Is a work of pure literature good simply because it is well written? Is it enough to deal with difficult ideas? Or does it have to be a kind of novel nobody has written before?
When people talk about junbungaku, Japan’s “pure literature,” they often say it has “a value separate from whether it sells.” But what exactly is that “other value”?
There is no single scoring sheet that applies to every work of pure literature. But if you compare the long history of Japanese writers and critics arguing about literature with the judges’ comments from actual literary prizes, certain points of evaluation keep coming back.
Language and narration. Structure. The portrayal of characters. Insight into people and society. Novelty. Overall accomplishment. The effect on the reader. Drawing on writings about literature from Natsume Sōseki to Murakami Haruki, on the Shōwa-era debates over pure literature, and on actual Akutagawa Prize judges’ comments, this article asks what “good pure literature” actually means. For the basic meaning of pure literature itself, see our separate article “What Is Junbungaku?”.
Contents
- What is good pure literature? A short answer first
- How have writers thought about “good literature”?
- What do ten writers’ views on literature have in common?
- What has the Japanese literary world argued about “good literature”?
- What do judges actually look at when evaluating works?
- Nine recurring axes of evaluation in pure literature
- The nine axes in actual works
- Why do judges disagree about the same work?
- Common misconceptions about how pure literature is judged
- What makes “good pure literature”?
- Frequently asked questions
- Summary: no single yardstick decides the quality of pure literature
What is good pure literature? A short answer first
Let us start with a rough answer.
Good pure literature can be understood as literature that is judged not only by the seriousness of its subject or the beauty of its prose, but by how fully it realizes language, structure, character, insight into people and society, and its own distinctiveness, in a way suited to that particular work.
That said, there is no shared scoring sheet along the lines of “style 30 points, structure 20, originality 20.” In a limited study of judges’ comments carried out by Viscera, similar axes of evaluation appeared again and again, but we found no common weighting that says how many points each is worth or which takes top priority[1].
There are axes of evaluation. But there is no formula.
Nor is this a recent state of affairs. In modern Japanese literature, the question “what is good literature?” has itself been argued over by writers and critics for more than a hundred years.
How have writers thought about “good literature”?
The leading writers of modern Japanese literature each discussed the value of fiction and literature in their own terms. Of course, the ten writers below cannot be asked to settle a “common standard for pure literature.” A writer’s views change over time, and what is presented here is only part of each one’s view of literature.
Even so, when they are set side by side, issues that overlap with the axes of evaluation discussed later keep reappearing.
| Writer | What to note in their writing on literature |
|---|---|
| Natsume Sōseki | Analyzes literary experience and literary value theoretically |
| Akutagawa Ryūnosuke | Looks at detail, description, sense of reality, and endings |
| Tanizaki Jun’ichirō | Considers prose, the Japanese language, and the craft of style |
| Kawabata Yasunari | Prose and newness, as seen in writings on style and criticism published under Kawabata’s name |
| Yokomitsu Riichi | Questions the split between artistry and popularity or storytelling |
| Dazai Osamu | Takes up the “interest” of the novel and the turning of literature into an authority |
| Sakaguchi Ango | Looks not only at beauty but at human beings and the writer’s own world |
| Mishima Yukio | Analyzes prose, style, technique, and the craft of the novel |
| Ōe Kenzaburō | Considers narrators, structure, and creative method |
| Murakami Haruki | Considers originality, characters, story, and the relationship with readers |
Natsume Sōseki: thinking about literary value as theory
In his 1907 Theory of Literature (Bungakuron), Natsume Sōseki tried not merely to call literature “beautiful” or “moving,” but to explain theoretically how literary experience comes about.
Theory of Literature analyzes literary content in terms of the relationship between the impressions or ideas at the focus of consciousness and the emotions that accompany them, and its table of contents even includes a chapter titled “The Classification of Literary Content and Its Ranking by Value.” In “The Philosophical Foundations of Literature” (Bungei no tetsugakuteki kiso), he also classifies the ideals that writers pursue, such as beauty, truth, love and morality, and the sublime[2].
It would be too simple to say that Sōseki anticipated the evaluation criteria of today’s literary prizes. What matters is his stance: literary value is not just a matter of vague likes and dislikes, but can be analyzed as a question of how human perception and feeling take shape as a work.
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke: literature shows itself in the details
In his 1927 essay “Literary, All Too Literary” (Bungeiteki na, amari ni bungeiteki na), Akutagawa Ryūnosuke discusses specific works by Shiga Naoya and others.
What he focuses on is not only grand ideas or subject matter. Quite fine points also come under evaluation: what kind of sense of reality a detail of description creates, or what visual effect the ending of a work leaves behind[3].
