Dictionary of Literary Biography on Kita Morio Kita Morio is one of the relatively few Japanese writers whose diverse

works have combined styles distinguished by deferential humor or high moral seriousness with shrewd psychological insights and social observation. At least two of his works, his early novel Yurei (1954; translated as Ghosts, 1992) and his lengthy and moving Nireke no hitobito (1962-1964; translated as The House of Nire [1984] and as The Fall of the House of Nire [1985]), are generally considered among the more impressive accomplishments of postwar Japanese literature. Kita was born as Sait Mungkichi on 1 May 1927, the second son of Sait Mokichi, who had studied psychopathology in Germany and Austria from 1921 until 1925 and then returned to Tokyo to run a well-known hospital and clinic for mental patients. Along with his clinical duties Mokichi had maintained a second career as a writer and poet, and his literary experiments in modernizing the traditional thirty-one-syllable waka form had made him one of the leading writers of his time. Raised in a sophisticated, highly Europeanized household, Kita perhaps naturally was interested in both of his father's professional endeavors. The boy was often in frail health, and life in the Sait family, as fictionally depicted in The House of Nire, apparently caused much anxiety in Kita, for his father maintained high standards of personal behavior for his children. Kita's original dream had been to become an entomologist, but, with some urging from his father, he began medical studies in 1948 at Thoku University and passed his state medical examinations in 1953. As a boy Kita admired his father's poetry, but despite the lyric qualities of some of Kita's own works, as a mature writer he has written relatively little verse. Modern European literature had interested Kita from his years as a member of the Sait family, and he was particularly interested in the works of Thomas Mann, whose Buddenbrooks (1901) and Tonio Krger (1903) remained his special favorites. After successfully completing his medical studies, Kita returned to Tokyo to work in his father's hospital as well as in another clinic, and he continued his full-time medical career until 1961 when he began to devote more time to writing. During this period Kita published, in addition to Ghosts, many stories in literary magazines, and in Tokyo literary circles he earned some reputation as a debutant writer from these pieces.

In 1958 and 1959 Kita took a position as ship's doctor on a voyage surveying tuna resources and extending through the Indian Ocean to Europe. This trip provided Kita with the experiences he incorporated in a series of successful humorous books beginning with Dokutoru Mamb kkaiki (1960; translated as Dr. Mamb at Sea, 1987), in which his alter ego, Doctor Mamb, undergoes various rueful adventures. In a very different disposition that same year Kita published another of his early successes, Yoru to kiri no sumi de (In a Corner of the Foggy Night), an account of the lives of German doctors whom the Nazis had forced to conduct experiments on mental patients during the war. For this work Kita won the coveted Akutagawa Prize. Following Kita's marriage in 1961 he published relatively little until 1964, when his House of Nire won the Mainichi Prize, another important literary award. Based loosely on his own family experiences, the literary strategy of the book owes much to Mann's Buddenbrooks, for Kita presents the careers and passions of three generations of the Nire household in a complex symphonic fashion. With detached humor Kita examines the foibles of Nire Kiichir, the founder of the Nire Hospital, and those of Kiichir's children and grandchildren. Perhaps the most important of these children is Tetsukichi, who goes to Germany to study medicine and whose character Kita has drawn from memories of his father. Tetsukichi's son Shuji, in turn, is modeled on Kita Morio. Swirling around these three figures are wives, sisters, relatives, servants, and even hospital patients--many sketched with the wit and compassion of a brilliant cartoonist. While Kita can describe with candor and poetic precision the psyches of his characters, he carefully places them in the context of those times in which they lived. In this respect the long novel offers a sharp, seldom flattering portrait of modern Japan between 1918 and 1946. It poignantly presents the sometimes cruel fate of independent-minded women through incidents involving Momoko, Dr. Nire's third daughter, who begins a loveless marriage for family reasons, remarries after her husband has died in difficult circumstances, and never reconciles with her family. In a series of hallucinatory scenes the narrative records the tragedies that many Japanese soldiers on islands in the Pacific Ocean suffered at the end of the war. Although Kita's father was a distinguished doctor and a brilliant poet, he was politically naive and had become an ardent nationalist during the war, and Kita's dour representation of the somber days at the end of the war may comment ironically on his father's misplaced enthusiasms. The novel evokes powerful, never sentimental emotions, as Kita's satiric eye

never closes. Kita attempted much, and contemporary Japanese writers such as Mishima Yukio pronounced the novel a masterpiece. In 1965 Kita joined a group of alpine climbers anxious to scale a peak in the Karakoram Range, the mountainous region of Kashmir, India, and Pakistan. These adventures formed the bases for Shiroki taoyaka na mine (White Graceful Peak, 1966), a novel that shows little of the poetry of his early work. Kita felt that capturing nature on such a scale was beyond the scope of any merely elegant description; nevertheless, the prose sections of his narrative are sometimes eloquent. In the late 1960s and through the 1970s Kita wrote what he called "nursery stories for adults," a series of poignant and charming morality tales: Sabishii sama (The Lonely King, 1969), Sabishii kojiki (The Lonely Beggar, 1974), and Sabishii himegimi (The Lonely Princess, 1977). Around 1974 Kita began working on another major project, a fictional presentation of the lives of Japanese settlers in South America between the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and the defeat of Japan in 1945. He traveled to these areas and began publishing this work as Kagayakeru aoki sora no shita de (Beneath the Brilliant Azure Sky). Published in 1982, the first section of this novel shows Kita's interests in the vicissitudes of history and human character and covers the end of the Taish period (1912-1926). The concluding section of the novel was published in 1986. Along with those fictional works that have serious historical and philosophical significance, Kita has continued to write light, humorous works that remain popular. Among the more successful of this latter group are Yasashii nyb wa satsujin oni (The Gentle Wife Is a Devilish Homicide, 1986) and Dai Nippon Teikoku supaman (Superman of Great Imperial Japan, 1987). The range of Kita's literary enthusiasms and the sophistication of his international background make him in some ways different from many of his contemporaries. Yet these qualities give his work a humanity and ensure for his work a continuing interest that distinguishes his representative works. The House of Nire, in particular, maintains a central position in the canon of postwar Japanese fiction.