In 1900, the future novelist Natsume Soseki — then a scholar of English literature — arrived in London to commence two years of study abroad. Back in Japan, his best friend, the renowned haiku poet Masaoka Shiki, had — as explained in the first installment of this series — adopted the painterly concept of "sketching from life" as a means of injecting fresh realism into haiku and tanka poetry. Now prose writers, too, Soseki included, were being encouraged by Shiki's circle to "sketch from life."