From this point of view, how something is written matters as much as what it is about. One way to understand why style and structure so often come up in judging pure literature is that prose is not just a container for content, but the means of creating an experience that only that work can produce.
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō: prose has value in itself
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s A Style Reader (Bunshō tokuhon) deals head-on with appreciating literary works and with the principles and techniques of writing. Its publisher, Chūōkōron Shinsha, presents it both as an introduction for people who write and as Tanizaki’s own theory of prose based on his experience[4].
The key point here is that a literary work cannot be evaluated by extracting its content alone. Even the same event will reach the reader differently depending on word order, rhythm, word choice, the amount of explanation, and the flow of the prose.
The craft of prose is not an accessory for decorating ideas. It is itself one of the elements that make literature what it is.
Kawabata Yasunari: the question of new prose
A New Style Reader (Shin bunshō tokuhon), published under Kawabata Yasunari’s name, says that knowing new prose leads to knowing the secret of the novel, and takes up the idea of “prose that has life”[5].
However, regarding how the writings on style and how-to books published under Kawabata’s name came into being, the collaborative nature of their writing and editing, including the phenomenon of ghostwriting, has itself become a subject of research. For that reason, this article does not treat the statements in A New Style Reader strongly as Kawabata’s own established literary thought[6].
On the other hand, Kawabata’s “Responses to ‘On the Pure Novel’” (“Junsui shōsetsu ron” no hankyō), written in reaction to Yokomitsu Riichi’s 1935 “On the Pure Novel,” is still included in his Literary Reviews (Bungei jihyō). That Kawabata took part in the 1930s debate over pure literature versus popular fiction and over what a new novel should be can itself be confirmed[7].
Yokomitsu Riichi: artistry and entertainment can coexist
In 1935, Yokomitsu Riichi set out the direction of “pure literature that is also popular fiction” in “On the Pure Novel” (Junsui shōsetsu ron). Yokomitsu took issue with the confusion among concepts such as pure literature, art literature, the pure novel, mass literature, and popular fiction, and questioned the idea of simply separating pure literature from popular fiction[8].
Yokomitsu’s argument cannot be reduced to today’s one-liner “entertainment matters too,” but at the very least he does not treat literary sophistication and the power of a story to draw people in as complete opposites.
The idea that “it’s pure literature, so it doesn’t need a plot” or “it doesn’t matter if it’s not enjoyable to read as long as it’s art” was not taken for granted even in the literary world of the 1930s.
Dazai Osamu: not dismissing the “interest” of the novel
In his 1948 essay “The Interest of the Novel” (Shōsetsu no omoshirosa), Dazai Osamu mocks, with rather wicked humor, the attitude of reading novels with excessive solemnity and discussing them as objects of authority[9].
Of course, it would be crude to read this essay as a theory that “literature only needs to entertain.” Dazai’s prose is itself full of irony and exaggeration.
Still, one thing is clear from it. Being pure literature does not mean a work need not think about being “interesting.” Why does the reader keep reading? Where do they laugh, get surprised, feel pained, become unable to put the work down? That, too, is part of a novel’s power.
Sakaguchi Ango: looking at “human beings,” not just beauty
In “The Literature of a Guru: On Kobayashi Hideo” (Kyōso no bungaku: Kobayashi Hideo ron), Sakaguchi Ango criticizes aesthetic understanding cut off from the concrete movements of human beings, and in the works of Miyazawa Kenji he sees a world unique to their author[10].
Ango’s argument cannot be condensed into a single criterion, but it shows an attitude that does not measure a work only by whether it is “neatly made.”
How far does the work grasp human beings? Is there a world in it that only this writer can see?
These two questions are close to the axes we will later call “character and understanding of people” and “novelty and distinctiveness.”
Mishima Yukio: novels are made through technique
In his A Style Reader (Bunshō tokuhon), Mishima Yukio discussed in concrete terms a variety of prose styles and techniques and their beauty[11].
His A Novel Reader (Shōsetsu tokuhon), on the other hand, is not a book Mishima himself put together as a single volume; it was published after his death by editing related writings, and so came into being differently from A Style Reader[12]. Still, the writings collected in it let us trace how Mishima thought repeatedly about the form, technique, and method of the novel.
What emerges here is a view that does not evaluate literature solely by the author’s life or ideas. No matter how urgent an experience is, putting it straight onto paper does not make a good novel. Where to place the point of view, how to arrange information, how to vary the pace of the prose, where to end the work.
A novel is also a form built using experience as material.
Ōe Kenzaburō: the novel has its own “method”
Ōe Kenzaburō was a writer who returned again and again to the question of the novel’s method itself.
