Paper short abstract:

The identity of tenkō literature, narratives produced by former proletarian writers forced to undergo a political conversion, remains contested today and glossed over as an offshoot of proletarian literature. Is there more that research can reveal about commonalities between the tenkō narratives?

Paper long abstract:

Although identified as a distinct literary category by critics of Japan's transwar period, tenkō bungaku (tenkō literature) remains very much contested today, and glossed over as a mere offshoot of proletarian literature. While most of the writers who produced texts of tenkō literature were members of the proletarian literary movement, everything in their writing, from the themes to the style, was considerably different in their post-conversion literature.

The current presentation offers a new interpretation and explores new common tropes and themes across most of the prose texts of the tenkō literature category, through a fresh in-depth, close-reading look at the texts themselves. The tenkō narratives are defined and classified based on the writers’ political experience and their subject matter. While it is customary for tenkō literature works to be classified on whether the authors had truly committed to the ideological “conversion” or had done so declaratively in order to be freed from prison, this presentation takes a different approach. The focus is switched from the authors as historical individuals to the content and style of their literary pieces. As a result, two major thematic/narrative style groups are identified within the category: family-centered stories and stories employing the shishōsetsu (I-novel) literary convention.