Pathway to Japanese Literature

I

In the December issues of magazines and newspapers, following annual custom, several writers and critics discussed the 1949 literary world from their various angles.
The writers who produced noteworthy works that year and the promising newcomers expected to shape tomorrow's literature were highlighted through their works.

Yet could these year-end assessments truly claim to have organized—in their depth and multifaceted scope—the visceral realities we endured through those three hundred sixty-five days: the searing heat, biting cold, and gritty complexities that life and literature had pressed directly against our skin?
At least I sensed too many generalizations missing their structural fastenings.
It struck me that the essential problems lying there were neither properly unearthed nor granted their due examination.
Within what's discussed as last year's flowerbed—judged only by its surface undulations—lay neglected bulbs that might have blossomed into remarkable flowers given care.
This too was my perception.
And I wondered whether this sensation—so resistant to comprehensive articulation—might not in fact resonate surprisingly widely within some chamber of people's hearts.

1949 was not a good year.

In the fourth year after the war, Japanese society and culture experienced the fourth period of democratic suppression that the authorities desired.
One-Man himself was the international head tea-server.
Tea-server politics, having received talismans, pasted them one by one onto the Potsdam Declaration, sealed the essence of the Constitution, and erected torii gates of subservience one after another as if the Human Rights Charter were mere text.

When we recall the names and backgrounds of people like Kodama Yoshio and Abe Genki—who were released from Sugamo Prison in late December two years ago and insinuated themselves back into social life—it becomes self-evident what elements the power structure of 1949 came to more strongly embody in its shadow.
In the experience of the past three years, while democratic sentiments had yet to take root among the Japanese people, existing forces exerted their full strength and succeeded in spreading their influence for the time being.
The reality that 1949 was not a good year for anyone domestically has become a motivating force in the hearts of those who require deep reexamination of both the methods of Japan’s democratic movement and the very theoretical framework underlying its liberation movement.

This turbulent wave did not leave literature untouched, exerting influence both directly and indirectly.
Journalism as a public forum had been placed under strong control and systematic organization since 1948, but the methods employed were incomparably more sophisticated than those of the past.
Through the channel of excluding rogue newspapers, correcting paper distribution, and promptly responding to subscriber demands, postwar small newspapers—including those with democratic characteristics—were absorbed into large corporate newspapers.
And during the autumn 1949 Newspaper Week, a slogan was presented—“Where newspapers go, freedom follows”—that even the journalists themselves must have found perplexing.
The dissolution and reorganization of Nippatsu were forcibly implemented through the economic aspect of the Concentrated Exclusion Law, and in the course of the publishing industry’s economic blockade that lasted over three months, all publishing enterprises—excluding major publishers—were exposed to severe crisis.
What cultural qualities today’s unshakable representatives of major publishing enterprises possess is revealed in the actual circumstances where only the publishing industry struggles with personnel selection during the rush to select delegates from various fields for U.S. visits.

The characteristics of 1949's literary phenomena could not be observed without accounting for this manufactured panic.
"The movement of practitioners of European-style novelistic methods—the so-called Postwar School—began to face disadvantages as the publishing boom declined."
(From the preface to Volume 4 of Selected Representative Works edited by the Japan Writers' Association—Ito Sei) These disadvantages extended beyond material circumstances, provoking among publishers and some writers who echoed their sentiments an attitude that viewed them as no longer postwar avant-garde, but rather like lingering morning glories past their season.
The ironic reality was that most modern literary coterie members labeled as the Postwar School—throughout the latter half of the previous year and all of 1949—had been making socially and literarily significant advances worthy of attention as intelligentsia.
Having evolved from depicting modern Europe's literary spirit during individualism's flowering era—built upon assertions of establishing a "self" and "subjectivity" that had been suffocated in Japan—it began to be understood that even for enabling this self's existence and development within Japan's social reality, protecting fundamental human rights common to all citizens became imperative.
There had come to be profound recognition that organizing resistance against global fascism and war provocation constituted both the historical task of humanity and the spirit of Japanese literature's new century connecting to world literature—and concrete efforts toward this end had already commenced.

Therefore, the disadvantages that these seniors of the Postwar School suffered in journalism under the pretext of the publishing panic—that is to say, the essence of the narrowing scope for socioliterary expression—was none other than a reduction in both the assertion of reason-grounded reality-seeking spirit and the protests and resistance against fascism and war provocation domestically and abroad.

The fact that this method succeeded was neither something chilling to some writers nor seen as requiring vigilance for the future.
Rather, it was perceived as a sense of stability by the established powers.
In the December issue of *Gunzo*’s creative monthly review roundtable, Hayashi Fusao’s affected demeanor and posturing when discussing “seriousness” were laid bare.
The modern spirit—ceaselessly seeking awakening while sensitive to self-indulgence and self-righteousness—and the very call to reason itself must be contemptible things that are distasteful to this type of writers.

Over the past three years, the group of writers who had maintained a passive existence due to their wartime collaboration emerged in full force upon entering 1949.
The format of monthly review roundtables that had once been customary in *Shincho* and other journals was revived in *Bungakukai* and other publications with new literary administrative lineups.
At these gatherings, any attitude of rigorously examining literature’s fundamental problems—those pertaining to the world society’s anguish, conflicts, and fervent aspirations toward development unfolding in this twentieth-century moment—had been utterly erased.
Amidst impressionistic criticism and rambling talks, a certain display was performed toward journalism and readers, and criticism remained confined to individual impressions.
For better or worse, touching upon Japan’s Democratic Literature Movement or earnestly discussing it became an outdated practice in such scenes where the speakers themselves resembled participants in a fashion show.
Democratic critics fell silent, and the space for scenes featuring young writers who weren’t newcomers dredged up by journalism was stripped away.
While existing among the Japanese populace—calculated at eighty-five million souls deployable for the next war—they shoved tedious inquiries into some forgotten corner and sustained the spectacle of multitudes feasting beneath a moon that knew no fullness.
(The reason the Democratic Literature Movement failed to develop freely upon entering 1949 lay in these externally entangled circumstances, containing within them an extremely complex and profoundly interesting research subject.)
This pertained to issues of that era’s politics and literature—what was called the primacy of politics—and questions of their nature—points I wished to address separately in another section.)

II

The carnal literature up until the previous year merged into the broader flood of genre fiction and middlebrow novels known as popular reading material.
Just as nearly all these literary works had unanimously affirmed the war during wartime, today they required neither deep thought nor critical engagement, swept along by their own sordid contemporary currents.
No need to observe reality through active mental exertion.
Together with radio entertainment sections and comics that engulfed both adults and children in their worlds, they further widened the trenches of this obscurantist education.
Regarding how ferociously this garish torrent—its colors intensified by a modern enamel-like veneer—raged through 1949, Takami Jun articulated the following in his dialogue with Maruyama Masao from *Ningen*’s December issue.