In The Making of a Novelist Called Me (Watashi to iu shōsetsuka no tsukurikata), drawing on his own creative process, he discusses questions such as whether the “boku” (I) of a novel is the same as the “watashi” (I) of the I-novel, why some works are narrated by “boku” while others feature a character with a proper name, why he uses quotation, and what a failed work is[13].
In other words, in the novel what matters is not only “what actually happened” but who is made to tell it, from what distance the world is shown, and into what form it has been transformed.
In addition, according to the excerpts from the 104th Akutagawa Prize judges’ comments consulted for this article, Ōe is summarized as having praised Ogawa Yōko’s Pregnancy Diary (Ninshin karendā) for concretely rendering the progression of psychological states, while also raising reservations about its plot and its sense of real-world substance. Because we have not directly checked the original comments themselves, this point is treated as a summary based on the excerpts[14].
Murakami Haruki: originality, story, and readers
Murakami Haruki’s Novelist as a Vocation (Shokugyō to shite no shōsetsuka) contains chapters such as “On Literary Prizes,” “On Originality,” “So, What Should I Write About?,” “What Kind of Characters Should I Bring In?,” “Who Do I Write For?,” and “Where Stories Are: Remembering Kawai Hayao”[15].
What is characteristic here is that he does not think of literature only in terms of technique within the work, but treats the writer’s own voice, characters, story, and even the relationship with readers as one continuous set of questions.
Pure literature is sometimes described as “literature in which the writer writes whatever they like and ignores the reader.” But at least in Murakami’s writing on the novel, originality, characters, story, and readers are all dealt with in the same book.
What do ten writers’ views on literature have in common?
The writers above did not share the same view of literature. Sōseki’s theory and Dazai’s ironic essay are completely different. The way Tanizaki thinks about prose differs from the way Ango takes up human beings. The question Yokomitsu raised about the relationship between pure literature and popular fiction is not the same as the questions Murakami Haruki discusses about originality and readers.
Even so, setting them side by side brings several broad issues into view.
| Broad issue | Examples of related writers and critics |
|---|---|
| Language and style | Akutagawa, Tanizaki, Kawabata, Mishima, Ōe, Murakami |
| Form, structure, and method | Akutagawa, Mishima, Ōe |
| Character and understanding of people | Sōseki, Ango, Ōe |
| Relationship with reality and society | Ango, Ōe, Hirano Ken, Itō Sei |
| Newness and the writer’s own expression | Kawabata, Ango, Murakami |
| Story, interest, and effect on readers | Yokomitsu, Dazai, Murakami |
What this shows is that the quality of literature has not been discussed in terms of a single item such as “writing skill.”
How language is used. How the work is put together. How people and society are seen. Whether there is something only this work has. And what kind of experience it creates for the reader.
The evaluation of literature has taken place where these several questions intersect.
What has the Japanese literary world argued about “good literature”?
Beyond individual writers’ views, the Japanese literary world (bundan) has repeatedly debated what should count as literary value. Changes in the meaning of the term “pure literature” itself and the debates around it are covered in detail in our separate article “What Is the Definition of Junbungaku? A Clear History of Its Changing Meaning and the Debates”. Here we focus on the issues directly related to the quality of works.
Are artistry and entertainment opposed?
In the 1930s, the very distance between pure literature and popular fiction became an issue.
Research confirms that at the 1933 “Literary Renaissance Roundtable” (Bungei fukkō zadankai), Kikuchi Kan said that in Japan popular fiction and pure literature had drifted too far apart. In 1935, Yokomitsu Riichi’s “On the Pure Novel” went further and proposed the direction of “pure literature that is also popular fiction.”
Around the same time, Makino Shin’ichi also argued against the view that made pure literature something especially specialized and separated it from readers’ enjoyment. Research also confirms that a number of writers and critics, including Kawabata Yasunari and Nakamura Mitsuo, responded to the problem Yokomitsu raised[16].
In other words, the simple scheme of “pure literature = art, mass literature = entertainment” was not stable even in the era when the two were discussed separately.
Is only the I-novel “serious literature”?
From the late Taishō period into the Shōwa period, there was also a strong view that placed the I-novel (shishōsetsu) and the “state-of-mind novel” (shinkyō shōsetsu) at the center of literature.
In his 1925 essay “The ‘I’-Novel and the ‘State-of-Mind’ Novel” (“Watakushi” shōsetsu to “shinkyō” shōsetsu), Kume Masao discussed the I-novel and the state-of-mind novel as the main road of prose art. However, Kume did not define them there using the term “pure literature.”
What matters is that there was a period when facing the writer’s self and inner life in depth was strongly linked to literary value.
But that set of values did not stay fixed either. Yokomitsu’s “On the Pure Novel,” postwar arguments about “middlebrow fiction” (chūkan shōsetsu), and the pure literature debate of the 1960s brought in one different view of literature after another.
How should literature engage with society and reality?
