Korehito Kurahara

Born Jan. 26, 1902, in Tokyo. Japanese literary critic and historian.

Kurahara studied in the Russian division of the Tokyo University of Foreign Languages. In 1925 he became a special correspondent in the USSR for the newspaper Miyako Shimbun. He joined the Pan-Japanese Federation of Proletarian Art in 1928. His most important works are The Art and Class of Proletarians (1929) and Thoughts About Artistic Method (1931), which attempted to explain the creative principles of Japanese proletarian literature.

From 1932 to 1940, Kurahara was in prison for his participation in the proletarian literary movement. After World War II he again joined actively in the democratic literary movement and became one of the founders of the Society of Literature of the New Japan. He left the society in 1965 to become a founding member of the Union of Democratic Literature of Japan. He is the author of monographs on contemporary progressive Japanese literature and is also known for his translations of Russian literary works into Japanese.