SOURCE: "Shiga Naoya," in Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature, Stanford University Press, 1976, pp. 85-110.

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

More than most other contemporary Japanese novelists of importance, Shiga Naoya (1883-1971) seems to have been fond of writing about his own works. When the first collection of his prose was published in 1928, he wrote a postscript explaining the motive and intent of each work included in it. He did the same for the nine-volume Collected Works of Shiga Naoya (1937-38), and for the five-volume Library of Shiga Naoya's Writings (1954-55), so that today's readers have the author's notes on virtually all his fiction. The works themselves also throw a good deal of light on his attitude toward literature, because many of them have a writer, often identifiable as Shiga, for their principal...