A series of transcribed interviews with a number of writers, titled "Sakka kushin dan" (Writers' Struggles) appeared in the literary journal Shincho gekkan, starting in 1897, ending in the following year. It had a provocative introductory statement, to the effect that these interviews revealed how "ambitious writers" made painstaking efforts to produce their works, and that "shallow readers and critics should repent deeply." This implies that the writers of the time had been pestered by critics who speculated whether the stories were based on the authors' own lives or not, and tried to make accusations. This offered a good opportunity for the writers to make public their honest opinions about the actual conditions of their lives and to fight against the critics' personal attacks. This paper focuses on the antagonistic relationships between the writers and the critics of the time that triggered the birth of the new genre of "kushindan" (tales of struggle) and analyzes the effect that the emergence of this new genre had on the critical language.

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Tayama Katai's Nikko (Nikko, 1899) has some textual characteristics that shed light on the advent of the Realist Novel around the turn of the century. This work straddles two genres-travel literature and fiction-and a third-person narrative is occasionally interjected into the first-person narrative. This type of blending of narrative styles in one work was in fact common across a wide range of contemporary works, including what were conceived of in Japan as disparate genres such as the descriptive essay and belles-lettres. In Nikko, however, Katai is quite original in the way he took advantage of the changes in location in the progress of the journey in order to introduce a third-person narrative that goes astray from the norms of a travelogue. He was also creative in the way he used quotations from Western literary works to prompt a switch into third-person narrative. These innovative techniques set Nikko apart from and above numerous other works of travel literature of the same era.

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Psychopathia Sexualis : eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie (Sexual Psychopathology : A Clinical-Forensic Study, 1886) by Krafft-Ebing, an Austro-German psychiatrist, established the foundations of modern sexual psychopathology, and it was Mori Ogai who introduced that discipline first to Japanese academia. The study of sexuality necessitates verbal expressions of sexuality, and calls attention to sexuality as an arena in which one's effort to establish the topic and one's desire to suppress it collide with each other. Through Krafft-Ebing's work Ogai became interested in issues of sexuality, and he incorporated the binary urge of establishing and suppressing into his writing. As a doctor specializing in public health he promoted personal responsibility for control and management of sexuality; but as a creative writer he penned Vita Sexualis, a work that highlights the power of the verbal expression of sexuality. Ogai's discourse on sexuality was closely tied to questions of power.

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A number of studies in the field of the intellectual history of modern Japan have analyzed from a variety of angles the importance of the discovery of the concept of "society" in the public arena after World War I. However, its effect on literary history has not been explored fully to this day. This paper attempts to explicate how the awareness of society affected literary circles and literary expressions by reexamining the significance of the "Socialization of Literary Art" debate in 1920. This debate was conducted primarily in the form of an article that attracted a number of comments by different critics in the Yomiuri newspaper under the title, "The Socialization of Literary Art. "This paper argues that the movement engulfed the entire literary world and explicates how the conception of society transformed the literary discourse of the time, which idealized "the self," "character," and "universality."

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This paper attempts to interpret Takeda Taijun's Shinpan (The Judgment, 1947) as a novelistic demonstration of Taijun's effort to overcome issues arising from his prewar work, Shiba Sen, (Sima Qian, 1943). The first section of the paper points out the commonalities between two works published around the same time, Shiba Sen and Koyama Iwao's Sekaishi no tetsugaku (The Philosophy of World History, 1942), and shows the limitations of discussing pluralism on a metaphysical level alone. The second section argues that the cosmopolitan nature of the city of Shanghai and the narrative polyphony in Shinpan function as tools to help overcome the shortcomings of Shiba Sen. The thirdand the fourth sections argue that the polyphony of the narrative in Shinpan casts strong doubt on the uniqueness of individual self-awareness, and propose to find in the story the hidden theme of violent animalistic nature seen in human history. Thus the paper opens up the possibility of finding animalistic themes in postwar literature.

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This paper explains Abe Kebo's motives for writing "Henkei no kiroku," focusing on a variety of representations of the dead during the Second World War. First, it introduces his ideas from around the same period about the recording of facts, and analyzes "the dead" as an allegorical signifier. This leads to the conclusion that Abe was not so much trying to depict the War itself as the linguistic environment surrounding the representations of the dead. It also suggests that the corpses of the Chinese people depicted in the story invalidate the narrative inside Japan that held that Japanese are the war victims. The analysis shows that Abe wrote "Henkei no kiroku" as a criticism of the Japanese discussion of war responsibility.

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Although mainstream mystery writers have in the past stayed away from unscientific elements such as superhuman powers and ghosts, the most recent trend in Japan is to have detectives in stories solve cases using supernatural powers. This is a reaction to the impossibility of problem-solving by inference within the limits of information given in one story, which detective fiction fans commonly refer to as "issues related to the later works of Ellery Queen." It is important to note that this trend of incorporating supernatural powers was a way to overcome the limitations placed by the rigor of inference expected by the reader. This study closely examines one of the latest such examples, Detective Fantasy : Nanase with a Steel Bar (2011) by Shirodaira Kyo, and offers an insight into how the structures of conventional mysteries have been abandoned, and what kinds of new issues contemporary writers are facing now.

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