In the pure literature debate of 1961–62, the issue was not only the category of “pure literature” but also how literature relates to contemporary reality.
In research on Hirano Ken’s argument, three strands are distinguished: his diagnosis that pure literature was changing in character, his view of pure literature as a historically formed concept, and the question of “actuality,” which asks about literature’s relationship to contemporary reality.
Research also describes how Itō Sei, in his 1961 essay “Can ‘Pure’ Literature Exist?” (“Jun” bungaku wa sonzai shiuru ka), with Matsumoto Seichō’s depiction of the dark side of society and Mizukami Tsutomu’s combination of an I-novel-like direction with detective fiction in mind, questioned pure literature’s supposed monopoly on literary goals that had traditionally been thought to belong to it alone[17].
The point here is not that “dealing with social issues makes for good literature.” Rather, the question became how people and society are understood, and in what novelistic form that understanding is given shape.
What do judges actually look at when evaluating works?
In theories of literature, one can say all sorts of fine things. So what is actually looked at when works are evaluated?
For this article, Viscera compared judges’ comments on 15 works across 13 Akutagawa Prize rounds from the 1930s to the 2020s, covering not only winning works but also candidates that did not win. Of the 15 works, 11 were on the winning side and 4 were non-winning candidates. This is not a study that statistically represents the Akutagawa Prize as a whole, but a limited sample chosen in order to look at concrete examples and counterexamples of reasons for evaluation[18].
What emerged from it were the following nine axes of evaluation.
Nine recurring axes of evaluation in pure literature
| Axis | In short |
|---|---|
| Language and narration | What words are used, and how the story is told |
| Structure, development, and ending | Whether the arrangement of material, the progression of the story, and the ending work |
| Character and understanding of people | Whether characters are drawn concretely and capture human complexity |
| Social insight and realization of the theme | Whether the theme and insight into society are realized as a work |
| Novelty and distinctiveness | Whether there is a way of seeing or expressing found only in this work |
| Completeness and unity | Whether the whole and its parts mesh well |
| Sense of reality and persuasive causality | Whether description, characters’ actions, and plot developments feel solid and convincing |
| Urgency and expressive heat | Whether the pain in the work and the necessity of its expression reach the reader |
| Effect on the reader and readability | Whether it has the power to keep people reading, and whether it makes something happen in the reader |
These nine items are not scoring criteria officially laid down by the Akutagawa Prize.
They are an organization of the issues that recur in the judges’ comments we examined. Moreover, several axes often overlap within the same comment[19].
For example, praise for a memorable character may also be praise for the prose and narration that created that character, not just for the characterization. Even a sharp insight into society will be judged differently depending on whether it has become part of the work through its characters and structure. A literary work cannot be completely broken down into parts.
The nine axes in actual works
Language, structure, and accomplishment
It is often said that pure literature puts great weight on “good writing.” This is half true, but what “good writing” means needs to be made concrete.
According to the summary of the excerpted comments on Pregnancy Diary, its concise and precise prose, its progression of psychological states, and its transparent, acute writing were praised, while other judges expressed reservations about its way of explaining, its plot, and its handling of the ending[20].
In other words, it is perfectly possible to judge a single work as having good prose but structural problems, or a good idea that does not fully work through to the end.
For Black Box (Burakku bokkusu), the published comments show that the sensations created by its descriptions and its insight into society were praised, while a separate problem was pointed out regarding cause and effect in the sequence of events[21].
What this shows is that pure literature is not a “fine-prose contest.” What is examined is how the prose, structure, ending, and details serve the purpose of the work as a whole.
Character, society, and reality
Does dealing with a serious theme by itself make for good pure literature? Judging from the comments, that is not how works are evaluated.
In his 1952 post-selection comment on Solitude in the Square (Hiroba no kodoku), Sakaguchi Ango questions not only the work’s grasp of its era but also whether it is sufficiently concrete as human beings and as drama. This can be confirmed in the text of Ango’s own comment[22].
For the more recent Jackson Alone (Jakuson hitori), excerpts from the comments and Hirano Keiichirō’s own explanation after the selection allow us to summarize that its social theme and new narrative method were praised, while there were also reservations about its ending[23].
“Writing about something important” and “turning something important into a good novel” are two different things.
A social theme only becomes a work when it is bound up with characters, narration, structure, and detail. This point also connects to the question of “literature’s relationship with reality” that came up in the pure literature debate of the 1960s.
Newness, and what only this work has
Novelty is also praised again and again.
In his 1952 Akutagawa Prize comment, Sakaguchi Ango saw in the depiction of horses in Itō Keiichi’s The World of Clouds and Plants (Kumo to shokubutsu no sekai) an expressive power that belonged to that author alone[24].
