Shinkankakuha

After the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake and the deadly fire it caused, new technologies such as subway, airplane, and radio were transforming Japan. Meanwhile, a new conception of modern life also appeared. Shinkankakuha developed during this period as the start of Japan's modernist movement, influenced by European modernism. In order to oppose the literary mainstream, Kawabata, Yokomitsu, and other young writers started a new literary journal called The Literary Age in 1924, which was a medium of new movement in modern Japanese literature. Articles in this journal were mainly a reaction against the old school of Japanese literature; they also supported proletarian literature of the socialist/communist schools. The conceptions the writers had when they wrote articles for Bungei Jidai were known as Shinkankakuha. In other words, Shinkankakuha is a writing style. The Shinkankakuha writers were interested in film as a medium of new impressions and were involved in the production of Teinosuke Kinugasa's A Page of Madness, which was produced by the Shinkankakuha Eiga Dōmei.

Kawabata struggled to define what "oldness" and "newness" were. Even though he noted Shinkankakuha was an integral part of creating "the new literature", the conception of "newness" was still unclear. Finally, he published an article in the fourth issue of Bungei Jidai stating that Western literature inspired a new writing style in Japanese literature, the so called "new literature".

In 1924, the Japanese poet and translator Horiguchi Daigaku cited the work of the French novelist Paul Morand as a symbol of a new era. Instead of using rational logic to describe the relationship between things, Morand used the logic of senses. His work inspired many Japanese authors to begin writing in a new style, and prompted Yokomitsu and others to found Bungei Jidai.