Kōnosuke Hinatsu

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Kōnosuke Hinatsu was the pen name of Kunito Higuchi, a Japanese poet and university professor. He was born on February 22, 1890, in Iida, Nagano, and died on June 13, 1971, in Iida. Hinatsu wrote romantic and gothic poetry shaped by English literature, and he was inspired by writers like Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe. He also helped bring English poetry into Japanese through translation. Hinatsu founded the poetry magazine Shijin (Poets) in 1915 with Daigaku Horiguchi and Yaso Saijō, and in 1917 he published Tenshin no sho, the first collection of his own work, which he called "gothic romanticism" with rich symbolism.

He wrote Meiji Taisho shi shi (History of Poetry in the Meiji and Taisho eras) in 1929, the first scholarly history of modern Japanese poetry. Hinatsu became a professor of English literature at Waseda University in 1931. He resigned in 1935, earned a doctorate, and returned to teach at Waseda in 1939. In 1949 he expanded his history into three volumes and won the Yomiuri Prize in 1950.

In 1952 Hinatsu moved to Aoyama Gakuin University as a professor of English literature. He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in 1956 and returned to his hometown of Iida. He went back to Tokyo to teach again in 1961 and stayed at Aoyama Gakuin until his death in 1971.

Hinatsu was often in poor health and was a devout Roman Catholic, keeping a Virgin Mary icon in his room. A memorial building in his honor opened in Iida in 1986.