SOURCE: "Postoccupation Literary Movements and Developments in Japan," in Legacies and Ambiguities: Postwar Fiction and Culture in Germany and Japan, edited by Ernestine Schlant and J. Thomas Rimer, The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1991, pp. 207-23.

In the following essay, Gessel discusses major fiction writers and literary movements that emerged in Japan after World War II.

Japanese fiction after the occupation is in many ways an extension as well as a rethinking of the two major types of writing that dominated prewar composition—specifically, the works by the socially and ideologically committed proletarian authors (Puroretaria bungaku sakka) and the predominantly asocial, semiautobiographical personal narratives (the infamous shi-shosetsu). There was little cross-pollenization between these two rival factions; the proletarian writers considered the shi-shosetsu writers to be needlessly parochial, overweeningly narcissistic, and dangerously removed from the political and social concerns that were already tearing apart the fabric of experimental democracy in...