Japanese literature followed a distinctive path of development where ‘the new did not replace the old, but was added to it’. In the late nineteenth century, after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan was opened to the ‘world’ after 200 years of isolationist foreign policy and began to integrate into what was termed ‘modern civilisation’. The literature of the West had a great influence on Japanese writers in this process: Japanese intellectuals set out to create a literature that would develop modern ideas and shape a new image of themselves.

This chapter explores how Gabriele D’Annunzio's works introduced new images of ‘modern’ men and women into Japanese literature at that time: a femme fatale who reigned over men, and a new male figure with ‘keen senses’ who replaced the old ideal of the Japanese man. D’Annunzio's works thus functioned as a catalyst for the transformation of the values of Japanese youth.

The first part of the chapter explores D’Annunzio's reception in fin-de-siècle Japan. The first work to introduce the image of the femme fatale in Japan was Bin Ueda's (1874–1916) abridged translation of Trionfo della morte; and intellectuals of the time saw the influence of his novels in the 1905 attempted double suicide of Sōhei Morita (1881–1949) and Haruko Hiratsuka (1886–1971), as well as in Morita's novel based on the incident, Baien (Sooty Smoke, 1909). The second section introduces a comparison between D’Annunzio's works and Morita's Sooty Smoke, demonstrating the extent to which D’Annunzio influenced the new qualities of men and women in Japanese literature. The last section examines how Sōseki Natsume (1867–1916), a prominent writer inspired to read D’Annunzio by Morita's scandal, interpreted them to construct an image of a ‘new man’ with acute sensibilities. This chapter thus explores a complex network of influences across various literary works to argue that the fin-de-siècle image of modern people emerged in Japanese literature precisely under the influence of D’Annunzio.

Trionfo della morte as a Starting Point

Gabriele D’Annunzio was introduced to the Japanese literary world at the end of the nineteenth century through French magazines. French translations began appearing in Le temps, Revue de Paris and Revue des deux mondes from 1893.