Although the themes and styles of those contemporary Japanese novelists now best known in the west - Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto - are a far cry from the taciturn, elusive qualities of Mishima and others, both owe large swathes of their western audiences to the trails blazed by their predecessors.Īt almost exactly the same historical moment as the cold war gave Japanese fiction an entrée into big-business publishing, Mao's bamboo curtain clattered down around China, shutting off western access to many of its most interesting, free-thinking writers and tainting its modern literature - in the eyes of the western public - with the stigma of communism.

These were the years in which authors such as Mishima and Kawabata became the representative, languishingly melancholic voices who later slipped comfortably into canon-forming collections in Britain: Penguin Modern Classics, the Everyman's Library. In the 1950s, as part of the broader US project of reinventing Japan as an unthreatening regional ally against communist China, the American publisher Knopf set about marketing a picture of Japan - through carefully selected and translated works of its modern fiction - as a non-bellicose land of exotic aestheticism the very opposite of Japan's aggressive, jingoistic pre-war image. W hy does modern Japanese fiction have an audience in Britain while its Chinese counterpart plays to an empty house? How come substantial numbers of British readers of literary fiction can conjure with a few names from recent Japanese literature - Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, Haruki Murakami - while the Chinese Shen Congwen, Qian Zhongshu and Mo Yan languish in near-total obscurity?

The Guardian Specter by Marc Lovell