Standing on the Streets: Standard-bearers of Popular Literature, 1925-1927

Standing on the Streets: Standard-bearers of Popular Literature, 1925-1927

From the end of the Taisho era (1912-1926) to the beginning of the Showa era (1926-1989), Japanese cities were shaken by the post-World War I recession and the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. In the midst of confusion and anxiety, people craved "reading material" rooted in reality, and serialized novels in weekly magazines and newspapers became devices to convey the pulse of the times. Shirai Kyoji's "Shin-Sen-Gumi" attracted readers in the aftermath of the earthquake and captured the mood of the masses during the reconstruction period with its volume serialization.

On top of this groundswell, in the fall of 1925, Shirai called for writers of his generation to join him in launching the "Nijuichi-kai (廿一日会). The motto of the group was "Popular writers, take to the streets. Take action by experiencing the realities of society. This was a provocation to step out from the ideals of the desktop and bring into literature the whole range of emotions of ordinary people's lives. The founding of the association (1925) and the publication of its journal, "Popular Literature" (1926), the following year, were a manifestation of this intention.

The members of the group were diverse. Among them were period novelist Shin Hasegawa, detective novelists Rampo Edogawa and Fuki Kosakai, Shiro Kunieda, Furyoka Masaki, Roe Hirayama, Soun Yada, Seiji Doji, and Sanjuugo Naoki. The discussions overlap across genres, and the meetings often become a back-and-forth exercise between "reading" and "movement" theory. Despite the cynicism of some, who regarded their discussions as commonplace, they stimulated each other's styles and expanded the horizons of popular literature.

The pages of "Popular Literature" were an extension of these discussions. The spearheads' insistence that writing styles should be changed to match the temperature of the streets - real labor, entertainment, desire, laughter and tears - clashed head-on with the "pure literature" norms of the time. However, what post-disaster readers wanted was not esoteric ideas, but the excitement and catharsis of surviving day to day life. Shirai's manifesto was an editorial idea aimed not at "popularization" but at "gaining readers," an attempt to broaden the audience for literature from the intellectual class to the urban masses.

This trend took off with Heibonsha's major project, the "Complete Works of Modern Popular Literature," a 60-volume series that began distribution in 1927 and was positioned at the center of the so-called "yenbon" boom. Each volume was approximately 1,000 pages in length and priced at one yen, a price revolution that turned reading into a daily necessity, something even the common man could afford at the time. Heibonsha itself inscribed "60 volumes published" in its corporate history, and was recognized as the driving force of the Yen book era.

According to the description in this file, the number of subscriptions for this collection reached 250,000 despite the price tag of "1 yen per 1,000 pages," and it is recalled that the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who had no connection with literature were raised to the "mass" level. Although the size of the numbers may vary depending on the data, the fact remains that the yen book exploded the public's desire to read and made it visible. There are several contemporaneous testimonies that Shirai and his colleagues were deeply involved in editing and sales, and that royalties transformed the lives of writers and the creative environment.

In general, from the "Nijuichi-nichi kai" to "Shonpei bungaku" and then to "Gendai shonpei bungaku zenshu," this sequence was an experiment in the history of publishing culture that went beyond the theory of works to "how to create readers. The social unrest after the earthquake, combined with urban expansion and innovations in distribution, transformed literature from a decoration of salons to a necessity on the streets. The conversation between Kyoji Shirai and his colleagues was the on-the-spot thinking that drove this transformation, and at the same time, it was a practical answer to the question, "Who owns literature?