Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

In addition to Sōseki, Japanese books at the top of the 1946 bestseller list included Sempū Nijūnen (The Twenty-Year Whirlwind), a journalistic account of Japan’s road to war and destruction; Nagai Kafū’s Udekurabe (Rivalry), a novel about competition in the geisha quarters that was written during the war but withheld from publication; the autobiography of Kawakami Hajime, a pioneer Marxist scholar and early member of the Japan Communist Party who passed away a few months after the war ended; Miki Kiyoshi’s Tetsugaku Noto (Philosophical Notes), consisting of previously published essays by a well-known philosopher who had died in prison; and the prison letters of the executed spy Ozaki Hotsumi.