For Almost Transparent Blue (Kagirinaku tōmei ni chikai burū) as well, the excerpted comments confirm judgments that acknowledged its technical immaturity while rating its originality and the writer’s talent highly[25].
Being accomplished and being new are not the same thing.
Sometimes a highly accomplished work is praised; sometimes a work is valued for an intense, unprecedented expression despite some roughness. On the other hand, being new does not automatically earn high marks. The assessment of Black Box that Ogawa Yōko gave in her published comment also shows that a literary challenge cannot be reduced to mere novelty.
Novelty is one important axis of evaluation, but it alone does not decide how a work is judged as a whole.
Pure literature also values “the power to keep you reading”
The claim that “readability and entertainment are not valued in pure literature” is not accurate either.
In the excerpted comments on Kita Morio’s In the Corner of Night and Fog (Yoru to kiri no sumi de), one judge regards the work as solid and as something that “keeps you reading,” while another judges it boring despite being well put together[26].
For Hunchback (Hanchibakku), too, the excerpted comments take up the effect its intense expression has on readers, and whether its deliberately offensive expression works as “humor”[27].
“The power to keep you reading” here does not simply mean that the prose is easy. Making you laugh. Making you tense. Making you uncomfortable. Leaving a sense of unease. Showing something you had taken for granted from a different angle.
What a work makes happen in the reader is also one of the things literature does.
Why do judges disagree about the same work?
One of the interesting things about reading literary prize comments is that judges reading the same work disagree. Is this proof that “literature has no standards”?
Not necessarily.
In this study, for works such as In the Corner of Night and Fog, Jini’s Puzzle (Jini no pazuru), Idol, Burning (Oshi, moyu), and Hunchback, we organized the differences in judgment about the same features and the differences in how strengths and weaknesses were weighted[28].
For example, in the case of In the Corner of Night and Fog, the excerpted comments can be summarized as both judges acknowledging that the work is well put together, with one praising its “power to keep you reading” and the other finding it boring.
For Jini’s Puzzle, judges are said to have acknowledged both flaws in the prose and the work’s strong expressive power, with some weighing the power more heavily than the flaws, and others judging the prose problems more severely precisely because the work had such power.
For Idol, Burning, a view that highly praised the protagonist as a living character stood alongside a view that found the character familiar. For the intense expression of Hunchback, too, there are confirmed assessments that value it as having been transformed into humor, and others that acknowledge its power while distinguishing it from literary emotion.
Because these examples of disagreement include excerpted comments not checked against the original magazines, they cannot all be treated as “results of directly comparing the full original comments.”
What is still interesting is that what the judges look at is not completely scattered. Looking at the same prose, the same characters, the same structural features, they divide over how great a strength is, whether it outweighs the flaws, and whether a given expression works within the work as a whole.
The evaluation of literature involves multiple yardsticks, and judgment enters into how they are weighted as well.
Common misconceptions about how pure literature is judged
Is style the most important thing?
Style is an important object of evaluation. But we could find no common rule that it always comes first. Some writers and critics place great weight on prose, but there are also evaluations that make more of character, structure, social insight, novelty, and so on.
It is not a system in which “if the style is good, nothing else matters.”
Is more difficult prose rated more highly?
We could find no evidence that difficulty in itself earns high marks. On the contrary, there are cases where concision, precision, clarity, and ease of reading were evaluated positively.
When a difficult work is praised, it is better to think that this is not “because it is difficult,” but because its complexity is necessary to the work and produces some effect.
Is story unimportant in pure literature?
This is not accurate either. In actual judges’ comments, plot, relationships between characters, cause and effect, development, and endings come up again and again.
That does not mean a clear four-part story arc or lots of incidents is required. The question is whether the structure a work has chosen is effective for the work as a whole.
Are newer works rated more highly?
Newness is one important axis of evaluation. But it is not enough to deal with a new subject, nor is it enough to write in an unusual way. The question is whether the newness is bound up with the work’s characters, language, structure, and theme.
Does a deep theme make a work good?
The importance of a theme and its realization as a work are separate matters. There is meaning in dealing with serious problems such as war, discrimination, poverty, disability, death, and the difficulty of living. But literary evaluation is not decided by subject matter alone.
Evaluation also looks at how that theme is realized through characters, prose, and story.
Is writing about real experience rated more highly?
The I-novel has occupied a large place in the history of Japanese pure literature, but we could find no general rule that “the more directly you write your real experience, the better the literature.”
The urgency felt within a work and whether the author actually experienced it are separate questions. In the novel, how experience has been transformed into narration and form is also an object of evaluation.
What makes “good pure literature”?
Looking across the theories of literature, the literary debates, and the actual judges’ comments discussed so far, it becomes possible to draw them together.
