was a pre-

war War is an armed conflict between the armed forces of states, or between governmental forces and armed groups that are organized under a certain command structure and have the capacity to sustain military operations, or between such organi ...

Japanese literary group led by

Riichi Yokomitsu was an experimental, modernist Japanese writer. Yokomitsu began publishing in dōjinshi such as ''Machi'' ("Street") and ''Tō'' ("Tower") after entering Waseda University in 1916. In 1923, he published ''Nichirin'' ("The Sun"), ''Hae'' ("A F ...

and

Yasunari Kawabata was a Japanese novelist and short story writer whose spare, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works won him the 1968 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Japanese author to receive the award. His works have enjoyed broad international appeal and ...

which focused on exploring "new impressions" or "new perceptions" in the writing of Japanese literature. Riichi Yokomitsu wrote "The phenomenon of perception for ''Shinkankakuha'' is, to put it briefly, the direct, intuitive sensation of a subjectivity that peels away the naturalized exterior aspects and leaps into the thing itself."

History

After the

1923 Great Kantō earthquake The 1923 Great Kantō earthquake (, or ) was a major earthquake that struck the Kantō Plain on the main Japanese island of Honshu at 11:58:32 JST (02:58:32 UTC) on Saturday, 1 September 1923. It had an approximate magnitude of 8.0 on the mom ...

and the deadly fire it caused, new technologies such as subway, airplane, and radio were transforming Japan. Meanwhile, a new conception of modern life also appeared. ''Shinkankakuha'' developed during this period as the start of Japan's

modernist Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...

movement, influenced by European modernism. In order to oppose the literary mainstream, Kawabata, Yokomitsu, and other young writers started a new literary journal called in 1924, which was a medium of new movement in modern Japanese literature. Articles in this journal were mainly a reaction against the old school of Japanese literature; they also supported

Proletarian literature Proletarian literature refers here to the literature created by left-wing writers mainly for the class-conscious proletariat. Though the ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' states that because it "is essentially an intended device of revolution", it is t ...

of the Socialist/Communist schools. The conceptions the writers had when they wrote articles for ''Bungei Jidai'' were known as ''Shinkankakuha''. In other words, ''Shinkankakuha'' is a writing style. The ''Shinkankakuha'' writers were interested in film as a medium of new impressions and were involved in the production of

Teinosuke Kinugasa was a Japanese filmmaker and actor. His best-known films include the Silent film, silent Experimental film, avant-garde films ''A Page of Madness'' and ''Crossroads (1928 film), Crossroads'' and the Academy Awards, Academy Award-winning historic ...

's , which was produced by the ''Shinkankakuha Eiga Dōmei''.

Related work

In 1924, the Japanese poet and translator Horiguchi Daigaku cited the work of the French novelist

Paul Morand Paul Morand (13 March 1888 – 24 July 1976) was a French author whose short stories and novellas were lauded for their style, wit and descriptive power. His most productive literary period was the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s. He was m ...

as a symbol of a new era. Instead of using rational logic to describe the relationship between things, Morand used the logic of senses. His work inspired many Japanese authors to begin writing in a new style, and prompted Yokomitsu and others to found ''Bungei Jidai''.

Critiques of ''Shinkankakuha''

Kawabata struggled to define what "oldness" and "newness" were. Even though he noted ''Shinkankakuha'' was an integral part of creating "the new literature", the conception of "newness" was still unclear. Finally, he published an article in the fourth issue of ''Bungei Jidai'' stating that Western literature inspired a new writing style in Japanese literature, the so called "new literature".

References

{{reflist 1920s in Japan Literary movements Japanese literature

History

Related work

Critiques of ''Shinkankakuha''

See also

References