, like the ones Lafcadio Hearn had “wrongly” expounded to the West.　Not inclined to gratify their expectations, however, Maedako ceased to write stories in English and commenced writing in Japanese, whereby he produced the works “Gama no Kawa”（Toad- Skin，Kyoson，1917)，“Sawa no Dan” (Sawa’s Story，Japanese-America Cammerial Weekly，1918)，and “Yubiwa no tameni”（For a Ring, do., 1919). Respectively, these were about his home town, a crowd on board a ship, and the joys and sorrows of Japanese immigrants. All three are considered to lead to the works he later produced during the height of his activity, both in their stance and topics.

The Stories of MAEDAKO Hiroichiro in his ‘American’ Period

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