ABSTRACT
Before 1926, the Japanese proletarian literary world consisted of several dozen writers committed to advancing radical politics, but there was no one writer who was so outstanding that he or she could not be ignored by the mainstream literary world. At least, that is, until “The Prostitute” was published in November 1925, followed by Hayama’s grotesque “Letter in a Cement Barrel” in January 1926. Hayama Yoshiki also had the honour of being the first proletarian author to be discussed in the Shinchō literary round-table, the prestigious forum of the central literature clique, the bundan (Kume et al. 1926; Uranishi 1994: 6). At the other end of the literary spectrum, modernist Shinkankaku-ha (New Sensationists) writer Akagi Kensuke found in “The Prostitute” “a ray of hope” (Akagi 1925: 84). Akagi’s proposition of a new romanticism inspired by works such as Hayama’s never gained currency in the fight to overthrow the bundan, but it is
noteworthy that he enlisted Hayama’s story to demonstrate effective alternatives to what he saw as the decay of bourgeois realism. And members of the bundan were themselves fascinated by Hayama.
