By 1935 Shiga Naoya had been extolled as the "God of Fiction," and his preeminence as the most revered of modern Japanese writers was established by the late 1930s. The body of Shiga's work probably equals that number of works annually published by a...

Roy Starrs (Surrey, GB: Curzon Press, 1998), 261 pp. Cloth [pounds]40.00. This book, which provides an excellent entrance into the life and works of modern Japanese writer Shiga Naoya (1883-1971), is divided into two parts. The first part consists of four chapters...

In the following excepts from his book-length study of Shiga, Mathy analyzes eight of the author's most famous short stories and summarizes how his work differs from Western standards of great literature.

In the following excerpt, Fowler surveys Shiga's novellas, particularly Wakai. He then goes on to contend that Shiga "depopulates " his fiction, showing his main characters in relative isolation in order to better explore the nature of personal experience.

In the excerpt below, Makoto examines Shiga's literary aesthetic through a survey of his fictional and autobiographical writings.