Background Facts about 'At Kinosaki'

Shiga Naoya wrote "At Kinosaki" (Kinosaki ni te ) in 1917, when he was 34 years old. The story is based on his real experience in the autumn of 1913, when he was recovering at the hot springs of Kinosaki, from an accident which nearly took his life. Shiga was walking with a friend toward Shibaura one evening along beside the train track of the Yamanote Line when the train hit him from behind. The incident is recorded in Shiga's diary, and was believed to be the material on which an unfinished work called "Inochi" written by Shiga in 1914 was based. All the incidents that take place in the novel did actually happen in the same period of time of three weeks.

"At Kinosaki" is considered to be a fine example of Shiga Naoya's famous style of writing, and an exemplary model of the "I novel" (shi-shosetsu ) . It is also a work often used as a great example of a novel written in a movement coined as the "Naturalism" movement; which describes writers attempting to take scientific methods of observation and turn it into literature. Shiga Naoya is reported to have said that he never attempted to draw a line between s

Quotes from the original Japanese text taken from the version printed in:

The final sentence of the work takes us again to the 'present' of the story three years later, from where the story began. In this way it closes what can be seen as a frame of the story, while also informing the reader that he did in fact survive the "two or three year" danger period where he might catch tuberculosis, mentioned in the first paragraph.

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2347
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)