then some 110 serious literary magazines were being published; novels and books of literary criticism filled bookstores. "Just as people hungered for food," observed critic Nakamura Mitsuo, "they hungered for literature." Many postwar writers (Niwa Fumio, Hayashi Fumiko, Funahashi Seiichi) vividly described war horrors and explicit sex, a new phenomenon in Japanese literature. The "quintessential postwar work," in Rubin's opinion, is Tamura Taijiro's Gates of the Flesh...