Japanese critics have long made a distinction between taishu bungaku, "popular literature," which is simple entertainment, and jun bungaku, "pure literature," which is "serious" and aspires to art.
Popular literature, a concept that matured in the 1920s with the emergence of a mass media, posits innocent storytelling against intellectual depth and sophisticated expression, and implies a populist intention, as contrasted to the unavoidable elitism of pure literature.
Authors of popular literature include Shin Hasegawa, Eiji Yoshikawa, Shugoro Yamamoto and Ryotaro Shiba, among many others. These names are well known all over Japan -- but almost nowhere else because it has been mainly pure literature that is translated: Natsume Soseki, Yasunari Kawabata, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, Yukio Mishima, etc.
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