Shishi Bunroku (the pen name of Iwata Toyoo) is a writer who deserves to be better known. His novel "Jiyu Gakko (School of Freedom)" was a best seller when it first appeared in 1951, and gives as vivid a picture as we're likely to get today of what daily life was like in postwar Tokyo.
Few nations in history have been as violently wrenched out of one era into another as Japan was then, and Shishi's characters — the elderly and middle-aged for whom the past remains, in spite of everything, very much alive, and the young for whom it is dead and good riddance — must discover for themselves what brand new concepts like "freedom" and "human rights" are all about.
For more than 50 years "Jiyu Gakko" remained unavailable in English. The publication last year of Lynne E. Riggs' fine translation will give the non-Japanese reader a whole new perspective on today's elderly Japanese — who, of course, were the young people living with the plights Shishi wrote about.