Novelist, playwright, poet, painter and thinker, born into a viscount’s family. He left Tokyo Imperial University, and afterwards founded the magazine “Shirakaba” with Naoya Shiga and other fellow pupils from the Gakushuin. Turning away from the Tolstoy to whom he had been devoted, he developed a literature of bold individualism that affirmed the self. In 1918 he founded “Atarashiki Mura” (the New Village), aiming to remake his own life and society, and lived there communally until the end of the Taisho era. In the Showa era his interest in art deepened, and he left plain and companionable painting and calligraphy.