Ibuse Masuji's writing career spanned most of this century. Through seventy years of his remarkably consistent literary work, Ibuse contributed significantly to most literary genres--short stories, novellas, novels, poems, essays, and translations. His writing expresses the painful struggle of the Japanese people for identity and documents their most shattering experience of this century--the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Ibuse is renowned above all for experimenting radically with styles and for becoming the voice of the shomin (common people). Saeki Shichi, one of the most influential critical authorities in Japan, places Ibuse's achievement at the peak of one end of the range of aesthetic, social, and political concerns in modern Japanese literature, with Kawabata Yasunari at the opposite end. In Saeki's view Kawabata is the modern representative of the classical monogatari (Heian "tales") and nikki (diary) tradition, with their emphases on emotional subtlety, fragile nature-lyricism, and an intimate if somewhat...