Works Reviewed: Arthur M. Mitchell Disruptions of Daily Life: Japanese Literary Modernism in the World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020. 266 pages. The power of modernist fiction, contends Arthur M. Mitchell, lies in its ability to "make us aware of the discursive structures that undergird the imaginative relationship we have to our social world." The purpose of fiction, in other words, is less a flight of fancy than an act of questioning ~ holding up a mirror to reality to see where the cracks are.