New in peperback. Hardcover was published in 2024. Discovers innovative methods for coming to terms with urgent questions about the ethics and value of the novel in the work of some of Japan's most famous and influential modern writers, Mori Ogai and Akutagawa Ryunosuke. Concluding with a jump to the present, it puts on display a startling continuity between the methods of Japan's modern novel progenitors and those of novelists at the forefront of global literature today, especially Haruki Murakami.