This collection of essays by distinguished scholars on both sides of the Pacific is an excellent companion volume to The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism, 1945–52. The provocative essays take up the topic of literary criticism in postwar Japan and open it up to rigorous and multifaceted examination. Japanese literary criticism was intensely argumentative during this period, embroiling writers in debates about political commitment, war responsibility, literary autonomy, and human subjectivity. These debates are discussed and contextualized here in admirably lucid prose. This is essential reading for students and scholars of modern Japan, but is also highly recommended to anyone whose reading and thinking touch on the relation of art and politics in the modern world.

Ayako Kano, University of Pennsylvania

Literature among the Ruins, 1945–1955 takes up the most vital debates of Japan's immediate postwar period, an era of great hardship that saw profound reflections on literature’s relationship to individual political agency. This collection of critical essays—drawn from leading scholars in both the United States and Japan—illuminates what was at stake then and what remains relevant today. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the relationship between culture and power in the twentieth century.

Edward Mack, University of Washington

This work, together with its companion volume, The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism, 1945–52, fills a substantial lacuna in postwar scholarship on Japan. While the essays collectively address the question of literature, the complex relations literature invariably maintains with history and the political are examined here with remarkable insight. The core notion of ‘literature among the ruins’ helps pave the way for a rethinking of trauma beyond the personal in properly geopolitical terms.

Richard Calichman, City College of New York