Background
He was born in Tatebayashi, Gunma Prefecture, into a shizoku (ie former samurai) family, at the time of the abolition of the privileges of that rank. His father entered the police force to support the household and was killed in April 1877 during the Satsuma Rebellion.
Education
The whole family moved to Tokyo in 1886, and Tayama attended the poetry classes of Matsuura Tatsuo (Hagitsubo, 1844-1909) before appealing to Kōyō Ozaki in 1891 for help in beginning a literary career. He soon fell out with Ozaki however, and it was Suiin Emi who helped Tayama establish himself as a travel writer
Career
He is noted for establishing the Japanese literary genre of naturalistic I novels which revolve around the detailed self-examinations of an introspective author He also wrote about his experiences in the Russo-Japanese War. Tayama married in February 1899.
His mother died in August, and in September he joined the staff of the newspaper Hakubunkan.
In 1904 he was sent to Manchuria as a war correspondent. This experience led him to write stories such as Ippeisotsu ("One Soldier", 1908).
In 1903 a female admirer, Michiyo Okada (1885-1968), had written to him. Apparently influenced by Gerhart Hauptmann"s play Einsame Menschen, Tayama gave the fan permission to come to Tokyo as a literary pupil.
She arrived in February 1904, but was a houseguest for only a month before he left for Manchuria on 23 March.
After his return on 20 September, she moved back in, and stayed until January 1906. He did not begin an affair, but used the romantic tension as material for his most ambitious work yet, Futon (1907), which made his name as a writer, and established the Japanese literary genre known as the I Novel — although in fact Futon is largely recounted in the third person. After the Great Kantō earthquake, Katai provided Iida with a place to stay because her house was destroyed in the disaster.
This period of his relationship is covered in the novel One Hundred Nights (Momoyo, 1927).
He continued to write until his death from throat cancer in 1930.