“If even artists don’t exercise restraint…”
“If we speak of our postwar shame, it’s that writers’ attitudes have come to aim for a kind of sensationalism.”
“Whispering softly into people’s souls won’t do—you have to stand right in the middle of the thoroughfare and let out a loud ‘Waah!’, otherwise no one will hear you.”
“But then again, as long as they can produce plenty of loud voices, that’s all that matters.”
“This must be the first time since the Meiji era that such a thing has happened.”
“If writers raise their voices this loudly, it must be the first time that easy money can be made.”
“It was said that Kikuchi Kan’s kitchen expenses matched a minister’s, and literary figures were praised for having risen in stature—but now they’re above ministers, so as long as they raise their voices…”

When genre fiction reached certain limits in replicating social conditions, its authors' professional psychology—scrounging for material within their lived experience and hunting for sensational events—became unavoidable.
1949 saw, even in this aspect, strange model disputes emerge that had never before existed in the literary scene.
The most representative example was the incident surrounding Inoue Tomoichirō’s *Cliff*.
General readers naturally read that one story.
And as to why this section—whether in *Late Chrysanthemums* or elsewhere—fixated on combining women’s aging bodies with social ambition or monetary desire despite their essential banality, I think they merely gazed upon the figures of men and women in *Cliff* being manipulated under artificial lights.
However, strangely enough, male and female writers emerged who claimed to be models for the work—protesting loudly in journalism that its ugliness defamed their honor—and threatened legal action.

It may have stemmed from entanglements within literary circles that outsiders could never comprehend, but this utterly non-literary sensation—regardless of the author’s intentions—helped establish *Cliff* as a controversial work and thrust those who proclaimed themselves its models into the footlights.

The conditioned reflex of genre fiction, having lost all resistance to sensationalism, appeared to have even influenced masters of human emotion and artistic dedication like Satomi Ton and Kubota Mantarō in how they approached their creative motifs.
An incident occurred in which an old gentleman purported to be the model for Yuki Shigeko’s novel *The Laughter of the Superintendent General* committed suicide in Kamakura.
When *Yomiuri* interviewed Satomi Ton and Kubota Mantarō—Kamakura-based writers who had apparently associated with the old gentleman—they refrained from strongly arguing against erroneously linking the commotion to Yuki Shigeko’s novel from their position as writers.
Kubota Mantarō stated, “I plan to write a novel titled *Akishio* in the near future and dedicate it to that person’s spirit,” while Satomi Ton remarked, “Though I don’t understand why this death occurred, I will soon publish a novel called *Oki*”—each announcing works connected to the incident.

Sensationalism was also a method pushed to extremes by the Yoshida Cabinet—unyielding internally yet submissive externally—as part of their 1949 scenario that abandoned democratization.
This current, which consistently integrated politics and culture while overriding social trends, resulted in Nagai’s works—despite attracting various criticisms—topping the preparatory surveys for the 1949 Mainichi Cultural Award and Yomiuri Shimbun’s Best Ten Books survey, with works such as *Miyamoto Musashi*, *Shinran*, *Gone with the Wind*, *The Makioka Sisters*, and *A Shooting Star Lives On* garnering numerous votes.
In the preliminary survey for the Mainichi Cultural Award, *Shinran* had topped the literature category, but the selection committee pushed for *The Complete Works of Nakajima Atsushi*.

What demanded attention was that these authors of so-called genre fiction—writers who dismissed those incapable of producing middlebrow novels as half-baked talents in literature—themselves paradoxically clung to what had long been called pure literature, this true literature.
In monthly reviews and literary discussions, these writers strove to present themselves as literati who grasped literature's essential nature.
Consequently, contemporary literary phenomena grew increasingly chaotic—with middlebrow and genre fiction writers dominating commercial journalism and commanding disproportionate page space for their pronouncements—their literary theories masquerading as legitimate critical discourse.

These people, who denied the I-novel while discussing pure literature, shared a common aversion to political overtones—as could be seen in Hayashi Fusao’s critique of Hirotsu Kazuo’s *Hisako and Her Girlfriends*.
Middlebrow fiction stood upon the essence of these writers who could not produce social novels.

However, on another front, they opposed fascism, joined the "Intellectuals’ Association" to reject war provocation, and also supported Kawabata Yasunari’s proposal to protect peace by standing on the very path of being a writer.

In his dialogue with Takami Jun, when Maruyama Masao stated, "Materially speaking, that may be true (that literary figures have risen in stature), but in terms of social value and role, they remain akin to outlaws," and Takami Jun affirmed this by responding, "Utterly outlaws"—while this may have been a natural answer for Takami Jun himself, it neither reflected the reality nor resonated with the true sentiments of middlebrow novelists.
Against the creative method called “pure literature” that had lost its social relevance, the middlebrow novelists led by Hayashi Fusao and Tomita Tsuneo asserted that “the distinction between pure literature and popular literature should naturally disappear,” declaring that the literature they now wrote aimed precisely to “bring joy to the masses’ lives, enrich them, and provide some spiritual anchor for living,” while being convinced that “a path leading to *Crime and Punishment*, *Madame Bovary*, *A Woman’s Life*, and *Arch of Triumph* would undoubtedly open.”
these individuals.
To these individuals, newspapers had even sent questionnaires regarding peace treaty issues.
Within the scope collected by Yomiuri Shimbun, the writers’ answers were demands for comprehensive peace.

Why were critics merely being overwhelmed by this chaotic and disordered state of literature and literary figures in 1949?
"Moreover, unless they accomplish this someday—that is, unless they open a path leading to works like *Crime and Punishment* and others—they will ultimately be unable to escape accusations of hanging out a sheep’s head but selling dog meat."
(If we are to speak of *The Writers' Association's Anthology of Representative Modern Novels* Vol. 5: Tamura Taijirō), then they should first begin by withdrawing from journalism those products that currently constitute dog meat masquerading as literature itself.
To recognize that the fate of the masses does not exist solely within sexual desires and physical curiosity.
If they claim to provide spiritual anchorage, then even if authors—aware that they themselves are embedded within this population dubbed eighty-five million obedient slaves—have signed petitions opposing fascism and war provocation and endorsed demands for comprehensive peace, they could have at least clearly pointed out for the Japanese people the contradiction of simultaneously serving as agents of the obscurantist policy that powerfully promotes eroticism through journalism.

The fact that this proved impossible, I think, speaks to critics' own failure in 1949 to fully grasp social and literary issues in a unified manner.

Nakano Yoshio recollected 1949 in the December issue of *Shin Nihon Bungaku* as follows.

