Political Value and Artistic Value and Other Essays

Can a work be politically useful without being artistically great? Can literature evolve, or does it merely change with fashion? Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke poses these questions with sharp examples and a willingness to challenge his own allies.

These five essays move between Marxist literary theory, the growth of Japanese detective fiction, and the pressures of commercial publishing. Hirabayashi discusses writers including Edogawa Ranpo, Shimazaki Tōson, Yokomitsu Riichi, and Kobayashi Takiji, while examining advertising, censorship, cinema, literary schools, and the precarious livelihoods of authors.

A substantial survey of the literary world in 1929 brings those concerns together. It follows popular fiction, historical storytelling, true-story literature, humor, proletarian writing, modernism, criticism, and women writers, ending with the unequal power of editors and publishers.