Dazai Osamu's Sekibetsu (1945.9, Asahi Shimbun), designated as a ‘biographical novel’, depicts Lu Xun, as a foreign student in Sendai, and there are expressions related to ‘rural areas’ veneered in it. This paper pays attention to such points and examines Sekibetsu in context to the ‘Local Cultural Movements’ active during the war. The contemporaneous discourses related to this movement acknowledge the idea of expanding culture from the local culture of Japan to the whole of Asia, however, this paper will show how the narrator ‘I’ in this text is someone that rejects such ideologies. This work is characterized by its apolitical position telling the story of a person from an individual standpoint only, and this paper will clarify the Dazai's stance while responding to contemporary literary landscape by examining it from the perspective of a wartime ‘biographical Novel’ which was expected to contribute to the state of affairs of the time.

Even now, more than 30 years after his death, Shibasawa Tatsuhiko continues to gain new readership. His writing style diverged from the dominant contemporary literature and created its original style, which continued to grow for a long time. It can be said Shibusawa started his original style of writing from the novel ‘Bokumetsu no fu (撲滅の賦)’ which was traditionally believed to be based on Haniya Yutaka's work ‘Ishiki (意識)’. However, the core of this work, ‘The Eradication’ has roots in French writer Alphonse Allais' ‘Plaisir de Été’, making it a text with lyres of canonical intertextuality. Plaisir de Été was included in André Breton's ‘Anthology of Black Humor’ (Anthologie de L'humour Noir) (1950) and it was from this text that Shibasawa learned the elements that comprise his works, taking hints from these collage technics he acquires a writing style of inverting traditional values which established him as a heretical writer.

In response to the women's movement to revise the Civil Code in US-occupied Okinawa where the old Civil Code still existed, Arakaki Mitoko's newspaper novel The Yellow Lily (1954-55) criticized the feudal system of Okinawan society and presented the plurality of the occupied space, which was not covered by male writers in Okinawa. The contemporary newspaper novel Yamazato Eikichi's The World of Dust and its critique both repudiate the autonomous space for women, however, Arakaki's texts envisage the phases of concubines, wives and mothers divided by sex and reproduction, and shifts the normative family image by depicting a non-normative image of women. This is also evident in Yuriko's feeling of seeing her birth mother Kammy as an object of eros not as someone bound by her duty of reproducing the next generation. In the end, Yuriko's decision of cremating the remains of her ancestors is an act of both accepting and rejecting the traditional customs and shows her desire of a law that could justify her acts by bettering the new Civil Code.