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on two or more serial novels at the same time, as well as turning out articles on assorted subjects from birth control to Japanese-American relations, giving lecture tours and dashing off occasional stories to satisfy the requests of the numerous literary and semi-literary magazines. One popular novelist recently became so confused by the number of different things he was writing simultaneously that he inadvertently changed the name of the main character in the middle of one of his serial novels—an error that was not caught up in proof and which caused considerable bewilderment to his readers.

For the successful Japanese writer it never rains, it pours. To remain successful he cannot afford to be long out of the public eye, and the artistic energy necessary to produce serious work is often dissipated by commercial demands. Such conditions are, of course, not limited to Japan, but the lack of solid tradition in modern Japanese literature adds to the danger. Fortunately the risk of total commercialization is recognized and deliberately resisted by a number of the better authors.

Among those who oppose commercialism, though not for literary reasons, are the ‘committed’ writers. In the present political scene this invariably means communist and near-communist writers. They are organized into two or three main groups; in these groups they energetically carry on the tradition of the pre-war Proletarian School and look on the writers of ‘pure literature’ as escapists. The economic distress of the early post-war years, the discrediting of the old régime and all that it stood for, the moral vacuum left by defeat—these and other factors led many writers to join such groups. With improving material conditions the appeal of the extreme Left has steadily diminished—its period of greatest influence was in 1949—and the ‘committed’ writers have been increasingly out of touch with the mood of the country, which remains predominantly conservative. The complete freedom of thought and expression since 1945 has not, so far, led the contemporary committed writers to produce fiction of any higher quality than that of the pre-war Proletarian writers, and their calls for