In the midst of the increasing restriction of freedom of speech in the 1910s, Sakae Ōsugi started the literary and political magazine Kindai-shisō to criticize the literary circle for its indifference to the trend toward totalitarianism. In the magazine he had a controversy with Gyofū Sōma over the relation between personal revolution and social revolution. While Sōma insisted on the separation of art from politics, Ōsugi advocated the monistic idea of political art on the assumption that art could cause a social change if artists became ideologically conscious. As if to put his monism into practice, Keishichi Hirasawa, a proletarian playwright, created the “working-class drama” precisely for the unification of art and politics.

The history of proletarian literature during the late 1920s and the early 1930s has been written exclusively from Marxist points of view, but now it seems to be necessary to revise such a partisan approach to it. Indeed there were some anarchist poets who played an important role in the literary movement. Their poems about working-class experiences, most of which were published in a magazine Aka-to-kuro, are less didactic and more artistic than any other proletarian work. Such grass-roots politics has much in common with “new anarchism” that can be found in a variety of civic movements now going on all over the world.

The inexpensive editions of literary works called “enpon” books started to be published in 1926. While they made literature more accessible to the public, they contributed much to the standardization of the Japanese language as an ideological tool of the linguistic centralization of power. In the name of “correct” Japanese the languages used by workers, farmers, women, and other minority groups were condemned as “wrong” and “deteriorated.” But proletarian writers resisted such a linguistic discipline through the faithful descriptions of the social minority's words. In this sense proletarian literature was a movement against standard Japanese and even against literature itself.

After the suppression and collapse of the proletarian literary movement in wartime, Yuriko Miyamoto wrote a series of “meta-proletarian novels” that focused on the private lives of the writers who dedicated themselves to the movement. In those novels she foregrounded gender issues submerged in the political movement which was rather conservatively male-centered in spite of its apparent radicalness. In the same period Sakae Tuboi wrote about the movement from the viewpoints of the women whose husbands lost their lives in it. In their own ways both women writers pointed to the possibility of proletarian literature as artistic resistance for obscure individuals, especially for women.

Hisashi Inoue's posthumous novel Isshūkan (2010) is strongly reminiscent of Iurii Libedinskii's The Week (1922). The Russian writer's novel is known for its influence on Japanese and Chinese proletarian writers such as Yuriko Miyamoto, Takiji Kobayashi, Shinzaburō Iketani, and Dai Wangshu. But it is some modernist writers of the 1920s that first noticed its literary value and introduced it to Japanese readers in translation. Such a proletarian and modernist heritage of prewar literature can be found in Inoue's works, especially in his drama “Kumikyoku-gyakusatsu.”

In his works Takizawa-Bakin often reused the same plot of “blood testing,” which he borrowed from the first part of the fourth volume of Karanashi-daimon-yashiki by Nishiki-Bunryū. Bakin had a belief that popular fiction should be moralistic. Indeed he used blood testing as a literary device to make a distinction between good and evil through its function to prove the hero's legitimacy. The plot is thus fit for his idea of popular fiction.