Stories from the Samurai Fringe: Hayashi Fusao's Proletarian Short Stories and the Turn to Ultranationalism in Early Shōwa Japan

Author/Contributor(s):	Long, Jeff E
Publisher:	Cornell University - Cornell East Asia Series
Date:	12/31/2019
Binding:	Hardcover
Condition:	NEW

A cultural history of writer and literary critic Hayashi Fusao's (1903-1975) tenkō experience, Stories from the Samurai Fringe examines Hayashi's tenkō (ideological conversion) through a close reading of his proletarian short stories. Tracing Hayashi's move from "romanticizing" to "defining" to "remembering" the proletarian literature movement and its participants in his proletarian fiction, this study argues for a far more personal and political rationale for Hayashi's subsequent turn to ultranationalism. Stories from the Samurai Fringe concludes with a consideration of Hayashi's tenkō experience, first, within the historiographical context of the early Shōwa years (1926-1937), and then within the trans-war setting of Hayashi's reemergence as a proponent of wartime nationalism.