the Zengakuren students in crashing into the National Diet compound. Leaping up on top of a truck, he gave an impromptu lecture encouraging the students to continue their resistance. Thereafter a violent clash with police occurred, resulting in the death of Tokyo University student Michiko Kanba. In the aftermath, Yoshimoto was arrested and interrogated for three days by the police, before being released without charges. The failure of the anti-treaty movement to stop the treaty from being ratified left Yoshimoto angry and disillusioned with "Old Left"-style political activism. In October 1960, he published an essay offering a blistering postmortem of the protests entitled “The End of Fictions” (Gisei no shūen), in which he asserted that the anti-treaty protests had exposed not only the "fictions" of the ruling conservatives, but also the "fictions" of established left-wing political organizations and mainstream left-leaning intellectuals. Yoshimoto concluded that the only path forward was to reject the oppression of existence and pursue absolute individual autonomy (jiritsusei). In September 1961, Yoshimoto co-founded the magazine Experiment (Shikkō) with like-minded activists Tanigawa Gan and Murakami Ichiro, as a place to publish essays and criticism completely independently of any established organization. The journal published articles by Miura Tsutomu, who had been expelled from the Communist Party after the critique of Stalin, his disciple Takimura Ryuichi, Nango Tsugumasa, and others. Edazawa Shunsuke and others made their debuts as critics in Shikkō. Over the remainder of the 1960s, Yoshimoto became a hero to the New Left student activists, and came to be known as the “prophet” (kyōso) of the New Left. New Left activists especially appreciated that Yoshimoto was developing a positive theoretical discourse in the midst of the collapse of the Communist Party's heroic status after the failure of the anti-Treaty movement and endless, contentious and dispiriting schisms within the left. Yoshimoto's books became best-sellers, especially his 1962 essay collection The End of Fictions, named after his famous 1960 essay of the same name (which was anthologized within). In these and other essays, Yoshimoto developed an independent theory of the arts in the face of criticisms of the Communist Party and sectarian literary theories, emphasizing the aesthetics of language and psychological phenomena, and his concept of "communal fantasy" (共同幻想, kyōdō gensō), describing how the propaganda and militarism of the wartime era "swept away virtually the entire population in a wave of war frenzy". Yoshimoto's philosophy of radical individualism became a