Good pure literature can be understood as a work that brings together language, form, character, insight into people and society, novelty, and so on in a way suited to that work, and that creates a literary experience only that work can achieve.
This does not mean that Sōseki, Akutagawa, Tanizaki, Mishima, Ōe, Murakami, and the others all claimed the same thing. It is a synthesis this article has made by looking across multiple theories of literature, debates, and judges’ comments.
The point is not to score highly on all nine items. A work may have rough prose yet be overwhelmingly new. A work may be extremely well put together yet be judged as leaving no strong effect after reading. Some works have an important theme that is not sufficiently developed as a novel, while others deal only with small events yet give a powerful insight into human beings.
That is why the evaluation of pure literature is not simple addition. But neither does that mean anything can be decided by likes and dislikes alone.
What words were used, how the work was structured, what characters were portrayed, and what that method made possible: evaluation can always be argued by returning to concrete parts of the work.
To evaluate literature, then, is not to apply a single absolute yardstick, but to read, from multiple angles, what a work was trying to do and how far it succeeded in doing it.
Frequently asked questions
Do all good works of pure literature share certain features?
We could not identify any single feature that every masterpiece necessarily shares. On the other hand, language, structure, character, insight into people and society, novelty, accomplishment, effect on the reader, and so on come up again and again in theories of literature and in the actual evaluation of works.
Are Akutagawa Prize winners “good pure literature”?
Under its current rules, the Akutagawa Prize is a literary prize for “medium-length and short works of pure literature by up-and-coming writers,” and winning it is the result of the selection committee’s evaluation[29].
However, literary value cannot be decided by the Akutagawa Prize alone. Judges are often divided even about winning works, and later criticism and a work’s place in literary history can change.
Does whether a book sells affect how pure literature is judged?
Sales and literary evaluation are not the same thing. On the other hand, this does not mean that “pure literature doesn’t need to think about readers.” In the writings on literature of Yokomitsu Riichi, Dazai Osamu, Murakami Haruki, and others, the power of story and the relationship with readers come up repeatedly.
Is the evaluation of pure literature entirely subjective?
Evaluation involves subjective judgment. But that does not mean it has no grounds at all.
It is possible to give concrete reasons: which passages one valued, which characterizations one thought succeeded, where the structure has problems. Literary criticism is, in part, the work of putting those reasons into words.
Summary: no single yardstick decides the quality of pure literature
From Natsume Sōseki to Murakami Haruki, writers have put forward many different ideas about “good literature.”
Some writers put prose first. Some focus on how human beings are grasped. Some emphasize form and technique, while others think about the interest of the story and the relationship with readers.
In the debates of the literary world, too, artistry versus entertainment, the I-novel versus other kinds of fiction, and the relationship between literature and society have been argued over again and again. And actual judges’ comments draw on multiple perspectives: language and narration, structure, character, social insight, novelty, accomplishment, sense of reality, urgency, and effect on the reader.
No single yardstick decides the quality of pure literature. But that does not mean there are no yardsticks at all.
When we ask what makes a work good, the question is how newly, deeply, and concretely the work has been able to make us experience people and the world through the language and form it has chosen.
About the research for this article
This article organizes the conceptual history of pure literature, the literary debates, and the reasons for evaluation in Akutagawa Prize judges’ comments, on the basis of non-public research materials prepared by the Viscera editorial team for producing the article. These internal materials are for fact-checking, source management, and organizing the issues, and are not currently available to the public.
For the Akutagawa Prize, we covered 15 works across 13 rounds and examined the reasons for evaluation and the disagreements among judges for 11 works on the winning side and 4 non-winning candidates. However, this is not a statistical study based on random sampling of all Akutagawa Prize rounds. Nor did we directly check all of the comments as printed in the original magazines for all 15 works; for some, we used excerpts of comments that cite their original sources.
For this reason, this article does not treat the nine axes of evaluation as official criteria of the Akutagawa Prize or as a statistical order of priority for pure literature as a whole. For writers’ theories of literature, we used their own published texts, bibliographic data from the National Diet Library, official bibliographic information and descriptions from publishers, and literary scholarship.
Notes
Most sources below are in Japanese. Original titles are given with English translations in brackets.
[1] A comparative study of a limited sample by the Viscera editorial team. We confirmed that several points of evaluation recur, but we do not treat them as an official scoring sheet indicating a common weighting or order of priority.
[2] For bibliographic data on Natsume Sōseki’s 『文学論』 [Theory of Literature], see the National Diet Library, “NDL Search”.
[3] Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 「文芸的な、余りに文芸的な」 [Literary, All Too Literary]. Text on Aozora Bunko.
[4] For bibliographic data and a description of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s 『文章読本』 [A Style Reader], see Chūōkōron Shinsha.
