Japan on the Periphery of the Soviet Literary World ―― Fractured Narratives of Japanese Leftist Literature in International Literature(1931-1945)

This article analyzes shifting representations of Japan in the 1930s-40s English edition of International Literature, a Soviet multilingual journal, and situates them within their historical contexts. At the time of the Kharkiv Congress, when the journal was founded, Japan—having already organized the NAPF—as portrayed as a model socialist ally. However, the 1931 Manchurian Incident and intensified political repression led to a decline in Japan’s visibility and a transition from revolutionary works by Kobayashi Takiji to conversion literature by Hayashi Fusao and Shimaki Kensaku, as well as sympathizer literature associated with Akutagawa Ryunosuke. After 1937, amid the Sino-Japanese War and Stalin’s Great Purge, the journal’s focus shifted to Far Eastern literature depicting Japan as a hostile nation of spies. While some narratives imagined a unified proletarian victory over Imperial Japan, the actual mediators—such as the émigré Sano Seki and the diasporic intellectual Roman Kim—were expelled or purged. By tracing these thematic transformations, this study highlights the tensions within the socialist ‘periphery’ and offers a basis for renewing revolutionary literatures of Japan.