“Looking back over the past year, what I feel most strongly interested in is not so much individual laws or regulations themselves, but rather the recent political trends that have been consistently unfolding through these repressive laws and regulations.”
“In the methods of the Democratic Liberal Party government over the past year, there have emerged actions that now appear to transcend mere anti-communist lines and amount to violations of human rights themselves.”
“Recently, even within the narrow confines of my own professional domain, new issues such as so-called ‘Red Marks’ and academic freedom have been arising.”
“The fact that we must once again face such issues today—despite having already endured the bitter experience of how dangerous it is to strip away academic freedom over recent years—can only be described as utterly disheartening, to be honest.”
“However, the problem does not actually lie in any one of these concrete facts.”
“It is precisely these submerged reefs—invisible beneath the surface except for their protruding tips of such obvious, disheartening problems—that constitute the true issue.”
“But I do not despair.”
“If we truly possess the resolve to protect only the most fundamental things as human beings, and if we have the strong will to not even refuse prison or death in putting this into practice, then the time will surely come when we can crush today’s overconfident right-wing offensive.”
“However,” he states, “while tactically I cannot agree with the methods hitherto employed by the Communist Party members,” he has renewed his deep interest in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to actively promote—without remaining passive bystanders—the moment when reactions from both left and right wings emerge.

Given that Nakano Yoshio had shown such an attitude toward the sociopolitical phenomena of 1949, why could he not help being weak-kneed in commercialized literary forums like creative monthly review roundtables?
No matter who read it, this was preservationist faction’s literary sophistry—so why must he adopt an attitude of silent acquiescence to Hayashi Fusao’s logic, which connected to his war collaboration, his “adult literature” theory, and his erasure of humanity and literature’s fundamental rights?

Hayashi Fusao touched upon Uno Koji’s *Literary Imperial Conference* during Gunzo’s December roundtable discussion.

“Generally speaking, Japanese I-novel writers discard their lives for literature.”
“So whether it’s their wives’ affairs or old debts—they’ll turn anything into literature to sell.”
“The most extreme case is Uno Koji’s *Literary Imperial Conference*. That’s the endgame of a great writer who abandoned his life for literature.” (Omitted) “Since they’ve discarded their lives for literature, there’s no saving that fatal flaw.”
“Mr. Nakano—you’ll continue working as a critic—this matter is crucial.”

Nakano... (nods).

If what Hayashi Fusao calls “life” in relation to *Literary Imperial Conference* were to signify proper human existence, then that text by Uno Koji stood as a consummate work regarding Japanese life itself.

Long ago, Uno Koji had written a novel depicting a troupe of Russian dwarf traveling performers who bustled about in confusion within the inner garden of Kikufuji Hotel, reciting and chattering in an incomprehensible tongue.

Moving through a garden dotted with shrubbery and a spring-fed pond, or contemplating and conversing on the veranda facing that garden, the figures of these male and female dwarfs—earnestly devoting themselves to their lives—were rendered through Uno Koji’s singular descriptive power, infused equally with melancholy and humor.

*Literary Imperial Conference* evoked that novel of Uno Koji’s.
Toyoshima Yoshio—a French literature scholar, anti-fascist, and avant-garde figure—flipped the hem of his anachronistic frock coat and boarded a streetcar without a silk hat; from this depiction alone, pathos already seeped through.
In the culminating scenes, the unfolding of all events resembled manipulating puppets.
Amidst peculiar daily habits never compared to others were the Emperor’s movements—marked by eccentric mannerisms despite his personable intelligence—and the court’s knowing mediation.
As the meticulously restrained author minutely narrated—with literary-historical precision—the backgrounds of each stiffly lined-up poet and writer, the more exacting these descriptions became, the more a Gogol-esque essence welled up within them; readers found themselves seized by the sensation that every scene and character belonged to a world where none possessed life-sized humanity akin to their own.
When Hirotsu Kazuo stood up and began to speak amidst everyone being small, unnervingly clear-cut, and stiffly formal, it suddenly felt like an ordinary human body and voice.
This change, too, was an unintended effect of Uno Koji’s descriptive power.

The young critic Fujikawa Tetsushi dismissively criticized *Literary Imperial Conference* in *Akahata*. In Kubokawa Tsurujirō’s *The Literature of False Testimony*, he exposed the contradictions inherent in Uno Koji’s realism. Despite containing these contradictions, Hayashi Fusao’s use of *Literary Imperial Conference* to position Uno Koji as the end point of I-novel writers stemmed precisely from how its realism molded a Gogol-esque reality of Japanese life—one that Hayashi himself rejected. This was because the work laid bare Japan’s quintessential existence: a life both humorously absurd and infuriating. Hayashi Fusao would not revile Satō Haruo’s *Human Emperor’s Smile*. Because these contained no semblance of life whatsoever. Because they possessed nothing but what might be called mere decorative trimmings.

With the English literature scholar who nodded silently in assent to Hayashi Fusao’s pronouncement—expressed in suitably literary terms—before him, he went on to recommend *British Literature* by Yoshida Ken’ichi, the Prime Minister’s son.
Yoshida Ken’ichi had written that British literature appeared as beautifully as lace, serving as decorative trim to British life.
Yet among Japanese I-novel writers, life itself had become mere decorative trim for literature, while life proper—their true lives—was being ignored.
“This is precisely why I so vehemently oppose Japanese I-novel writers.”

Stefan Zweig produced numerous works as a biographer, but among his masterpieces collected in *Three Masters*, his study of Dickens was most highly regarded.
While Dickens’ genius stood as a pride not only of English but of world literature, it was said that even his immense talent ultimately failed to reach full fruition due to British-style compromise with reality.
And the very environment of England’s unique capitalist development that had given rise to Shakespeare also clipped the wings of Dickens’ genius.
Galsworthy had been a charming writer, but even in his literature there existed the phrase marking its culmination: “Life is such a thing.”
Literature that served as mere decorative trim did not possess significant power to influence the progress of human history.
Even if nineteenth-century British Romanticism influenced Lermontov and the realism of Thackeray and Dickens acted upon Tolstoy and others, the Russian novels and criticism of the 1860s that emerged as a result resonated powerfully with the world spirit precisely because they delved into life’s fundamental problems.
Recalling Yoshida Ken’ichi—who had gained renown prewar for his masterful translation of Valéry’s *On Degas*—his current works like *British Literature* and his rhetoric as his father’s spokesperson (“where there is no humor, there is no thought, and hence no literature”) seemed eerily reminiscent of middlebrow novelists’ approach to depicting life’s true essence.

It was regrettable that Nakano Yoshio, a scholar of English literature, steered his argument toward opposing the I-novel without engaging even once with the theory of literature as mere decorative trim to life. Since Nakano Yoshio had resolved to protect "the most fundamental things as a human being"—including "the right to freedom of opinion and expression"—even at the risk of imprisonment or death, I believed he ought to have expressed his views when discussing literature as a social phenomenon.

