Stories from the Samurai Fringe: Hayashi Fusao’s Proletarian Short Stories and the Turn to Ultranationalism in Early Showa Japan

A cultural history of writer and literary critic Hayashi Fusao’s (1903-1975) tenko experience, Stories from the Samurai Fringe examines Hayashi’s tenko (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 tenko 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.