Arishima Takeo's first encounter with Christianity took place in the late 1880s, the beginning of a deep attachment to Christian ideas. The connections between Arishima and Uchimura Kanzō, the most influential Japanese Christian of his day, were complex. Arishima's break with Christianity came about because of his experience of working at a Quaker asylum in Pennsylvania, which gave rise to Arishima's later apostasy. Several of Arishima's most famous works contain Christian themes, especially his 1919 play, A Triptych.\

Introduction

Arishima Takeo (1878–1923) was a significant Japanese author, whose most famous novel Aru Onna (A Certain Woman,* 1919) has been acclaimed as one of the most important Japanese works of fiction written in the 20th century.1 However, Arishima also wrote a large number of other works of fiction, which gained high praise among his contemporaries and, in addition, he was a social reformer, producing a large number of polemical essays on matters of social concern.2 Arishima's Christian faith was such that the famous Christian writer and educator Uchimura Kanzō (1861–1930) declared that “I and others thought that [Arishima] would succeed me as the advocate of independent Christianity in Japan” (cited in Morton 1988, 42). This chapter will outline Arishima's relationship with Christianity, and its influence on several of his writings.

Arishima's first encounter with Christianity

Arishima was born in Tokyo as the eldest son of a prominent Satsuma domain samurai family. After his father Takeshi became head of the Yokohama Customs Office, Arishima spent the ages from four to fourteen with his family in Yokohama. The “chronology” of his life, written when he was forty and published in March 1918, records his education in English, which was to prepare him for his three years at the Yokohama Eiwa Gakkō (a Christian mission school) from 1884 to 1887.3 The “chronology” states that Arishima had his first contact with Christianity here: this record shows that he attended Sunday school here, so Bible readings and the catechism were presumably part of the curriculum. This experience is crucial to an understanding of Arishima's life and work. Long before he declared his Christian faith at the Sapporo Agricultural College (Sapporo nōgakkō), he was schooled in the basic tenets of Christianity.