Kasai Zenzo
If you just try and keep drinking without a care in the world
Author | 16 January 1887 – 23 July 1928
Every organization has that one person who is funny to observe from afar, but a complete nuisance in close proximity. They get violent when drunk, knocking down beer bottles, covering themselves in vomit, and habitually exhibiting bizarre, eccentric behavior.
Author of numerous I-novels in the Taisho era (1912–1926), Kasai Zenzo—sometimes called the “Drunkard Author”—could surely be counted among these people.
But even if you’ve heard of him, not many among you will actually know any of his work by name. Some of his representative works include With the Children in Tow and Mourning Father. His work was always grounded in the negative aspects about himself: poverty, drunken frenzy, and illness. While some contemporaries such as Kikuchi Kan criticized his work, saying it was “not literature,” his self-deprecating writing style earned him many fans as well, especially among male students.
But in discussing Zenzo’s writing and his life, it is impossible to do so without also talking about his hardships. Even his breakthrough piece, With the Children in Tow, tells a story about poverty in which a father and his children wander the streets.
What, then, was the source of Zenzo’s hardship? Why was he so very poverty-stricken? Well, in his case, it’s not that he had no work. It’s that he wouldn’t work.