[5] Part of the preface to 『新文章読本』 [A New Style Reader], published under Kawabata Yasunari’s name, can be read at Shinchōsha.
[6] On the issues of ghostwriting and collaboration surrounding the how-to books and other works published under Kawabata’s name, see 『川端康成スタディーズ』 [Kawabata Yasunari Studies], which includes Kōno Kensuke’s 「『代作』と文学の共同性」 [“Ghostwriting” and the Collaborative Nature of Literature]. Table of contents on Kinokuniya. This article has not independently established how 『新文章読本』 in particular came into being.
[7] Kawabata Yasunari’s 「『純粋小説論』の反響」 [Responses to “On the Pure Novel”] is included in 『文芸時評』 [Literary Reviews]. See the product description and contents at Kōdansha.
[8] Yokomitsu Riichi, 「純粋小説論」 [On the Pure Novel]. Text on Aozora Bunko.
[9] Dazai Osamu, 「小説の面白さ」 [The Interest of the Novel], first published in 『個性』 [Kosei], March 1948. Text on Aozora Bunko.
[10] Sakaguchi Ango, 「教祖の文学――小林秀雄論」 [The Literature of a Guru: On Kobayashi Hideo]. Text on Aozora Bunko.
[11] Mishima Yukio, 『文章読本』 [A Style Reader]. Chūōkōron Shinsha.
[12] Mishima Yukio’s 『小説読本』 [A Novel Reader] is a collection of writings edited after his death. This article distinguishes how it came into being from 『文章読本』 [A Style Reader]. For bibliographic data and a description, see Chūōkōron Shinsha.
[13] Ōe Kenzaburō, 『私という小説家の作り方』 [The Making of a Novelist Called Me]. Shinchōsha.
[14] For the judges’ comments on Pregnancy Diary (104th Akutagawa Prize), we did not directly check the original comments but consulted the excerpts of comments, with original sources cited, on 「芥川賞のすべて・のようなもの」 [All About the Akutagawa Prize, Sort Of].
[15] For the table of contents and bibliographic data of Murakami Haruki’s 『職業としての小説家』 [Novelist as a Vocation], see Shinchōsha.
[16] On “On the Pure Novel” in the 1930s and the responses to it, see 丸山倫世 (Maruyama), 「文学論争にみる昭和期の純文学概念―純粋小説論と純文学変質論争を例に」 [The Concept of Pure Literature in the Shōwa Period as Seen in Literary Debates: The Cases of the Pure Novel Theory and the Debate on the Transformation of Pure Literature]. Osaka Metropolitan University Repository.
[17] On the pure literature debate of 1961–62 and Hirano Ken’s theory of actuality, see Kimura Masaki, 「『アクチュアリティ』の時代――純文学論争における平野謙」 [The Age of “Actuality”: Hirano Ken in the Pure Literature Debate]. J-STAGE. For the history of the debate, including Itō Sei and others, we also consulted Maruyama’s research.
[18] The Viscera editorial team’s study of judges’ comments covers 15 works across 13 Akutagawa Prize rounds: 11 works on the winning side and 4 non-winning candidates. It is a limited, purposively selected sample, not statistics on the Akutagawa Prize as a whole.
[19] The nine axes in this article are: language and narration; structure, development, and ending; character and understanding of people; social insight and realization of the theme; novelty and distinctiveness; completeness and unity; sense of reality and persuasive causality; urgency and expressive heat; and effect on the reader and readability. They are not simply the words used in the comments sorted into nine types; they include an analytical organization made for the purpose of comparison.
[20] The comments on Pregnancy Diary used here were not directly checked against the original magazine or reprint editions; we consulted excerpts of comments with original sources cited.
[21] For Black Box (166th Akutagawa Prize), we consulted the texts of Ogawa Yōko’s and Shimada Masahiko’s comments published on Bungeishunjū PLUS. Bungeishunjū PLUS, 「第166回芥川賞『選評』」 [Judges’ Comments for the 166th Akutagawa Prize].
[22] Sakaguchi Ango, 「選後感〔第二十六回芥川賞選後評〕」 [Thoughts after the Selection (Comments on the 26th Akutagawa Prize)]. Text on Aozora Bunko.
[23] For Jackson Alone, Ogawa Yōko’s comment was consulted via excerpts of comments. For Hirano Keiichirō, we consulted his own explanation posted on his official website after the selection.
[24] Sakaguchi Ango, 「選後感〔第二十七回芥川賞選後評〕」 [Thoughts after the Selection (Comments on the 27th Akutagawa Prize)]. Text on Aozora Bunko.
[25] For Nakamura Mitsuo’s and Yoshiyuki Jun’nosuke’s comments on Almost Transparent Blue, we consulted excerpts of comments with original sources cited. We did not directly check the original magazine or reprint editions for this article.
