Días de invierno

Kajii Motojiro's literary production is located in a crucial phase of modern Japan. After the great Kanto earthquake (1923), the need to redefine Japanese identity arises in the intellectual world. Although Kajii collects the stimuli of the main literary currents of the time, its content and style are not attributable to a specific current. In the fifteen stories collected in this anthology, his lyrical prose combines the exploration of the inner world with the Japanese tradition, Baudelaire, Poe, and the aesthetic contemplation of reality. Disease is a mole in which recurring elements converge, such as the mapping of the cultural boundary between metropolis and province and the motif of the doppelgänger as the transcendence of the material ego. The stories composed during his stay in Izu delve into the motifs of light and dark in connection with the dualism between life and death. In his last years he became interested in Marxism again, addressing in some stories the issue of tuberculosis through the realistic perspective of the social conditions of the population of the Osaka suburbs.