ABSTRACT
MORI ŌGAI, as this brief study hopefully has helped to show, deserves the reputation as a major figure it, twentieth-century cultural and artistic history that the Japanese have given him. Critical opinion there has stressed his resolution to grasp and disseminate Western ideas, especially in German literature and philosophy. Japanese scholars also credit him, along with Futabatei Shimei, with introducing Western modes of psychological expression into Japanese literature, and with successfully enlarging the scope of Japanese fiction to include intellectual and philosophical themes once reserved for poetry and essays. The themes of his stories, indeed, often deal either with Western subjects, such as the early German tales, or with themes seldom taken up in the traditional Japanese literature of artistic merit—the psychology of marital discord, for example, or the relationships between political and personal malaise. Even the historical stories treat their material in an analytical fashion altogether different from the way in which a Tokugawa writer of historical tales—Ueda Akinari, for example—might have done.
