Roy Starrs (Surrey, GB: Curzon Press, 1998), 261 pp. Cloth £40.00.

This book, which provides an excellent entrance into the life and works of modern Japanese writer Shiga Naoya (1883-1971), is divided into two parts. The first part consists of four chapters that examine the aesthetic ideals of Shiga's autobiographical works of fiction, and the second part contains translations of six of his stories, including the novella-length Reconciliation (Wakai 1917). The main interpretive issue dealt with in part one on "The Importance of Shiga Naoya" concerns why the writer, so revered among the Japanese as a leading practitioner and innovator of autobiographical fiction or shi-shosetsu (literally "I-novel," though Shiga wrote mainly much shorter works), has been consistently overlooked or dismissed by Western interpreters and translators. Shiga has not received the same attention as his contemporaries Akutagawa Ryunosuke and Tanizaki Jun'ichiro - although Shiga lived thirty-four years longer, his last and most important writing was the one novel-length work, A Dark Night's Passing (An'ya koro) in 1937 - let alone more recent figures such as Nobel laureates Kawabata Yasunari and Oe Kenzaburo as well as Mishima Yukio. Indeed, Western critics have deemed Shiga's...