Post War Literature

Japan’s defeat in World War II influenced Japanese literature during the 1940s and 1950s. Many authors wrote stories about disaffection, loss of purpose, and the coping with defeat. Dazai Osamu's novel The Setting Sun tells of a soldier returning from Manchukuo. Mishima Yukio, well known for both his nihilistic writing and his controversial suicide by seppuku, began writing in the post-war period. Kojima Nobuo's short story, "The American School," portrays a group of Japanese teachers of English who, in the immediate aftermath of the war, deal with the American occupation in varying ways.

Prominent writers of the 1970s and 1980s were identified with intellectual and moral issues in their attempts to raise social and political consciousness. One of them, Oe Kenzaburo wrote his best-known work, A Personal Matter in 1964 and became Japan's second winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Inoue Mitsuaki had long been concerned with the atomic bomb and continued during the 1980’s to write on problems of the nuclear age, while Endo Shusaku depicted the religious dilemma of the Kakure Kirishitan, Roman Catholics in feudal Japan, as a springboard to address spiritual problems. Inoue Yasushi also turned to the past in masterful historical novels, set in Inner Asia and ancient Japan, in order to comment on present human fate.

Avant-garde writers, such as Abe Kobo, who wrote fantastic novels such as Woman in the Dunes (1960), and wanted to express the Japanese experience in modern terms without using either international styles or traditional conventions, developed new inner visions. Furui Yoshikichi tellingly related the lives of alienated urban dwellers coping with the minutiae of daily life, while the psychodramas within such daily life crises have been explored by a rising number of important women novelists. The 1988 Naoki Prize went to Todo Shizuko for Ripening Summer. a story capturing the complex psychology of modern women. Other award-winning stories at the end of the decade dealt with current issues of the elderly in hospitals; the recent past; the Pure-Hearted Shopping District in Koenji, Tokyo; and the life of a Meiji period ukiyo-e artist. In international literature, Kazuo Ishiguro, a native of Japan, who had taken up residence in Britain, won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize.

Murakami Haruki is one of the most popular and controversial of today's Japanese authors. His genre-defying, humorous and surreal works have sparked fierce debates in Japan over whether they are true "literature" or simple pop-fiction: Oe Kenzaburo has been one of his harshest critics. Some of his best-known works include Norwegian Wood (1987) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994-1995). Another best-selling contemporary author is Banana Yoshimoto.

Modern Themes

Although modern Japanese writers covered a wide variety of subjects, one particularly Japanese approach stressed their subjects' inner lives, widening the earlier novel's preoccupation with the narrator's consciousness. In Japanese fiction, plot development and action have often been of secondary interest to emotional issues. In keeping with the general trend toward reaffirming national characteristics, many old themes re-emerged in modern literature, and some authors turned consciously to the past. Strikingly, Buddhist attitudes about the importance of knowing oneself and the poignant impermanence of things formed an undercurrent of sharp social criticism of modern materialism. There was a growing emphasis on women's roles, the Japanese persona in the modern world, and the malaise of common people lost in the complexities of urban culture.

Contemporary Literature

Popular fiction, non-fiction, and children's literature all flourished in urban Japan during the 1980s. Many popular works fell between "pure literature" and pulp novels, including all sorts of historical serials, information-packed docudramas, science fiction, mysteries, detective fiction, business stories, war journals, and animal stories. Non-fiction covered everything from crime to politics. Although factual journalism predominated, many of these works were interpretive, reflecting a high degree of individualism. Children's works re-emerged in the 1950s, and the newer entrants into this field, many of them younger women, brought new vitality to it in the 1980s.

Manga (comic books) have penetrated almost every sector of the popular market. They include virtually every field of human interest, such as a multi volume high-school history of Japan and, for the adult market, a manga introduction to economics, and pornography. At the end of the 1980s, manga represented between twenty and thirty percent of total annual publications in Japan, representing sales of some four hundred billion yen annually. In contemporary Japan, there is a debate over whether the rise in popular forms of entertainment such as manga and anime has caused a decline in the quality of literature in Japan.