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successfully revealed unconsciously than deliberately displayed. Japanese literature of this century has shared in all of the international movements—symbolism, surrealism, socialism, existentialism, and the rest have each had their Japanese followers. It is possible moreover to trace at times the direct influence of some Western writer on a Japanese one. More often the resemblances between contemporary Japanese writing and that produced elsewhere stem from the fact that the Japanese now undergo many of the same experiences as Europeans and Americans, though formerly they belonged to an entirely different world. The war, the hectic post-war period, the growth of mass communications, the rebellion of the younger generation, and other features of the past fifteen years have had regional variants in Japan, but are part of the wider experience of our time.
As yet the current of influence has gone in one way from Western literature to Japanese literature, but this condition is today as much the product of ignorance as of superiority on the part of the West. Unlike the Japanese, who are abreast of all developments in fiction and criticism abroad, writers in Europe and America have paid scant attention to