What prevented Nakano Yoshio from fully exercising his right to freedom of opinion and expression was his complex regarding the rejection of the I-novel. This likely stemmed from the fact that the very essence and future prospects of the negation theory of the I-novel had not yet been confidently understood from a historical standpoint at that time.

I thought the same phenomenon appeared in Miyoshi Jūrō’s “On the Piglet School Writers” due to identical causes. Employing his distinctive rhetorical style to lambast middlebrow writers and their works, he ultimately ended up lamenting that even his favored Ozaki Kazuo’s *Ami* had grown “somewhat antiquated.” He contended it would be preferable to voice the grievance that “all the messy trivialities have slipped through Ozaki’s *Ami*,” which had become overly purified and adrift from modern life’s currents. To even discuss middlebrow fiction—which flourishes fundamentally divorced from literature—and Ozaki Kazuo’s literary works, where I-novels had condensed into essay-like pieces, as equivalent entities betrayed what might be termed a crude sensibility. Amidst today’s literary clamor surrounding “the negation of the I-novel,” Miyoshi Jūrō’s act of spewing forth itself assumed the very form of regurgitated bile. “Then whose *Ami* could truly dredge up today’s messy trivialities?” “If anyone dares claim Tamura Taijirō’s *Ami* accomplishes this, I must apologize while laughing myself senseless—and so forth.” As words from “one who lived through the war in their own flesh and seeks to establish their identity and work as a writer,” [they declared]: “We can comprehend—nay, must comprehend—what Tamura intends as an author.” However, should one address Tamura’s self-righteous affirmations by stating “but what follows falls short,” then for both his sake and readers’, it becomes imperative to objectively disentangle and present the contradictions coalescing within this singular literary star: how Tamura Taijirō’s faction—with their vulpine maneuvering through literary circles—saw their professed literary intentions degenerate into hollow posturing; how his anti-fascist peace advocacy coexisted with works like Ooka Shohei’s literature, Noma Hiroshi’s *The Red Moon in My Face*, or Hamada Kyotaro’s *The Fake Lunatic*; and all schismatic relationships inherent to his position.

However, the demand for a new literature beyond the I-novel—encapsulated in the question, “Whose *Ami* could truly dredge up today’s messy trivialities?” (emphasis mine)—contained within it what had to be pursued as methods for birthing socially engaged creative works.
What did it mean for literature to "truly dredge up" reality?
If one could say that literature which dredged up every last bit of today’s messy trivialities—from one end to the other, whatever came to hand or ear—had truly scooped up something essential about human existence, then Miyoshi Jūrō’s necessity to label Tamura Taijirō and others as the Piglet School would have dissolved.
If we were to accept today’s discourse on society and literature at face value, it would have had to be re-examined starting from Tamura Taijirō’s conviction—expressed without any corrective statement regarding all his present realities—that his intent would undoubtedly open a path leading directly to *Crime and Punishment*, *Madame Bovary*, *A Woman’s Life*, and *Arch of Triumph*.
*Crime and Punishment* and its subsequent works were worthy of the name bestowed upon them, being widely read at that time by those who constituted his readership.
(The same readership was almost certainly reading works such as *Shinran*, *Leaving This Child Behind*, and *The Makioka Sisters*.)
(He did not touch upon that aspect.) For him and his faction to bring about a day when they refrained from hanging sheep’s heads to sell dog meat, it would have meant they had to pursue the trajectory of European—French and German—society and literature across those terrifying thirty years: from the nineteenth-century naturalism beginning with *Madame Bovary*, through Russian critical realism, to Remarque’s journey from *All Quiet on the Western Front* to *Arch of Triumph*.
And world history and literature had already passed through the "Arch of Triumph".
As for what kind of anguish the people had experienced there, it was undoubtedly the person who wrote about the brutality of Japanese soldiers toward female prisoners of war of the Chinese Communist Party who had truly internalized that reality.

Critics had no choice but to pass through 1949 bearing the problem of not having raised the problems that should have been urgently addressed regarding modern literature as a whole and its writers.

III

Then was the year 1949, according to Fukuda Tsuneari’s generalization, the year of the "rout of the intellectual class"?
"Just as with Naturalism’s meteoric rise and fall of old, it has begun to decline precisely three years later."
"To paraphrase Hirabayashi Taiko’s words: the intellectual class that returned singing victory hymns after the war now finds itself, by 1949, beating a disorderly retreat down that very same path with banners flying."
"The events of 1949 served as litmus paper thrust into solution."
"And the sole thing revealed is that they are neither red nor blue."
"In essence, they prove neither acidic nor alkaline."
"They are mere water—nothing more."

This critic’s writing contained words that would probably have startled his peers in science and other specialized fields—those who shared his level of education—or so I imagined.
As long as there were salt and water, life could at least be sustained.
Human settlements had always formed their primitive communities precisely along the banks of mere water.
If it had been true that the intellectual class was mere water—something they could drink and sustain themselves with—then today’s serious-minded people in Japan might rather have found that fact delightful.
For the star features of 1949-style journalism were rife with cyanide-like phenomena.

I wanted to ask all members of labor unions.
The 1949 Public Security Ordinances.
Nine Principles.
Were all of these—staff reductions, struggles against unemployment, year-end funding battles—truly social phenomena of the sort where "the majority are utterly ambiguous; even if not lies, the true extent remains unclear"?
I wanted to ask 250,000 female university students and male university students.
The University Bill that had garnered such widespread public concern as an issue pertaining to Japanese independence; the Non-Japanese Committee issue opposed through signatures by twenty-seven neutral scholars; and the multitudes now broadly resisting the National Personnel Authority regulations—to such an extent that the expression "defend the Nanbara line" had in some sense become common sense.

The "Nanbara line" extended into the attitudes of ordinary people toward Japan’s issue of securing a comprehensive peace settlement once the contents of his speech at the conference on educational matters in occupied territories in Washington were conveyed. For Fukuda Tsuneari, these matters "lack decisive moments that compel self-aware praxis." "What exactly does it mean to say, 'That is to say, it lacks the decisiveness of the Emperor’s August 15 broadcast'?"

"The 'decisive victory of the Chinese Communist Party'—through the birth of the People's Republic of China with the largest population on Earth—was an event in human history that decisively transformed the trajectory of Asia's future destiny encompassing the Japanese people."
The act of equating such matters with incidents like Shimoyama, Mitaka, Matsukawa, and Taira—where the government’s fabricated oppression of the working class played a major role—and declaring most to be fundamentally ambiguous, their true extent remaining unclear even if not outright lies, plumbed the depths of contemporary intellectuals' common sense.
The Japanese people were being denied freedom to clearly know facts about domestic and international events.
If this had been framed as a protest against that suppression, one might have understood; but when the critic himself described the Chinese Communist Party’s decisive victory as 'ambiguous,' did this not contain an irony beyond ordinary comprehension?

