Shugoro Yamamoto

Shugoro Yamamoto wrote about ordinary people in the back streets and refused every literary prize he was offered, including the Naoki. He is no relation to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto; he was born Satomu Shimizu and took the name of the pawnshop owner who employed him as a boy and paid for his schooling. He worked as an apprentice, a reporter and a clerk, and wrote popular fiction for magazines for thirty years, which the literary establishment regarded as a lower category and he did not. His subject is people without power: craftsmen, prostitutes, tenement families, minor samurai in reduced circumstances, treated without condescension and without uplift. Kurosawa filmed three of his books - Sanjuro, Red Beard and Dodes'ka-den - and Red Beard in particular, set in a charity clinic in Edo, is close to a statement of Yamamoto's whole position. Nagai Kafu and others thought him the best storyteller of his generation. His story about the Russo-Japanese war concerns a village and its conscripts rather than the fleet, which is characteristic: the war reaches his characters as absence, telegrams and debt. He turned down the Naoki Prize in 1943 on the grounds that a writer should be judged by readers and not committees, and kept refusing afterwards. Kurosawa said he had learned from him how to look at people. His pen name is a small act of gratitude that he never explained beyond the fact. He wrote something like forty volumes and refused, besides the Naoki, both the Mystery Writers of Japan award and a literary prize offered late in life. He died of liver failure at sixty-three.

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