Riichi Yokomitsu's first novel, "Shanghai," was published in magazine installments between 1928 and 1931. Based on a short visit to the city in 1928, it concerns a 1925 incident (the so-called May 30th Movement) when Chinese workers at a Japanese spinning mill staged a strike, to the consternation of the resident foreigners.
Though this was the kind of "proletarian" material that was animating Japanese literary circles at the time, Yokomitsu's novel contained neither a message calling for workers to unite nor any apology for Japanese capitalists aboard. Indeed, in a later essay the novelist said ("rather ominously," writes Washburn) that "only Japanese militarism possesses enough power to rescue the subjugated East."
Rather, the novelist's interest lay in this international city as vehicle for his modernist ideas. In it he could find a paradigm for no less than "the state of contemporary man." Explicitly stating that his aim was to create a new realism to combat the Marxist proletarian school, Yokomitsu told his story of a group of Japanese expatriates in the "festering" city using many of the techniques of international modernism.