In the world today, at least six hundred million men and women defended peace and opposed fascism—which sought to provoke a third world war—to secure their peoples' independence in life and culture.
The Second World War brought about by fascism made humanity's heart bleed with cruel destruction and agony.
And now, looking back, it became increasingly clear that those deprived of life and livelihood across every nation were people of all ages—men and women alike—and children.

Under imperialism within Japan, it was not only workers, office workers, and students who were coming to feel that contemporary authority constituted tyrannical rule.
The ruin of small and medium-sized businesses and the suppression of culture—including radio and newspapers—and academia all stemmed from a single cause.
The trial records of Kawai Eijirō were published as a pamphlet titled *Freedom in Death*.
Even a moderate scholar like him had been prosecuted and tried on the grounds that his reason stood without submitting to ultranationalism and absolutism.
The spirit of resistance with which Kawai Eijirō sought to defend the minimum line of a scholar’s conscience was also the resistance of those defending the Nanbara line against the National Personnel Authority regulations.

It was not Fukuda Tsuneari alone who remained a bystander to or mocked Japan’s peace preservation movements.
The mere fact that Fukuda Tsuneari was not among their members could not serve as an objective basis for claiming that Japan’s “Peace Preservation Society” and “Intellectuals’ Association” lacked clarity in their true motives and actions.

The phrase “Killifish prefer to school,” uttered by a certain writer, had been wielded as a tool to mock democratic movements even in 1949.
But what solitary soul had not been packed tightly into those transport ships?
How fundamentally different was the fate of that solitary person who starved and suffered to death after being separated from the unit packed tightly and abandoned in the jungle, compared to those who perished en masse through collective starvation? Within the people who formed solidarities—within the spirit of killifish and their declarations refusing to be packed tightly as eighty-five million usable individuals at history’s most dire moment—lay modern history’s humanism.

The prevalence of private criticism in the pseudo-academic "is" style—marked by outward self-deprecation and inward superiority—was another phenomenon of 1949.

As individuals, how those people perceive historical reality, express it, and thereby naturally bring into objective relief their relationship with progressing history is, of course, each person’s own freedom—or so I think.

However, regarding the various issues of society and literature, is it not a fact that there may—and indeed must—exist criticism such as Senuma Shigeki’s in *Criticism’s Blind Spot*: “Even if it contains some blind spots toward the contemporary era, [criticism] should instead present a path to creation as a technique for grasping modern logic”?
“In the modern age, even if judging literature from its true meaning is no easy task, it remains necessary to persist in what I would call criticism from a fixed historical standpoint even in everyday criticism.”
[Ibid.]

To generalize 1949 as the "rout of the intellectual class," as Fukuda Tsuneari did, resulted in a one-sided perspective that viewed the actual movements of democratic forces within Japan from the opposing side.
From late 1948 through 1949, the growing visceral awareness of defending fundamental human rights in daily life and the palpable necessity for a united front to achieve national independence had taken root more deeply, widely, and viscerally than during the People's Front Movement era following 1933.
This stood on the fact that Japan in Asia had been placed in a uniquely difficult conscientious position toward humanity as a whole.
It was the anguish and resistance toward this reality: at the very moment when Korea was liberated from subjugation, the People’s Republic of China established itself, and movements for national independence arose across every semi-colonial and colonial land in Asia—each advancing toward success—the Japanese people, who had themselves laid down their arms, were being forged into something akin to a small yet potent poisoned arrowhead aimed at all of Asia.

The core of Japan’s people’s activities in the 1950s—including literature—cannot avoid confronting the task of how to treat this caries.
Modern Japanese literature has now reached a point where it must be examined—from this perspective—whether it holds any significance within world literature, or whether it is nothing more than the fleeting distraction of a subjugated people’s puzzle-ring play and empty rhetoric, clinging to an empty constitution and the symbol of the Emperor.

IV

In the face of such fierce turmoil in 1949, the Democratic Literature Movement did not fully develop itself and proved woefully inadequate in prospectively addressing modern literature's various challenges.
What was the reason for this?
I do not believe that the readily available answer of "reactionary offensive" constitutes the entirety of the solution.

At the beginning of 1946, the Shin Nihon Bungakukai (New Japan Literary Society) was organized, initiating the Democratic Literature Movement.
At that time, the special historical conditions—namely that Japan's democratic revolution was maturing through advancing a bourgeois democratic revolution against inherent feudalism and absolutism—were not entirely unforeseen.
There was naturally no understanding that negated the working class's leading role in progressing toward people's democratic revolution.
However, regarding the literary movement itself, neither at the New Japan Literary Society's founding convention nor at any subsequent conventions up to the fourth was there clear definition given to working-class literature's nature and direction as the backbone of the Democratic Literature Movement.
The reasons for this were as follows.
During the Proletarian Literature Movement era, when all Japanese liberation movements were outlawed, publications like *Senki* functioned simultaneously as literary magazines of class-conscious culture and international enlightenment journals addressing working-class economic/political concerns.
*NAPP* and *Proletarian Literature* inevitably shared similar characteristics, while the Proletarian Cultural League possessed an iceberg-like nature—its underground class organizations barely protruding above legality's surface.
Even literary circles assumed such characteristics.

Around 1933–34, when the proletarian cultural and literary movement of that era had its life strangled by the repercussions of Sano and Nabeyama’s ideological apostasy, all those affiliated with proletarian cultural and literary organizations were forced into a self-criticism of the movement manufactured by the Prosecutor’s Office.
It was a narrative that the previous proletarian cultural and literary movement had been driven from cultural activities into political ones due to the politicalist deviations of its leaders—Kurahara Korehito, Kobayashi Takiji, Miyamoto Kenji, and others—thereby depleting their creative powers, and so on.

In the more than ten years that followed, when speaking of theoretical literary works accessible to those devoted to literature, they consisted primarily of writings by authors opposed to proletarian literature at the time—Hayashi Fusao, Yamada Seizaburō, Kamei Katsuichirō, and others.
Even matters concerning socialist realism could only be read with their class-based essence distorted.

Alongside the rallying cry of the Democratic Literature Movement, arguments opposing Kobayashi Takiji proliferated from certain quarters as if they shared the same nature as resistance to the Special Attack Forces spirit, leaving advocates overwhelmed by the struggle against them.
Within the Democratic Literature Movement, clarifying the working class’s mission and emphasizing which aspects of proletarian literary tradition should naturally be inherited became dissolved amidst that struggle.
One reason lay in how those previously active during the proletarian literature era naturally came to advocate for the Democratic Literature Movement—a circumstance that paradoxically drew them toward an atmosphere demanding something “distinct from old proletarian literature.”
I believe we cannot claim there was no similar demand among these individuals themselves.

