ABSTRACT
During the 1920s and 1930s, writers and artists in Japan actively debated the proper relationship between politics and literature, between social values and artistic values. The question of literary realism had been a major subject of debate from the time of Tsubouchi Shoyo's essay "The Essence of the Novel" in 1885, and with the development of the I-novel as a distinct genre in the twentieth century, the debate often took the form of critiques of the I-novel. Although the number of works written strictly according to the theory of socialist realism was limited, the active dispute which took place with regard to its applicability to Japanese proletarian writing has a significant place in the history of modern Japanese literature, particularly in the context of the larger dispute over politics and literature. In evaluating the past literature of realism, Kurahara Korehito criticized naturalism as external depiction which pays attention only to trivia.
