A cultural history of writer and literary critic Hayashi Fusa's (1903–75) tenkō experience, Stories from the Samurai Fringe examines Hayashi's tenkō (ideological conversion) through a close reading of his proletarian short stories. Tracing Hayashi's move from "romanticizing"to "defining"to "remembering" the proletarian literature movement and its participants in his proletarian fiction, this study argues for a far more personal and political rationale for Hayashi's subsequent turn to ultranationalism.

Stories from the Samurai Fringe concludes with a consideration of Hayashi's tenkō experience, first, within the historiographical context of the early Showa years (1926–1937), and then within the trans-war setting of Hayashi's reemergence as a proponent of wartime nationalism.