Kazuo Hirotsu
| Kazuo Hirotsu | |
|---|---|
Kazuo Hirotsu
|
|
| Native name | 広津 和郎 |
| Born |
5 December 1891 Tokyo, Japan |
| Died | 21 September 1968 (aged 76) Atami, Shizuoka, Japan |
| Resting place | Yanaka Cemetery, Tokyo |
| Occupation | Novelist, literary critic, translator |
| Language | Japanese |
| Alma mater | Waseda University |
| Genre | novels |
| Literary movement | Proletarian literature, I novel |
| Notable awards |
Noma Literary Prize (1963) Mainichi Literary Prize (1963) |
Kazuo Hirotsu (広津 和郎 Hirotsu Kazuo?, 5 December 1891 – 21 September 1968) was a Japanese novelist, literary critic and translator active in the Shōwa period.
Hirotsu was born in the Ushigome neighborhood Tokyo as the second son of the noted novelist Hirotsu Ryurō, whose pupils included Kafū Nagai. He had problems completing Azabu Middle School due to poor health and his complete incompetence in mathematics. At the time he was also working part-time delivering newspapers, and his inability to add often meant that his parents had to make up for the short-fall in his accounts.
However, Hirotsu did show a talent for literature from an early age. His literary debut came with a short story submitted to a contest in a newspaper when he was 17 years old. The story won a prize of 10 Yen, which was a reasonable sum of money in 1908. While attending Waseda University Hirotsu started submitting articles to various literary journals. One of his classmates at Waseda was Hinatsu Kōnosuke. In 1912, Hirotsu joined Zenzō Kasai in establishing a literary magazine, Kiseki (“Miracle”), to which he contributed short stories and translated works of foreign authors. The magazine ceased publication the following year after seven editions.
In 1913, Hirotsu published a translation of Guy de Maupassant's Une Vie, which marked the beginning of a career of literary criticism and translation of various European writers. The same year, he graduated from Waseda University, and his family was evicted from their rented house due to inability to pay the rent. The following year, he was hospitalized for tuberculosis. His stepmother was also diagnosed with the disease, and his father and stepmother relocated to Nagoya, living Hirotsu at a boarding house in Tokyo, where he shared a room with Zenzō Kasai for a time, while attempting to find work as a translator and submitting stories to newspapers and magazines. Hirotsu relocated from Tokyo to coastal Kamakura, Kanagawa from 1916.
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