ABSTRACT
The Heisei era coincided with the decline, if not actual death, of Japanese ‘pure literature’ (junbungaku). It was during this era that grand national narratives that sustained a sense of ‘Japaneseness’ gave way to a sustained push towards exposing and expressing the systematic peripheralization of large parts of its population. That is to say, where pre-Heisei writing seemed to focus on the isolated individual struggling against Japanese homogeneity, Heisei literature exposed the absence of that homogeneity itself. This chapter explores some of the major writers and movements that arose with Heisei to challenge the primacy of ‘pure literature’ and, more importantly, question the widely touted uniformity of Japanese culture. Heisei literature was instead marked by a diverse body of writers and texts that dug beneath the superficial tranquility of ‘Japaneseness’ (advanced in the Nihonjinron debates) to expose voices that were anything but mainstream. Indeed, Heisei writers showed that the ‘mainstream’ itself is a myth and that Japanese literature, like the society it represents, is constructed of a remarkable variety of voices, backgrounds, and experiences.
