lusion of that epoch'" (131). Japan desperately needed to explore the concepts that the change of the revolution thrust upon them--but they also needed shared illusions to survive. The literature that grew out of this period helped the Japanese believe that their society could indeed become "modern" since they were able to produce writing that aspired to Western standards.
It was not Western literature, however, and Fujii contends, "Japanese literature will continue to be seen as distant and exotic or somehow deficient as long as nineteenth-century Western realist standards persist in dictating its literary worth" (2). He argues for a different set of standards for evaluating the kundai shosetsu, the modern Japanese prose narrative, and believes that understanding requires an analysis of both the historical events occurring at the time that a work is written and the history that the writing of the work itself creates.
Fujii's title for his analysis of modern Japanese literature is provocative: Complicit Fictions. He seems to use "complicit" to suggest
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