ABSTRACT
Guo Moruo, the pen name of Guo Kaizhen, was born in 1892 in the Sichuanese town of Leshan, the son of a wealthy merchant family of Hakka origin. After receiving traditional schooling in his childhood and further pursuing his education in Jiading and Chengdu, he moved to Japan in early 1914 to specialize in medicine. It was during his Japanese years that, thanks to his proficiency in German, English, and Japanese, he first devoted himself to reading foreign literature and began his career as a writer and translator. By his own account, he began writing poetry in vernacular as early as 1916: his earliest poems were published in 1919 in the Shanghai literary supplement The Lamp of Learning (Xuedeng). In 1921, while in Tokyo, he co-founded the Creation Society, a literary association committed to the promotion of Romanticism, self-expression, “l’art pour l’art-ism,” and international literature. Among the founding members were other like-minded Chinese students and writers-to-be, such as Yu Dafu, Cheng Fangwu, and Tian Han. Shortly after his arrival in Japan, Guo also met a Japanese nurse, Satō Tomiko, who became his common-law wife despite a previous arranged marriage celebrated before his departure.
