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extra=23 November 1891 – 1 March 1952 was a Japanese people popular playwright, novelist and haiku poet (under the pen-name of Santei) active during the late Taishō and early Shōwa periods of Japan. His wife and the wife of Nagai Tatsuo were sisters, making them brothers-in-law.
Kume's debut as a playwright came with Gyunyuya no Kyōdai ("Milkman’s Siblings"), which was staged in 1914 and proved to be very popular. By 1916, he had published his first novel Chichi no Shi ("My Father's Death") and a play Abukuma Shinju ("Love Suicides at Abukuma"). In 1918, he founded the Kokumin Bungeikai ("People's Arts Movement") with Kaoru Osanai and Mantarō Kubota. His fame and kudos as a novelist grew when he wrote a series of stories, including Hotaru Gusa ("Firefly Weeds"), Hasen ("Shipwreck"), and Bosan ("Visit to a Grave"), about his unrequited love for Natsume Sōseki's eldest daughter (he proposed to her via her parents, as was the prevailing practice at the time, but she surprised everyone by announcing her love for Kume's classmate and close friend Yuzuru Matsuoka instead). In 1925, Kume wrote an essay, Shishōsetsu to Shinkyō shōsetsu ("The I-Novel and the Mental State Novel"), which became a classic in defining those two literary forms. In 1933, he wrote a melodramatic novel Tsuki yori no shisha ("Messenger from the Moon"), which was a major best-seller. Kume was arrested in Kamakura in 1933, along with fellow literati Matsutarō Kawaguchi and Ton Satomi for illegal card gambling. In 1938, Kume joined the Pen Butai (lit. "Pen corps"), a government organisation consisting of authors who travelled the front during the Second Sino-Japanese War to write favourably of Japan's war efforts in China, (2026). 9780367355739, Routledge. ISBN 9780367355739 and later the Nihon bungaku hōkokukai ("Patriotic Association for Japanese Literature"), led by Sohō Tokutomi and himself.
Kume suffered from high blood pressure much of his life, and died of a cerebral hemorrhage. His grave is at the temple of Zuisen-ji in Kamakura. After Kume's death, his house was physically relocated from the Nikaido district of Kamakura to Kōriyama in Fukushima prefecture, where it now houses the Kōriyama Bunkagu no Mori Museum. There is a bronze statue of Kume in the grounds of Hase-dera in Kamakura.
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