"Erudite but saucy, The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature succeeds in making the history of modern Japanese literature as colorful as the neon-lit back alleys of Tokyo. The book features a broad range of characters, including a Meiji 'poison woman,' Korean nationalists, and a serial killer enamored of anime. As for the final verdict on the future of Japanese literature, Treat wisely leaves it up in the air."
— Minae Mizumura, author of The Fall of Language in the Age of English
"Treat has chosen literary landmarks that offer him fertile ground for an 'excavation' . . . of the social and economic forces at work on them."
— New York Review of Books
"Formidable. . . . Though he does, briefly, engage in textual analysis, Treat is less concerned with what the story says than what it is and what it does. That is, he is interested in its function in the larger context of Japan’s literary development. To this end, Treat takes the reader on a surprising journey that includes the emergence of libel and slander laws, competition between highbrow and lowbrow newspapers, and the occasional mention of Hillary Clinton's alien baby. . . . A very welcome addition, and counterpoint, to the existing body of English-language Japanese literary histories."
— Australian Book Review
“Noting the trend in Japanese literary historiography, up to and including the 1980s, to schematize material by historical period and occasionally even by periods of imperial reign, Treat homes in on the all-important truism that a national literary history is also the history of a nation and, as such, inextricably linked with the history of the modern in general. . . . In his open challenge to the conventional wisdom, Treat offers both interesting and readily accessible fodder for the uninitiated and a call for an element of recalibration from those raised, like it or not, on Katō, Keene, and that previous generation of scholars. At the same time, both sets of readers—plus those in between—will be left in no doubt of Treat's conviction that talk of the ‘end of literature’ in Japan is premature.”
— The Journal of Japanese Studies
"John Whittier Treat’s new book offers some brilliantly original, delightfully offbeat perspectives on modern Japanese literature. . . . Treat himself is at his best here when he writes with personal warmth and enthusiasm about certain writers one might describe as “rebellious outsiders” to the Japanese literary establishment.."
— Japan Review
"John Whittier Treat’s latest book is true to form as a meticulously researched and insightful survey of modern Japanese literature that courts controversy, but delivers on substance. . . . Treat eschews repeating the banal encyclopedic approach set by Donald Keene’s Dawn to the West or the all-too-familiar critiques of area studies and Orientalism that reduce literature to an afterthought of methodology. He instead assembles a corpus of representative texts that include such unlikely popular sources as Numa Shōzō’s erotic sci-fi manga Kachikujin yapū (Yapoo, the human cattle, 1956–1991) alongside works by the customary literary icons – Higuchi Ichiyō, Natsume Sōseki, Yoshimoto Banana, and Murakami Haruki – to chronologically and thematically chart the course of ‘the rise and fall’ of Japanese literature."
— Seth Jacobowitz, Japanese Studies