This book explores the existence of a Christian discursive space in Japanese literature, extending from the Meiji (1868–1912) and Taishō (1912–1926) eras to the postwar period. It examines a crucial question: what is the correlation between Christianity and Japanese literature, and how did these two realms continue to interface following the significant Christian experience of the Meiji and Taishō years?

Highlighting a major shift across the World War II divide, from narratives that emphasized humanity's inability to change its fate and avoid spiritual damnation to narratives that contemplated the possibilities of salvation, this study argues that such transformations, and the subsequent developments at the intersection of art and faith, were largely a dialectical response to earlier paradigms of despair, nihilism, and ineluctability. Examining the works of eight major authors from these intervening years, this volume explores the important mutual connections that fueled their fiction and deliberations, challenging conventional understandings and periodization of Christianity's influence on twentieth-century Japanese literature.

This work will be a valuable resource for students and scholars interested in literary criticism, Japanese literature, religion, and Christianity.

Massimiliano Tomasi (PhD, Nagoya University, Japan) is Professor of Japanese and former Director of the Center for East Asian Studies at Western Washington University, Bellingham, Washington, USA. Areas of interest and expertise include modern and contemporary Japanese literature, rhetorical theory, and Japanese language pedagogy. Publications include Rhetoric in Modern Japan: Western Influences on the Development of Written and Oratorical Style (University of Hawaii Press, 2004); The Literary Theory of Shimamura Hōgetsu and the Development of Feminist Discourse in Modern Japan (Mellen, 2008); The Dilemma of Faith in Modern Japanese Literature: Metaphors of Christianity (Routledge, 2018); and the edited volume Religion and Spirituality in Japanese Literature (Association for Japanese Literary Studies, 2016).