The history of modern Japanese literature begins with translation in more than one sense. The Meiji era was characterized by calls for reform in virtually every arena of Japanese life; language and women were especially prominent targets for change. Futabatei Shimei was the first to attempt translating modern Western fiction into vernacular Japanese, and one of the first to try composing original fiction in vernacular Japanese. In translating vernacular Russian fiction, Futabatei abandoned the preexisting styles of kanbun-kundoku, instead seeking to forge a new style that would convey the form, content, and vernacular nature of the original texts. Osei is a talker and natural-born mimic, whereas Bunzo is a thinker who sees everything in terms of written texts. The ever-widening gap between the two, when read as the failed betrothal of speech and writing, emerges as a powerful metanarrative on the essential dilemmas of vernacularization in modern Japanese literature.

Meiji Japan may be described, in both instrumental and metaphorical senses, as a translation culture. Almost all the oligarchy's policies aimed at modernizing the state were dependent to some degree on the translation of Western political, legal, and technological knowledge. It was politically advantageous for modernizers to disparage the Tokugawa period as frivolous and backward, and even conservative intellectuals saw popular forms of pre-Meiji literature and storytelling as old-fashioned. The hybridity of the political novel is apparent in two of the popular and influential works: Setchu bai by Suehiro Tetcho, which is marked by the intrusions of political dialogues into a love-romance narrative; and Kajin no kigu by Shiba Shiro, a romance centered around stories about the struggle for freedom and national independence. The important achievement of translations and political fiction was in taking advantage of new media to establish the novel as the artistic medium of modern culture that represented the sensibilities of an emerging middle-class readership.