ected the revolutions that were bringing countries all across the world closer together: "In the profoundest sense, the humanities trace the arrangements of social organization to see how subjects are continually created, shaped, empowered, subjected, suppressed, and used" (40). As travel became less complicated, book and newspaper production less expensive, and literacy more widespread, building literary movements across cultures also became easier. Writers in Russia, Britain, France, Italy, and elsewhere read one another's books and found new ways of expressing themselves with each new work. To Japanese students who suddenly had access to this wealth of writing, the impression must have been almost overwhelming. Fujii writes, "The concept of a private, emancipated individual worthy of self-reflection reached Japanese writers in the form of the nineteenth-century European realist novel" (1). Japanese writers set out to contribute to that literature. In the process, they created works that were structured like the writings of the West but that could not help being uniquely Japanese. They retained the flavor and sensibilities of their native land much more strongly than did those of Western writers because their authors were so new to the game.
They began exploring the, for them, uncharted territory of a world where the private individual had the right and the opportunity to choose an occupation, a mate, and even a nation without consulting the society at large. This was a radical, heretical concept. It went completely against the grain of what being Japanese meant to them. For the first true generation of writers and thinkers who were part of the Meiji revolution (studied in depth in Pyle's The New Generation in Meiji Japan), these were heady, complicated, and terrifying concepts. Fujii writes, "To use the words of Marx, literature participates in the sometimes conscious and often unconscious requirement to 'share the il...