ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores modern Japanese literature by focusing on three of the most basic concerns of modern Japanese writers: the relation between their art and themselves, the relation between their art and social and historical reality, and the relation of their art to Japan's cultural tradition and the archetypal creative imagination underlying it. It addresses some of the generic problems of the I-novel and to critics' attitudes toward it. The I-novel is a unique product of Japanese writers' efforts for "modernization," efforts pursued in the context of their vital exposure to Western ideas and basic isolation from Japanese society. Japanese writers, with the possible exception of Natsume Soseki and Shiga Naoya, were not so egocentrically obsessed with the question of the ego as Nakamura Mitsuo and Kobayashi Hideo tended to think in their criticism of the I-novel.
