[1] As a teenager, Hirano refused his father's wish that he follow in his footsteps and become a monk, and instead enrolled in Eighth High School in Nagoya, where he was classmates with Shūgo Honda and Shizuo Fujieda.
During his university years, Hirano became involved in illegal Marxist organizing as well as the Proletarian literature movement, but distanced himself from these activities as state repression ramped up in wartime.
[2] In 1945, Hirano co-founded the influential literary journal Kindai Bungaku, along with Shūgo Honda, Yutaka Haniya, Masahito Ara, Kiichi Sasaki, Hideo Odagiri, and Shizuka Yamamuro.
[1] In 1946, Hirano touched off the so-called "politics and literature debate" (seiji to bungaku ronsō) when he published his essay "Hitotsu no hansōtei" ("An Antithesis") in the journal Shinseikatsu.
[6] Historian Nick Kapur argues that the Parutai debate also reflected unspoken displeasure within the male-dominated literary world that a critic as prominent as Hirano was promoting the work of a young female author, in their view at the expense of males.
[8] In response to these fears, Hirano argued that so-called junbungaku was not a timeless and universal concept but rather a term specifically grounded in the politics of the immediate prewar and postwar periods and used to justify why certain books were acceptable and others were not.
[2] Hirano's stance sparked a wide-ranging debate in Japanese literary journals as to whether genre fiction (taishū bungaku, literally "mass literature") had any artistic merit.