Futabatei Shimei
Futabatei Shimei (Japanese二 叶 亭 四 迷; born April 4, 1864 in the prefecture of Tokyo, † May 10, 1909 at the Bay of Bengal ), actually Tatsunosuke Hasegawa (Japanese长谷川 辰 之 助), was a writer and the first artistic translator of Russian literature into Japanese.
Life
Futabatei came from the lower feudal nobility. He studied literature and Russian 1881-1886 on the Tokyo Foreign Language School (now the University of Tokyo foreign language ). He worked until 1887 as a translator in the civil service; of 1899-1902 Russian lecturer at the Foreign Language School in Tokyo. Traveling to Vladivostok, Harbin and Beijing. Futabatei befriended Tsubouchi Shoyo, the author of the first modern novel theory of Japan. He translated Russian Literature ( Gogol, Turgenev, and others) and wrote stories and novels.
After the outbreak of the Russo -Japanese War (1904 ) he worked as a journalist for the daily newspaper Asahi Shinbun. He went in 1908 as the Special Rapporteur of the Asahi Shinbun to Saint Petersburg. There he was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. He died in the episode during his return to Japan.