Literature

The Prange Collection includes the works of well-known writers such as Nobel Laureate Yasunari Kawabata and Junichiro Tanizaki. It also includes a wealth of popular, and often racy, literature. Produced by a counterculture that sprung from the black-market economy, pulp fiction quickly flooded the commercial world. This genre of erotica and escapism remained popular through the 1950s.

Postwar Japanese Children's Literature

The 9,000 children's books in the Prange Collection include picture books, comic books, folk tales, translations into Japanese of children's books in foreign languages, and books of fiction and non-fiction for older children. Osamu Tezuka, the originator of the tale of the Lion King, published many comic books during this period. American comic strips, such as Blondie, appeared in several Japanese daily newspapers, and American comic books, such as Superman and Popeye, were available in translation. Because the censors treated children's publications with a relatively light hand, this is a freer literature than most of what was produced for adults during the same years.

Postwar Japanese Women Writers

Japanese women writers had already begun to gain recognition and popularity well before the Asia-Pacific War and Occupation. Many of them engaged in leftist activities, and their fiction was distinguished by concern for the lives of the poor and the working classes and for the plight of women. Among the four writers represented here, Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951) was one of Japan's most widely read authors before, during, and after the war. Careful to avoid topics forbidden by the occupiers, she wrote and published exhaustively, until her early death in 1951, about women and survival in the immediate postwar chaos. Miyamoto Yuriko (1899-1951), who had been previously silenced for leftist views, revived a literary magazine and successfully turned to autobiographical novels but ran into heavy censorship for her essays about labor and working conditions. Hirabayashi Taiko (1905-1971), following a long break from writing in the 1930s, earned the Women's Literary Award in 1946. As allied censorship ended, she was among the first to expose the problem of prostitution and bar culture around U.S. bases in Japan. Sata Ineko (1908-1998), a communist before the war, re-entered the panty as an activist and writer in spite of criticism for wartime literary activities. She had a long and productive publishing career until her death in the 1990s, living to see women earn Japan's top literary prizes as authors rather than categorized separately as women writers.