Bungeishunju Archives

Bungeishunju is a general monthly magazine founded by the author Kikuchi Kan in January 1923 (Taisho 12).
As Kikuchi wrote in his Founding Message, “I’m tired of being asked to say things. I want to say what I am thinking with a sense of freedom, without having to be concerned about readers and editors,” he founded the magazine with the wish to conduct free writing activities that would not be hemmed in by the framework of literary circles. Bungeishunju became a forum for the publication of essays and creative writing by a great number of authors including, of course, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, but also Kume Masao, Kawabata Yasunari, Satomi Ton, Kobayashi Hideo and Naoki Sanjugo.
The publication of articles on current affairs also began in the early Showa period, and what especially caught the attention of the reading public were the round-table discussions. Bungeishunju was able to invite to these the most prominent personalities of the time to speak on a variety of topics.
The Akutagawa Prize and Naoki Prize, created in 1935 (Showa 10) to commemorate the meritorious service of Akutagawa Ryunosuke and Naoki Sanjugo, whose writings were serialized in Bungeishunju, are still today among the most authoritative literature prizes in Japan.

The JapanKnowledge content comprises a full collection of all 323 issues of Bungeishunju from the founding issue to December 1950 (Showa 25) (excepting special issues) as the Bungeishunju Archives. Around 90,000 pages of the original magazine will be made available in PDF format. These pages contain essays, fiction, and articles by over 4,000 authors and contributors published in the 28 years up to the post-war period.

For enhanced convenience, as well as searches for headlines in article titles, searches have also been made possible by year and month of issue and author name. Moreover, as the full text of the body of articles, with the exception of advertisements, is given, full-text searches are also possible by keywords, proper nouns, etc. that appear in the articles.
In addition, using the faceted search function available in the advanced search window, search results can be narrowed down, enabling extraction of the targeted article.