The post-war discourse on modern Japanese literature has long presented the binary opposition between "pure" versus "popular" literature as a historical fact. Needless to say, this question of the dichotomy between highbrow versus lowbrow is much more complex. Indeed, debates about the proper approach to literary expression were essential to the establishment of the very notion of traditional highbrow bundan literature itself. Thus, the distinction between bundan and lowbrow is an artifact of both critical and historical debates, and this suggests the need for a closer examination of popular literary genres, in particular of the ways in which they reflect the different strategies and goals of popular writers responding to the same historical forces of modernity that inspired their more famous contemporaries.
This paper attempts to map out a fuller picture of Japanese culture in the 1920s, a period of increasingly complex artistic, literary, political and international concerns, by rethinking them in light of the work of the influential critic and mystery writer Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke (1892-1931). A committed Marxist, Hirabayashi originally directed his efforts in support of proletarian literature. However, he soon shifted his approach to seeking venues to educate the bourgeoisie, arguing that it was not the newly emergent category of taishu (the masses), but rather the bourgeoisie that actually had to be introduced to democratic ideas. As a result of this belief, he advocated and helped to develop a new genre, tantei shosetsu (mystery fiction), as the most appropriate literary form for providing people in modern urban spaces with the analytical capacity to examine society through critical eyes. To do so, he not only published critical essays about mystery fiction and its im! portance, but also he produced his own original mystery stories, thereby pursuing a middle ground between a politically instrumental and a purely aesthetic approach to literature.