In Botchan Sōseki Natsume paradoxically represents Matsuyama, a local town of Shikoku, as if it were a site of modernity. The center of the “modern city” is the middle school where the narrator from Tokyo teaches mathematics because there he is automatically turned into a modern subject in the symbolic order of the new regime. Even after he quits teaching in Matsuyama, he still remains alienated and fragmented. Such fragmentation caused by modernization is not only thematically treated but also structurally incorporated in the narrative function of the story.

There is controversy over whether Kyōka Izumi changed his literary style after the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923. Certainly before the earthquake Tokyo was a metropolis full of mysteries out of which the author wove many stories. In this sense the disaster caused a great literary loss to him. But he soon tried to make a recovery from it by narrating the aftermath piece by piece. Such a therapeutic act of writing resulted in his discovery of a new sort of stories like “Ni-san-ba, jūni-san-ba.”

“Yūhei,” Masuji Ibuse's short story published in 1923, is generally known as a prototype of “Sanshō-uo” (1930). Although many critics see the development of his career as a writer in the more sophisticated style of his masterpiece, a certain possibility latent in the earlier work seems to be lost in the very process of reworking. This paper will relocate both stories in the historical and literary context between the 1920s and the 1930s and then revise a configuration of Ibuse's early works.

In 1960 the Socialist Party leader Inejiro Asanuma was stabbed to death by Otoya Yamaguchi, seventeen-year-old right-wing student who later committed suicide in prison. So “Seventeen” and “Seiji-shōnen-shisu,” Kenzaburō Ōe's short stories published in 1961, are often said to be based on the assassination. But such a relation between fact and fiction seems to be to a great degree formed by the author's own comments on this case of murder. In short his political and philosophical discourses are confused with his literary ones. Indeed suicide in the stories doesn't directly reflect the fact, but it symbolically refers to a project to escape from the cul-de-sac of postwar Japan.

In “Chikatetsu-no-jojishi” Kikuko Tsumura treats sexual molestation in a crowded train. She is a type of author who writes from anger against injustice and violence done to socially disadvantaged people in the age of globalization. In this story of sexual crime she also powerfully develops social criticism to bring into question the logic of laissez-faire rationalization in neoliberalism.