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be a novelist and desired to write a novel that was better than the works of Tōson and Doppo. This, we feel, is the basic reason why Katai did not employ the drama form of Einsame Menschen.
Another reason why Katai selected a novel form could be that he wanted to renovate the prevailing literary technique in the novel form of the Kenyūsha writers. This aspiration of Katai is also manifested in the lines from his essay "My Anna Mahr" quoted earlier: "Besides,. . . with regard to my work, I had to break the existing patterns and open up new roads." This attitude of Katai towards the Kenyūsha could be comprehensible from our observation of Katai's literary background before he wrote Futon. Katai was right from the very start a "nature" poet who expressed his emotions freely. This attitude of a poet was favorably advanced by learning the composition of waka as a pupil under Matsuura Tatsuo of the Keien school. The name of this school brings to mind that its precept was: "Be true to your emotions." We also recall that Katai was inspired by the works of several European naturalists, particularly the works of Maupassant, and their influence determined him to write a "realistic" novel expressing "freely even of the secrets of human life and even of the whisperings of the devil." Katai's travelling sketches, in which he wrote stories about what he had seen and heard on his nationwide travels, served to put his aspirations into practice. In addition, his participation in the Russo–Japanese War gave him profitable experience by enabling him to write about actual incidents that had taken place on the battlefield. When we trace through the literary background of Katai we can readily see that Katai's sole aspiration was to write a novel, not a drama, which would in effect "break the existing patterns and open up new roads."
