Overcoming Fate in Postwar Japanese Literature

This book explores the existence of a Christian discursive space in Japanese literature, extending from the Meiji (1868–1912) and Taisho (1912–1926) eras to the postwar period. It examines a crucial question: what is the correlation between Christianity and Japanese literature, and how did these two realms continue to interface following the significant Christian experience of the Meiji and Taisho years?

Highlighting a major shift across the World War II divide, from narratives that emphasized humanity's inability to change its fate and avoid spiritual damnation to narratives that contemplated the possibilities of salvation, this study argues that such transformations, and the subsequent developments at the intersection of art and faith, were largely a dialectical response to earlier paradigms of despair, nihilism, and ineluctability. Examining the works of eight major authors from these intervening years, this volume explores the important mutual connections that fuelled their fiction and deliberations, challenging conventional understandings and periodization of Christianity's influence on twentieth-century Japanese literature.

This work will be a valuable resource for students and scholars interested in literary criticism, Japanese literature, religion, and Christianity.