Photo/Illutration Kinmochi Saionji likely sent this letter, seen here at the Mori Ogai Memorial Museum in Tsuwano, Shimane Prefecture, on Aug. 4, to Mori Ogai when the politician donated a framed work of calligraphy to the author, at Ogai’s request, in 1916. (Tetsuro Kitamura)

TSUWANO, Shimane Prefecture--A newly discovered trove of 400 or so letters addressed to Mori Ogai offers a valuable insight into the broad company the famed author kept, according to officials of a museum here in the writer’s native town.

The municipal Mori Ogai Memorial Museum in Tsuwano, Shimane Prefecture, is dedicated to the literary giant who was born in 1862 and died exactly a century ago.

The missives, which were discovered in a clump, include the names of prominent individuals active in the Meiji (1868-1912) and Taisho (1912-1926) eras, among them writer Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), poet Akiko Yosano (1878-1942), poet Ishikawa Takuboku (1886-1912) and art critic Tenshin Okakura (1863-1913), museum officials said.

They were previously kept by Tamaki Yamada (1893-1943), a scholar of French literature and Ogai’s son-in-law, and his colleague at the University of Tokyo library, and were recently found by their family members.

Among those who wrote to Ogai are figures who had won fame in literary, dramatic and art circles, along with politicians such as Aritomo Yamagata (1838-1922) and Kinmochi Saionji (1849-1940), both of whom served as prime minister.

Some of the letters from the more than 60 individuals were dated between 1896 and 1922, but many others bore no date, museum officials explained.

Media representatives were given a sneak peek of four of the letters after museum officials had scrutinized them. The others, including those sent by Soseki and Takuboku, are currently being studied by experts.

In one of the letters shown to the media, Kyoko Natsume (1877-1963), Soseki’s wife, thanks Ogai, who was also an army surgeon, for sending a subordinate to ask after Soseki’s health after her husband vomited a large volume of blood and fell into a critical state at the Shuzenji hot spring resort in Izu Peninsula, Shizuoka Prefecture, in 1910.

The episode was previously only known from an entry in Soseki’s diary.

Another letter, sent by Akiko Yosano as she was leaving for Paris in 1912 to follow her poet husband Tekkan Yosano (1873-1935), shows that Ogai helped raise Akiko’s traveling expenses, the officials said.

“It is a surprise, before everything else, that such a large number of letters have been found in a single clump,” said Kazuhide Yamazaki, a scholar of Ogai’s works who serves as director of the Tsuwano museum. “The letters offer a glimpse of Ogai’s caring and considerate nature, which will also help enrich research on the prominent senders.”

Yamazaki is chief director with the Atomi Gakuen educational institution.

Museum staff plan to finish transcribing the letters by the end of this fiscal year. After that, they intend to analyze and scrutinize the texts and backgrounds to the incidents mentioned ahead of publishing their research results in the form of collected letters in 2025, which marks the 30th anniversary of the opening of the museum, the officials said.

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