Silk and Insight (Studies of the Pacific Basin Institute)

A labor strike in a Japanese silk factory may not seem like a promising premise for a novel, but Yukio Mishima manages to turn an historical event into a fictional exploration of Japan's old paternalistic system of labor management. The strike Mishima writes about occurred in the 1950s, and the outcome changed the face of business forever, as factories moved from an ancient, almost feudal way of dealing with workers to the modern method of worker participation. Mishima faithfully chronicles the conditions that plagued the factory workers--censored mail, internal spies, poor pay that was nevertheless just enough to keep discontent at bay--and the coalescence of the labor movement that eventually changed them.