Stories from the Samurai Fringe

A cultural history of writer and literary critic Hayashi Fusaō''s (1903–1975) tenkō experience, Stories from the Samurai Fringe examines Hayashi''s tenkō (ideological conversion) through a close reading of his proletarian short stories. Tracing Hayashi''s move from "romanticizing" to "defining" to "remembering" the proletarian literature movement and its participants in his proletarian fiction, this study argues for a far more personal and political rationale for Hayashi''s subsequent turn to ultranationalism. Stories from the Samurai Fringe concludes with a consideration of Hayashi''s tenkō experience, first, within the historiographical context of the early Showa years (1926–1937), and then within the trans-war setting of Hayashi''s reemergence as a proponent of wartime nationalism.