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In the Kamakura and Muromachi periods (1185-1573), glorious war tales were the fashion. Then several emperors were driven into exile, and the country was beset with wars and rebellion; stories of the samurai, themes of death characterized Japanese prose. When peace was restored at the beginning of the 17th century, the literature of the Tokugawa period (1603-1868) first reflected the new epoch by turning to eccentric verse and frivolous tales. Soon the merchant class replaced warriors as subjects for fiction, and novels examined the lives of the commoner instead of the aristocrat. Still, Japan was more interested in itself than the world. The country's isolation was interrupted by the appearance of Europeans, principally Portuguese priests and Dutch merchants. Ironically, it was their very presence that led to further isolation. The rulers of Japan, fearful of unrest, turned against the missionaries and eventually prohibited Christianity altogether. In 1640 the country was closed to the outside world, and under the rule of the shoguns, literature again turned inward.
But in the nearly four decades between the Meiji restoration of 1868 and the Russo-Japanese War, notes Scholar and Translator Donald Keene, literature in Japan "moved from idle quips directed at the oddities of the West to symbolist poetry, from the thousandth-told tale of the gay young blade and the harlots to the complexities of the psychological novel." Western works were translated; Japanese readers graduated from Self-Help by Samuel Smiles to the political novels of Disraeli and the naturalistic fiction of Zola. Expatriates like Lafcadio Hearn began to appraise the strange culture: in Japan, "we find ourselves bewitched forever . . . like those wanderers of folktale who rashly visited Elf-land."
The exotic country produced its first major novelists since the 17th century: Soseki Natsume (1867-1916), Ogai Mori (1862-1922) and Toson Shimazaki (1872-1943), writing in everyday speech rather than in the florid style of the earlier romances. The next generation of writers, informed by the experiments and traditions of the West, returned to native concerns. In Thousand Cranes and Snow Country, Yasunari Kawataba (1899-1972) addressed the themes of erotic obsession with an oblique sensitivity that won him a Nobel Prize in 1968. Osamu Dazai (1909-48) was Japan's Albert Camus. He sounded the dissonant chords of postwar malaise and romantic nihilism in works like The Setting Sun ("Victims. Victims of a transitional period of morality.
That is what we certainly are").
The most celebrated of 20th century Japanese novelists remains Yukio Mishima (1925-70), a writer of almost operatic sensibility.
From the surreality of Confessions of a Mask ("I surrendered myself to them, to those deplorably brutal visions, my most intimate friends") to The Temple of the Golden Pavilion ("A reality that has lost its freshness . . . and that gives off a half-putrid odor"), Mishima looked backward to military epochs and derided the indulged, secularized Japan he saw around him.