The Japanese press doesn't seem to have had quite the frenzy of millennium coverage that took place in America, but there were various attempts to look back at the recent past of Japanese literature and to forecast its future. I found two discussions in particular interesting for their contrasting viewpoints.
The December issue of Bungakukai had a highly intellectual discussion of Japanese literature in the 1990s by four literary critics: Suga Hidemi, Shimizu Yoshinori, Chiba Kazumiki and Yamada Junji.
First they discussed the end of literature with a capital L, as it were: a unified literature that could fit into the Japanese literary tradition; and then the reverberations of real-world events such as the death of the Showa Emperor in 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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