Modern Japanese novels
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After 1868, the manners, customs and culture of the West began to pervade the life of the Japanese people and Western literature, too, entered Japan for the first time on any significant scale. The imagery of Western poetry and romanticism was adopted with enthusiasm and, above all, there was a surge of interest in the novel.
Realism and rationality were watchwords of the new movement, and the greatest writers of the second half of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th-Mori Ogai and Natsume Soseki-were successful in blending these new concepts with the traditions of Japanese literature.
Among their contemporaries and successors were many fine novelists whose works have been widely translated into English and other languages, notably Tanizaki Junichiro and Kawabata Yasunari. In 1968, Kawabata Yasunari was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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