[26] For Inoue Yasushi’s and Funahashi Seiichi’s comments on In the Corner of Night and Fog, we consulted excerpts of comments with original sources cited. We did not directly check the original magazine or reprint editions for this article.
[27] For Yamada Eimi’s, Shimada Masahiko’s, and Matsuura Hisaki’s comments on Hunchback, we consulted excerpts of comments with original sources cited.
[28] The comparison of disagreements includes excerpted comments not checked against the original magazines. Accordingly, this article does not claim that “all examples of disagreement have been directly demonstrated from the full original comments.”
[29] On the current scope of the Akutagawa Ryūnosuke Prize, see the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Literature (公益財団法人日本文学振興会), 「各賞紹介」 [About the Prizes].
References and main sources
Writers’ own theories of literature and criticism
- Natsume Sōseki, 『文学論』 [Theory of Literature]: National Diet Library, NDL Search
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 「文芸的な、余りに文芸的な」 [Literary, All Too Literary]: Aozora Bunko
- Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, 『文章読本』 [A Style Reader]: Chūōkōron Shinsha
- 『新文章読本』 [A New Style Reader], published under Kawabata Yasunari’s name: Shinchōsha
- Kawabata Yasunari, 『文芸時評』 [Literary Reviews]: Kōdansha
- Yokomitsu Riichi, 「純粋小説論」 [On the Pure Novel]: Aozora Bunko
- Dazai Osamu, 「小説の面白さ」 [The Interest of the Novel]: Aozora Bunko
- Sakaguchi Ango, 「教祖の文学――小林秀雄論」 [The Literature of a Guru: On Kobayashi Hideo]: Aozora Bunko
- Mishima Yukio, 『文章読本』 [A Style Reader]: Chūōkōron Shinsha
- Mishima Yukio, 『小説読本』 [A Novel Reader] (edited posthumously): Chūōkōron Shinsha
- Ōe Kenzaburō, 『私という小説家の作り方』 [The Making of a Novelist Called Me]: Shinchōsha
- Murakami Haruki, 『職業としての小説家』 [Novelist as a Vocation]: Shinchōsha
Scholarship and the history of the debates
- 丸山倫世 (Maruyama), 「文学論争にみる昭和期の純文学概念―純粋小説論と純文学変質論争を例に」 [The Concept of Pure Literature in the Shōwa Period as Seen in Literary Debates: The Cases of the Pure Novel Theory and the Debate on the Transformation of Pure Literature], 『人文論叢』 [Jinbun ronsō] 42, 2014, pp. 37–52: Osaka Metropolitan University Repository
- Kimura Masaki, 「『アクチュアリティ』の時代――純文学論争における平野謙」 [The Age of “Actuality”: Hirano Ken in the Pure Literature Debate], 『日本近代文学』 [Modern Japanese Literary Studies] 90, 2014, pp. 93–108: J-STAGE
- 『川端康成スタディーズ―21世紀に読み継ぐために』 [Kawabata Yasunari Studies: Reading On into the 21st Century], including Kōno Kensuke, 「『代作』と文学の共同性」 [“Ghostwriting” and the Collaborative Nature of Literature]: Bibliographic data and table of contents
The Akutagawa Prize and judges’ comments
- Society for the Promotion of Japanese Literature (公益財団法人日本文学振興会), 「各賞紹介」 [About the Prizes]: Official website
- Sakaguchi Ango, 「選後感〔第二十六回芥川賞選後評〕」 [Thoughts after the Selection (Comments on the 26th Akutagawa Prize)]: Aozora Bunko
- Sakaguchi Ango, 「選後感〔第二十七回芥川賞選後評〕」 [Thoughts after the Selection (Comments on the 27th Akutagawa Prize)]: Aozora Bunko
- 43rd prize, 『夜と霧の隅で』 [In the Corner of Night and Fog], excerpts of judges’ comments: Source page
- 75th prize, 『限りなく透明に近いブルー』 [Almost Transparent Blue], excerpts of judges’ comments: Source page
- 104th prize, 『妊娠カレンダー』 [Pregnancy Diary], excerpts of judges’ comments: Source page
- 166th prize, 『ブラックボックス』 [Black Box], published judges’ comments: Bungeishunjū PLUS
- 168th prize, 『ジャクソンひとり』 [Jackson Alone], excerpts of judges’ comments: Source page
- Hirano Keiichirō’s explanation after the 168th selection: Hirano Keiichirō official website
- 169th prize, 『ハンチバック』 [Hunchback], excerpts of judges’ comments: Source page
Translated from the Japanese original, “優れた純文学とは？｜純文学のよしあしは何で決まるのか”. Quotations from Japanese sources are our own translations.