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Before the Dawn
1924 · translated from the Japanese · 437 pages
Before the Dawn
by Toyohiko Kagawa
The full Japanese text is public domain and free to read — linked below.
On this page: a summary of Before the Dawn, and our clean edition as a PDF or EPUB.
Kagawa was converted by missionary teachers as a schoolboy in Japan and disowned by his family for it. In 1909, aged twenty-one, he moved into the Shinkawa slum of Kobe and stayed. This is the novel he made out of those years: Niimi Eiichi loses his inheritance, loses his health, and goes on living among people the rest of the city had written off. It sold in the hundreds of thousands in Japan, and it is the least sentimental book about charity you will read.
The changed life
Born in Kobe to a businessman and a concubine and orphaned young, Kagawa (1888–1960) was taught English by American missionaries, took their Bible class, and was baptized — for which his remaining family disowned him. He answered by moving into the worst slum in the city at twenty-one. He studied at Princeton from 1914 to 1916, came back, organized labour, and was arrested in 1921 and again in 1922 for it. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947 and 1948 and for the Peace Prize in 1954 and 1955.
Summary
Niimi Eiichi is a student at Meiji Gakuin in Tokyo, reading Indian philosophy on a hillside and arguing about Spinoza with friends who think his Christianity is a phase. He goes home to his father's new house, is disinherited, and drops out. The first quarter of the book is that quarrel — between a son who has been converted and a family that regards the conversion as a debt he has run up against them.
The rest is Kobe. Eiichi takes a room in the Shinkawa slum and the novel simply stays there, chapter after short chapter, with the gamblers, the prostitutes, the rag-pickers, the drunks who come to make trouble, the sick man he nurses, and the children who die. Kagawa neither romanticizes them nor recoils: people are named, their rent is quoted in sen, and their funerals are counted.
The book is a novel and we shelve it as one, but it is the account of what Kagawa himself did, and it made him famous in Japan for doing it. The English translation by I. Fukumoto and T. Satchell was published in New York in 1924; its publishers changed the literal title, Across the Death Line, because readers took it for a book about the afterlife.
Who was Toyohiko Kagawa?
Toyohiko Kagawa (1888–1960) was born in Kobe, the son of a businessman and a concubine, and was orphaned young. American missionary teachers taught him English and took him through a Bible class; he was baptized, and his remaining family disowned him for it.
In 1909, at twenty-one, he moved into the Shinkawa slum of Kobe. He studied at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1914 to 1916, returned to Japan, and became one of the founders of its labour movement — arrested in 1921 and again in 1922 for his part in strikes. Shisen o Koete, the novel translated here, appeared in 1920 and sold enormously; his publishers in New York put the figure at about half a million copies in Japan and the East.
He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947 and 1948, and for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1954 and 1955.
A note on the text. Before the Dawn is in the public domain. What you’re buying is our edition: the careful typesetting and correction. The original text is also available free here.
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