Standard anthologies of modern Japanese literature have identified Ishikawa Jun as a writer belonging to the "new talent" debuting in the 1930s, the first wave of post-World War II novelists, the burai-ha (libertine) or shin gesaku-ha (new burlesque) school of Sakaguchi Ango and Dazai Osamu, or a young generation of "internationalists" such as Abe Kb or e Kenzabur. Ishikawa has also been seen as a figure belonging to no group at all, his place within Japanese letters established solely by his brilliance as a prose stylist and experimentalist. What these labels obscure or grasp only in part is the consistently modernist thread that runs through his works. To understand this writer and to establish his place within Japanese and world literature are to appreciate how Western modanizumu (modernism) has parallel roots in Japanese culture. A broad understanding of what modernism denotes can help one to understand how Ishikawa...