Diary of the one who is not Deceived

欺かざるの記 Azamukazaru no Ki

Diary of the one who is not Deceived is the name of the diary kept by the novelist and poet Kunikida Doppo (Aug. 30, 1871 - June 23, 1908). Although he wrote it in the 1890s, it was not published until after his death. It chronicles the vicissitudes of the mind and soul of an ambitious youth, whose disappointment in his dabblings in politics drove him to become a writer. His basic worldview is steeped in the thought of Wordsworth and Carlyle, and his cosmos--an infinite world of Nature--is crowned by a monotheistic God. While his God ostensibly comes from his Christian faith, which he adopted early on in his youth but grew away from as he got older, it never deplaces the Japanese people's aboriginal conceptions of spirit and divinity. It rather complements these, completes them. But he no doubt had a hard time reconciling the philosophical premises of Western theology, namely the absolute opposition between God and the World and between Man and Nature, with the universal animism of that spirituality that was with him before he discovered Christianity and Western thought--and that might explain why he was finally estranged from Christianity.

My translation is based off the Shunyodo edition published in 1922, which can be found here. Any errors are my own fault, and anyone who wants to offer corrections or alternatives to my translation choices may email me at tmcmillin490@gmail.com.

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