Shimazaki Tōson's novel When the Cherries Ripen is the story of Kishimoto Sutekichi and his experience of Christianity during the second half of the Meiji period (1890s). The novel was first published in installments between 1912 and 1918 in Bunshō sekai, a popular readercontribution magazine of the Taishō period. Thus, young Sutekichi's struggles to find his own path combining faith and poetry are given as an example of growth, and resonate with the dilemmas of the young audience of the magazine, who were looking for self-cultivation and spiritual enrichment through reading and writing.

Introduction

As many Christians experience it, Christianity is not only a matter of believing in a specific doctrine, but also, and in some cases even more prominently, one of participating in communal ritual practices. Oftentimes, these practices might be only loosely connected to Christian precepts; they can be intertwined with non- or pre-Christian customs, and will vary according to the local material culture, but also according to the changing socio-political climate in which they exist and function. For example, in Romania, my home country, babies are baptized shortly after birth, in line with the superstition that baptism will make them calmer, grounding them firmly in “this world.” Also, in many families, church baptism is followed by “house” baptism, a pre-Christian ritual in which the baby is washed in water with rice, flowers, gold and other ingredients that will ensure health, wealth and good fortune. At any rate, receiving God and being baptized into Romanian Orthodoxy is not a choice for the new Christian, and requires no deep understanding of the precepts of Christianity—not even on the part of the parents. This is perhaps the reason why religious rituals such as baptism were allowed to continue during the communist decades, while regular churchgoing was discouraged and many spiritual leaders (priests, theologians) were persecuted and forbidden from openly discussing Christian doctrines. The negative attitude towards Christianity as anything more than a set of rituals comes from an over-emphasis on the Marxist idea that religion can make people ignorant to the realities around them and, as a result, stand in the way of the socialist revolution.