ISODA KOICHI

Isoda Koichi was a literary critic and scholar of British literature. He was born in Yokohama and studied English literature at Tokyo University. His career as a critic began with a study of Mishima Yukio, Junkyo no bigaku (Aesthetics of Heresy, 1964). He continued to publish essays on Westernization and the Japanese tradition. His original Romanticist viewpoint switched to a more empirical mode after 1978 and he published Rokumeikan no keifu (Pedigree of the Deer Cry Pavilion, 1983), which garnered the Yomiuri Prize. The following year he started working as a professor, but died shortly thereafter.