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Other notable genres in this period were renga, or linked verse, and Noh theater. Both were rapidly developed in the middle of the 14th century, the early Muromachi period.
Vietnamese literature
The Meiji period marks the re-opening of Japan to the West, and a period of rapid industrialization. The introduction of European literature brought free verse into the poetic repertoire. It became widely used for longer works embodying new intellectual themes. Young Japanese prose writers and dramatists struggled with a whole galaxy of new ideas and artistic schools, but novelists were the first to assimilate some of these concepts successfully. A new colloquial literature developed centering on the "I novel", with some unusual protagonists such as the cat narrator of Natsume Sseki's Wagahai wa neko de aru (I Am a Cat). [dubious discuss] Natsume Sseki also wrote the famous novels Botchan and Kokoro (1914). Shiga Naoya, the so-called "god of the novel", and Mori gai were instrumental in adopting and adapting Western literary conventions and techniques. Rynosuke Akutagawa is known especially for his historical short stories. Ozaki Ky,Kyka Izumi, and Ichiyo Higuchi represent a strain of writers whose style hearkens back to early-Modern Japanese literature. In the early Meiji period (18681880s), Fukuzawa Yukichi authored Enlightenment literature, while pre-modern popular books depicted the quickly changing country. ThenRealism was brought in by Tsubouchi Shy and Futabatei Shimei in the mid-Meiji (late 1880searly 1890s) while the Classicism of Ozaki Ky, Yamada Bimyo and Kda Rohan gained popularity. Ichiy Higuchi, a rare female writer in this era, wrote short stories on powerless women of this age in a simple style in between literary and colloquial.Kyka Izumi, a favored disciple of Ozaki, pursued a flowing and elegant style and wrote early novels such as The Operating Room (1895) in literary style and later ones including The Holy Man of Mount Koya(1900) in colloquial. Romanticism was brought in by Mori gai with his anthology of translated poems (1889) and carried to its height by Tson Shimazaki etc. and magazines Myj and Bungaku-kai in early 1900s. Mori also wrote some modern novels including The Dancing Girl (1890), Wild Geese (1911), then later wrote historical novels. Natsume Sseki, who is often compared with Mori gai, wrote I Am a Cat (1905) with humor and satire, then depicted fresh and pure youth in Botchan (1906) and Sanshir (1908). He eventually pursued transcendence of human emotions and egoism in his later works including Kokoro (1914) his last and unfinished novel Light and darkness (1916). Shimazaki shifted from Romanticism to Naturalism which was established with his The Broken Commandment (1906) and Katai Tayama's Futon (1907). Naturalism hatched "I Novel" (Watakushi-shsetu) that describes about the authors themselves and depicts their own mental states. Neo-romanticism came out of anti-naturalism and was led by Kaf Nagai, Jun'ichir Tanizaki, Ktar Takamura, Hakush Kitaharaand so on in the early 1910s. Saneatsu Mushanokji, Naoya Shiga and others founded a magazine Shirakaba in 1910. They shared a
common characteristic, Humanism. Shiga's style was autobiographical and depicted states of his mind and sometimes classified as "I Novel" in this sense. Rynosuke Akutagawa, who was highly praised by Soseki, wrote short stories including Rashmon (1915) with an intellectual and analytic attitude, and represented Neo-realism in the mid-1910s. During the 1920s and early 1930s the proletarian literary movement, comprising such writers as Takiji Kobayashi, Denji Kuroshima, Yuriko Miyamoto, and Ineko Sata produced a politically radical literature depicting the harsh lives of workers, peasants, women, and other downtrodden members of society, and their struggles for change. War-time Japan saw the dbut of several authors best known for the beauty of their language and their tales of love and sensuality, notably Jun'ichir Tanizaki and Japan's first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Yasunari Kawabata, a master of psychological fiction. Ashihei Hino wrote lyrical bestsellers glorifying the war, while Tatsuz Ishikawa attempted to publish a disturbingly realistic account of the advance on Nanjing. Writers who opposed the war include Denji Kuroshima, Mitsuharu Kaneko, Hideo Oguma, and Jun Ishikawa.
international literature, Kazuo Ishiguro, a native of Japan, had taken up residence in Britain and won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize. Haruki Murakami is one of the most popular and controversial of today's Japanese authors. His genre-defying, humorous and surreal works have sparked fierce debates in Japan over whether they are true "literature" or simple pop-fiction: Kenzabur e has been one of his harshest critics. Some of Murakami's best-known works include Norwegian Wood (1987) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (19941995). Banana Yoshimoto, a best-selling contemporary author whose "manga-esque" style of writing sparked much controversy when she debuted in the late 1980s, has come to be recognized as a unique and talented author over the intervening years. Her writing style stresses dialogue over description, resembling the script of a manga, and her works focus on love, friendship and loss. Her breakout work was 1988'sKitchen. Although modern Japanese writers covered a wide variety of subjects, one particularly Japanese approach stressed their subjects' inner lives, widening the earlier novel's preoccupation with the narrator's consciousness. In Japanese fiction, plot development and action have often been of secondary interest to emotional issues. In keeping with the general trend toward reaffirming national characteristics, many old themes re-emerged, and some authors turned consciously to the past. Strikingly, Buddhist attitudes about the importance of knowing oneself and the poignant impermanence of things formed an undercurrent to sharp social criticism of this material age. There was a growing emphasis on women's roles, the Japanese persona in the modern world, and the malaise of common people lost in the complexities of urban culture. Popular fiction, non-fiction, and children's literature all flourished in urban Japan in the 1980s. Many popular works fell between "pure literature" and pulp novels, including all sorts of historical serials, information-packed docudramas, science fiction, mysteries, detective fiction, business stories, war journals, and animal stories. Non-fiction covered everything from crime to politics. Although factual journalism predominated, many of these works were interpretive, reflecting a high degree of individualism. Children's works re-emerged in the 1950s, and the newer entrants into this field, many of them younger women, brought new vitality to it in the 1980s. Manga (comic books) have penetrated almost every sector of the popular market. They include virtually every field of human interest, such as a multivolume high-school history of Japan and, for the adult market, a manga introduction to economics, and pornography. Manga represented between 20 and 30 percent of annual publications at the end of the 1980s, in sales of some 400 billion per year. Cell phone novels appeared in the early 21st century. Written by and for cell phone users, the novelstypically romances read by young womenhave become very popular both online and in print. Some, such as Love Sky, have sold millions of print copies, and at the end of 2007 cell phone novels comprised four of the top five fiction best sellers. [4]