The point where Democratic Literature differed from the original Proletarian Literature was said to lie in its stance of democratic humanism that “writes from within,” without merely treating class issues as theme novels.
In the summer of 1947, Shimada Masao—one of the leaders of the Literary Circle Council—announced a theory of stages: given the realities of Japan’s working class and laborers at the time, it was premature to debate a creative method of socialist realism that envisioned the working class’s victory and a socialist society; instead, he advocated for “people’s realism.”

This statement arose from an idea that took hold around the time of the February 1st Strike in 1947: given that Japan’s working populace remained culturally semi-feudal and backward, dance—rather than literary creation—could more directly satisfy their cultural needs.
During this period, several individuals who wrote poems, novels, and plays had in fact emerged from among laborers and office workers.
Throughout this time, the healthy entertainment of the masses, the general enlightenment of class-based culture, working-class literature from all angles and varieties, and the creation and dissemination of democratic literature had neither been structured through combinations that organically leveraged their particularities nor driven forward in such a manner.

After the autumn of 1948, China’s People’s Democratic Revolution was approaching victory, and that it would triumph became clear to the eyes of the world.

What was noteworthy was that among the sentiments of Japan’s progressive people, there existed a far greater leniency toward the Chinese Revolution than toward either the Soviet Union’s construction of a socialist society or the people’s democracies of Eastern Europe.
I think it could even be said that among some people there existed admiration for the Chinese Communist Party.

The fact that the Chinese Communist Party’s Liberation Army, upon entering Shanghai—a focal point under imperialism’s lens—did not permit even a single line of demagogy to be reported and disseminated in Japanese newspapers through their actual conduct was truly joyous and worthy of admiration.
One could envision the steadfast, unassuming young guardians of the Chinese people.

The impending independence of the Chinese people elicited a subtle reaction within Japan’s domestic situation. One force began pushing forward more aggressive methods to establish Japan as a bulwark. In contrast, the working class and democratic-minded people were justified in viewing China’s liberation as a decisive asset for Asia’s democratic forces, and equally justified in regarding it as a further step toward victory for world democratic forces.

At the same time, among some there arose a kind of illusory haste. As an objective necessity to resist anti-democratic pressures and oppression domestically became more widespread, there floated through the air a mood suggesting that if Japan’s democratic forces could muster some kind of momentum, they might—in tandem with China’s victory—reach some sort of goal. When assessing the domestic situation, the role of the proletariat as the vanguard once again became a major focus of concern.

The Democratic Literature Movement and the political elements inherent in its fundamental nature as people’s literature—the political character of class-based literature—here, from late 1948 through 1949, had to undergo a complex and valuable trial.

During the period from 1946 to 1947 when waves of strikes surged across Japan, the Democratic Literature Movement adopted a form encompassing both the working class and general laborers, while unions' cultural departments focused primarily on cultural mobilization linked to strikes regarding democratic culture and literature.
Between the majority of union members who devoted their entire lives and energy to economic-political activities and those in literary circles where so-called literary interests had permeated some among them—though all were working people—a certain discrepancy arose in their emotional orientation toward reality.
The organization of labor unions across all Japanese industries during 1946–47 and the open commencement of party cell activities within them marked an entirely new historical beginning for all Japanese workers and laborers.
This period simultaneously saw workers—men and women who had been exploited under wartime's worst labor conditions—standing upon their fundamental human and labor rights while battling inflation and striving to liberate Japan's labor conditions from semi-colonial baseness.
Yet throughout 1946–47, which outwardly manifested as continuous strikes both large and small, not a single work like *The Street Without Sun* was written by those very workers who labored and struck.
The contents of *Workers’ Literary Works Collection* attest to this fact.

Throughout the long war, under the enforced Hakkō Ichiu spirit and driven by the imperative "for Japan's victory," political books that the working class ought to have read were completely stripped from among laborers through spy systems and military police activities; even natural doubts and criticisms toward the war arising from workers' daily judgments were kept under surveillance through punitive measures.

Therefore, though young workers subjected to slave-like labor through wartime mobilization until August 15th were organized three months later into youth members of newly formed labor unions, their mindsets inevitably failed to transform completely into those of young workers fully imbued with class consciousness and discipline.
While unions' political education—and cultural/literary education—proved particularly vigorous, even this became consumed by establishing union organizations, conducting strikes, and supporting other unions' strikes, leaving the most active workplace members without a moment's respite in their twenty-four hours.
When reading the reportage titled *The Violence of the Authorities*—compiled by workplaces through the Sanbetsu Propaganda Department—none could fail to understand these circumstances.

In this critical period, it became imperative to clearly define how literature as the working class—constituting the core of the Democratic Literature Movement—differed from that of general laborers including the petty bourgeois, and what direction it should take. Yet even within literature’s domain, war’s devastation remained starkly visible. At that time, a primary task of *Shin Nihon Bungaku* lay in countering tendencies to negatively assess Kobayashi Takiji—a proletarian writer of historic significance. Concurrently emerged the need to redirect both *Kindai Bungaku*’s advocacy for establishing individual selfhood and democracy’s pervasive mood of political distrust toward reconstructing a sound understanding of society-literature relations. Thus during this phase, discussions on literature and politics regressed over a decade to restart from debates about politics’ primacy in literature. Though works emerging from laborers drew themes from workers’ lives, they failed to capture the large-scale working-class movements then unfolding. Soon critics began exposing these workplace-derived works’ fixation on quotidian trivialities. Writers from proletarian literature’s earlier era—muzzled for over a decade on themes they longed to address—now compulsively depicted urgent subjects through unavoidable materials in their distinct styles: whether *Tsuma yo Nemure*, *Watashi no Tōkyō Chizu*, *Harima Plain*, or *Kazekusa*. All shared motifs protesting wartime destruction of livelihoods and Peace Preservation Law’s inhuman oppression—each connecting to Japan’s democratic revolution through unique angles. Among these works, *Goshaku no Sake* stood apart through its singular significance and problematic nature.

V

Amidst a workplace literary atmosphere where theories about a “people’s realism” creative method—which abstracted the character of the working class’s historical mission—had been proposed by the very leaders of literary circles themselves, there arose in the latter half of 1948, alongside the anticipated victory of China’s people’s revolution, sweeping statements dismissing all prior creative work—encompassing Tokunaga, Miyamoto, Sata, and others—as useless to the working class, all without scientific scrutiny or analysis from the standpoint of Japanese democratic literature.

