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 contemporary popular writer, but, as Agawa Hiroyuki writes, although Yu Ta-fu has called Shiga "the most laconic writer in Japan, every work he produced was a gem." Shiga's An'ya kro (1922-1937; translated as A Dark Night's Passing, 1976) and Natsume Sseki's Meiji Era works are among the most widely read modern classics even among young people, and it is the only novel from the Taish Era to be so honored.

On occasion, however, critics contend that Shiga ceased to write major works after the late 1930s and that his post-World War Two works were limited to brief personal and occasional essays. Nakamura Mitsuo even goes so...