A critical study that refuses to confine Masuji Ibuse to the fixed image of a writer of common people, instead reading motifs such as drifters, exiles, and migrants to uncover hybridity and the dislocations of modernity in his work. It repositions Ibuse through themes including nonsense, documentary force, and resistance to historical narrative.

It reads the awkward modernity of Ibuse's literature behind the familiar image of the common-people writer.