What is noteworthy is that in response to this statement—which was not only unliterary but even apolitical—antagonism between professional literary scholars and workplace writers came to be cultivated from the side of certain cultural activists and circle members.
A portion of literary circles that had been uncritical of "people’s realism" theory, together with some individuals engaged in cultural activities—including the proponents of people’s realism themselves—engaged in baseless denials of so-called professional writers and their works.
The second "Cultural Meeting" of the Japan Democratic Culture Federation in 1948 and the subsequently held fourth conference of the New Japan Literary Society took on the appearance of a solo stage for this type of tendency.
There, rather than concrete discussions on culture and literature being conducted by writers and critics, political statements by a peculiar group dubbed cultural activists—based on their own understanding—overwhelmed the proceedings.

This was clearly no ordinary atmosphere.
Those earnestly striving to follow cultural and literary movements while continuing their creative work found themselves perplexed—influenced by the anxiety, lack of standards, and indeterminate politicality roiling within the Democratic Culture and Literature Movement—about where to ground their activities so they might develop without being struck down.

In 1949, when workplace worker-writers were called upon to launch strikes and demonstrate leadership as workplace authors, some among the young writers who had newly emerged from workplaces over the past two or three years suffered from a dissonance between "what I want to write now" and "what I must write" in their lived experience.
In their growth process as individual workers and writers, what they wanted to write immediately did not align with "what they must write"—deemed an impossibility for worker-writers to avoid writing about strikes.
In the era of strikes, there had been no leisure to write what they had wished to write as individuals; by the time they now attempted to write those things, the general situation had already shifted to emphasize the achievement of China’s revolution and the workers’ leading mission—this discrepancy also existed.
Moreover, the widespread struggles experienced by the working class during 1946–47 had no choice but to become economistic because sufficient political education to reclaim the wartime deprivation of class consciousness—as previously discussed—had not been achieved in time.
The subtlety of society’s living relationships was observed in this: although after the winter of 1945 the Communist Party existed openly as a legal party of the working people, with party cells operating freely within labor unions, on the other hand, when combined with postwar conditions where workers’ autonomous awareness of and experience with class politics had been lost, large-scale workplace struggles did not necessarily result in enriching the class-based humanity of each individual worker who participated in them.
Therefore, what they wanted to write now was rather something from further back—likely during the war—and though they understood that literature of class struggle must be written now, circumstances arose where it had not yet had sufficient time to ferment within their lived experience.

As a whole, the Democratic Literature Movement had been thrown into disarray and rendered unsteady by this political impetuosity—how should it organize this state and advance? In 1949, the Democratic Literature Movement required each individual to expend extraordinary energy in their own way for self-criticism, study, and resistance against oppressive pressures.

The understanding of the primacy of politics in literature was compelled to be correctly and concretely defined. For this understanding of the foundation behind the sociocultural phenomenon of politics taking precedence over literature had given rise to situations where certain elements engaged in political activities appeared to claim authority to issue commands over cultural and literary movements. And on another front emerged a phenomenon both fascinating and perilous within modern social sentiments and literature. What occurred was a peculiar reversal: those who had opposed the proper understanding of political primacy in literature—who had disparaged so-called “master-owned literature” since the Proletarian Literature era—now relied entirely within their own writings on fragments of criticism or hearsay when attempting to levy slander against specific writers standing on democratic positions today; unrealistic and unliterary assessments born from a misapplied invocation of political primacy. In literature there existed a reality where writers and critics who denied the primacy of politics—or in other words, who rejected both confirmation of literature’s class nature and revolutionary awareness of its developmental direction—now leveraged distortions regarding literature and political primacy within the democratic camp to condemn the Democratic Literature Movement.

VI

If the policies and concrete achievements of Japan’s Democratic Literature Movement were not judged and evaluated in relation to the actual tasks of Japan’s democratic revolution, then what could such judgments and evaluations possibly amount to in the first place?

Mao Zedong's statements were readily cited by Japan's democratic camp and frequently invoked regarding literary movements; however, in the international relations of that time, the fact that free translation rights for Chinese documents were not permitted to the Japanese people had become a greater obstacle to democratic literature than one might imagine.

Among the CCP-related documents that circulated domestically alongside the CCP’s victory were those once gathered by special agencies operating in the hinterlands to collect intelligence, as well as documents submitted in response to inquiries from the prosecutor’s office while in prison.

What else could they be but plundered goods that invading nation Japan seized from the Chinese people and the CCP?

Attentive readers would discover that a single author published bureaucratic-style reports on the CCP’s agricultural policies in one context, wrote about the CCP’s cultural enlightenment campaigns and literary policies in another, and in different women’s magazines penned tender stories of Indonesian girls with a soft touch.

The introduction of Zhao Shuli’s works—divorced from the realities of Japanese culture and literature—was being recommended by some quarters as democratic literature’s most brilliant exemplar.
Within portions of literary circles, the notion that communist literature would inevitably become allegorical had also been formulated.
The significance Zhao Shuli’s works held under China’s unique sociocultural conditions—where an illiterate populace abruptly entered Soviet society—could not possibly equate to their significance within Japan’s cultural conditions, poisoned by emperor-system culture alongside unscrupulous commercial journalism’s fleshly literature and middlebrow fiction’s deluge.
Small-scale novels; allegorical novels; novels enjoyable even when read aloud to listeners.
Novels where today’s events already emerged as compact stories.
All these could exist and were necessary.
Yet this did not lead to concluding that only Zhao Shuli-style works must be written in Japanese democratic literature while deeming all others petty bourgeois.
The relationship Japan’s working class needed to mold with various classes as its own literary achievement on democracy’s revolutionary path required embracing considerable complexity.

The issue of the primacy of politics had evolved through four arduous years of experience up to that day, transforming from a matter of ideology into the actual process of creation and practical foundation for evaluation.
In the Proletarian Literature Movement's early days—when art's relationship to politics and political primacy were first being debated—the naive understanding of political primacy directly influenced its advocates' practices, allowing them to reap both favorable and adverse consequences.
However, in this present era where political parties, labor unions, and other mass organizations conducted cultural-literary activities across various fronts, a misunderstood grasp of political primacy brought about bureaucratized leadership in each sphere and deviations from revolutionary objectives.
In 1949, most democratic writers found themselves compelled toward a particular political maturation.
They came to learn this reality: overcoming literature's misguided invocations of political primacy required each writer to firmly grasp both the tasks of Japan's democratic revolution and interclass relationships, develop their creative work from that perspective, and cultivate the ability to evaluate the vast array of literary works produced by others.
They learned that practical political primacy in literature lay not merely in admiring the beauty of one large star shining upon the People's Republic of China's new national flag—encircled by four smaller stars—but in properly recognizing, amidst Japan's turbulent social conditions, literature's own constellation of one star and four smaller stars that would gradually brighten within their rightful configuration.

