Fubō Hayashi

Kaitarō Hasegawa
Hasegawa Kaitarō (Hayashi Fubō)
Native name	長谷川海太郎
Born	(1900-01-17)17 January 1900 Sado island, Niigata prefecture, Japan
Died	29 June 1935(1935-06-29) (aged 35) Kamakura, Kanagawa Japan
Resting place	Myohon-ji, Kamakura, Japan
Occupation	Writer
Language	Japanese

Kaitarō Hasegawa (長谷川海太郎, Hasegawa Kaitarō, 17 January 1900 - 29 June 1935) was a novelist in the early Shōwa period Japan. He wrote under three different pen names, each with a unique personality, and caused a sensation with the sheer brilliance of his fiction, non-fiction and translations.

Born on Sado island, Niigata prefecture, Hasegawa was the brother of novelist Shirō Hasegawa. His older brother was a painter, and his younger brother was a translator of Russian literature. His father was a newspaper journalist, and relocated to Hakodate in Hokkaidō, where Hasegawa was exposed at an early age to a cosmopolitan environment with many foreign influences. He was accepted at Meiji University in Tokyo, but in 1918 quit his studies and travlled to the United States on the Nippon Yusen steamer Katori Maru, and worked as a cook while studying at Oberlin College in Ohio. It is not certain whether or not he actually graduated, but in August 1920, he decided to leave school and experience life by wandering all over the United States sightseeing and taking notes on his experiences. In 1924, he returned to Japan by working his way on cargo vessels, via South America, Australia and Dalian in the Kwantung Leased Territory, from which he went overland via Korea back to Japan. He intended to return across the Pacific to complete an around-the-world journey, but was refused a visa due to increasingly restrictive immigration rules by the United States, and decided remain in Japan to try his luck as a writer.