When viewing the Democratic Literature Movement from the standpoint of Japan’s revolutionary tasks such as these, it became clear that determining a novel to be working-class literature—the literature of the revolutionary mainstay—simply because a worker wrote it was a mistake.
The error of discussing class nature based on a writer's accidental birth had already been debated during the early days of the Proletarian Literature Movement; however, within the intense historical movements unfolding from today into tomorrow, we had to note the fact that class transitions were beginning among progressive people resisting fascism and war provocation in every country across the world.
If the Democratic Camp, while calling for a united front of the people—including workers, peasants, petty bourgeois, small-to-medium merchants/industrialists, and even national capitalists—in its economic and political struggles, should upon facing the cultural/literary front solely take up and rebuke the passive aspects of the petty bourgeois stratum (including scholars, intellectuals, writers, entertainers, and others), then what became of its professed principle to learn from the national line of culture that encompassed even Picasso?
It was also clear that the notion that the petty bourgeois stratum had no mission other than to serve the working class was erroneous.
The notion that one class should subjugate another to its service was nothing but the inverse of the capitalist idea that the working class ought to serve the capitalist class.
In any country where capitalist culture had developed to a certain degree, revolutionary literary movements invariably focused with great concern—in connection with the social and literary development of their mainstay, the working class—on how the cultural and literary substance of peasants and petty bourgeois could grow to serve their own liberation.

VII

Contemporary literature shared a common struggle: how to achieve new growth from the desiccated husk of the I-novel that had long withered.
For middlebrow fiction writers to develop their works into novels with the social content they aspired to, they needed to possess a perspective and creative method of observing reality that differed from reflecting societal trends through narratives unnaturally overloaded with sexual interest.
How would that be discovered?
It appeared that in 1949, Niwa Fumio—having broken away from realism that reflected reality without subjectivity and attempting to advance toward documentary works incorporating historical progress—had discovered that in material selection itself, a historical sifting was first necessary.
How would Toyoshima Yoshio’s progression from *Shiobana* to *Gyūnyū to Uma* be carried forward into tomorrow?
A developing contradiction had emerged among many people between their works and civic expressions in other aspects.
Or perhaps the distance between those two realms had become apparent.
When the "Peace Preservation Society" was established in Kamakura, the peace declaration read by Kawabata Yasunari struck people’s hearts.
Between *Eshino* and that text flowed a single emotional current of this writer’s, unfeigned in each.
Yet did it merely remain as human emotions flowing through a single writer, manifesting here and there?
I believed we had to understand far more thoroughly how the issues in Nakano Shigeharu’s *Five Shō of Sake* connected to his *Collected Parliamentary Speeches and Reports*.
I maintained that for the Democratic Literature Movement, existing merely as one literary school held no meaning.
Proletarian literature of the past had not been merely a single school; across nations, alongside their working classes’ class consciousness, it had opened new horizons for understanding literature itself.
These included establishing class nature in literature; leaping from impressionistic criticism to objective evaluation; and articulating creative methods aligned with history’s progression through perspectives shared with world literature.

Although attempts at new creative methods were being made from various angles, experiments with so-called European creative methods would likely see their small box of imitation shattered within the realities of Japan’s democratic revolutionary process.
It was noteworthy that a writer like Ito Sei—who deeply understood James Joyce’s literature—adopted a cautionary stance toward the younger generation’s adherence to European literary techniques.
In Japan, because the social and literary conditions after 1933 had been so irrational and brutal, many of the intelligentsia who had come of age during that period found themselves effectively exiled, their new lives taking shape primarily in Popular Front France.
Whether it be Noma Hiroshi or Katō Shūichi.
Those individuals were now returning in spirit within Japan’s democratic revolution.
Noma Hiroshi’s recent attempts—breaking away from the words of Gide and Valéry while striving to depict people’s lives through European novelistic techniques (those bourgeois democratic avant-garde methods) using language aligned with the tasks of Japan’s democratic revolution—were instilling hope in everyone.
There could be no one who would dismiss his earnestness—as he shattered his established style to plunge from Valéry’s words into phenomena lying beyond reason’s dim reach and resisting rational processing while engaging them in dialogue—as merely the anachronism of a writer unskilled in Japanese.

When considering the long, expansive process of democratic revolution, I believe literature increasingly ceases to be something arbitrarily tinted by critics' preferences or partitioned by the dams of literary schools according to its tasks' inevitability.
For a writer to gain even an inch in stature, I find it impermissible to push down another even slightly.
Literature has become something requiring thorough study.
If scientists' abilities are rightly evaluated today as contributions to human happiness regarding talent as capacity to reflect history's will—how could we condone literary talent alone being deemed pathological or self-destructive?
I consider it literature's own disgrace that literary talent alone gets celebrated through warped fascinations—whether reeking of alcoholism or praised for pathologically merciless acuity.
The abundant talent and sharpness of young writer Mishima Yukio were noted in 1949's overview.
This gifted young author likely already recognizes that his talent's sharpness—its vivid clarity—has only severed what his talent's blade can cleanly cut.
How will he henceforth discover materials to temper that very blade more robustly?
At what critical moment will he dare demonstrate the valor of brandishing his honed blade?
All these must undergo rigorous study.

In the Democratic Front, despite its breadth and the diversity of social activities encompassed within it, on another front, various social strata had developed a mutual common language they previously lacked.
The voices of the working class opposing fascism and the voices of scholars crying out against fascism for academic freedom not only blended into a single resonance domestically but also echoed internationally.

Literature was no longer the exclusive possession of literary professionals and enthusiasts alone.
The gateway for a historical escape from the I-novel lay in such places outside literature.
Therefore, literary creative methods could never be abstracted like scientific theorems—indeed, it was precisely this resistance to abstraction that constituted the humanity inherent to literature as literature. However, as we achieved a more objective grasp of history's forward direction and interclass relations, these methods naturally ceased to rely solely on the temperaments of individual writers.

Critical realism; proletarian realism post-1917.
Followed by socialist realism post-1932.
These three creative methods would serve as a guide to produce new literature in step with the advancing strides of each class across the broad and rugged front of Japan's democratic revolution.
Kuwabara Takeo had argued that if it were democratic literature, it should employ socialist realist methods, citing Steinbeck's Soviet travelogue in his *On Miyamoto Yuriko*.
Socialist realism was grounded in the working class's victory and the prospect of a socialist society, making it naturally suited as the creative method for working-class literature and for party member writers.
However, even if Steinbeck's dynamic method succeeded in typically capturing Soviet society's construction in his travelogue, his failure to comprehend the essential difference between bourgeois democracy and proletarian class dictatorship—discussing Stalin's dictatorship while ignoring his own country's financial capitalist dictatorship—demonstrated his lack of grasp on socialist realism.

In the 1950s, how will the Democratic Literature Movement convey the multitudinous voices of the people that resonate along the path of Japan’s democratic revolution?
How can we progressively unravel the various complexes of modern literature and render the history of Japanese people’s literature meaningful within world history?