The “Literary Works” series is the largest series in this collection in terms of volume and depth. The physical portion spans 9 out of 12 boxes. It is comprised of 13 sub-series grouped into five types of manuscripts (novels; plays; screenplay; articles, essays, short stories; legacy project). These sub-series are labeled “Type of Manuscript - Title of Work” (for example, “Novels - ‘The Night Is Young’”).

Milton Murayama was most well known for his novels, of which there are five in this series: All I Asking For Is My Body, Five Years On A Rock, Plantation Boy, Dying In A Strange Land, and an unpublished novel from the 1950s titled The Night Is Young. The novels are arranged first in this sub-series due to their fame in comparison to his other works. With each novel, Murayama’s writing style becomes ever more apparent. He did a lot of his drafting on typewriters and editing by hand, even into the Computer Age. The arrangement of these early drafts was determined by tracking the edits between them. In his novels, Murayama would frequently play around with narrative, oftentimes having certain scenes appear in early drafts of one novel only for them to end up published in a different novel. Or, he would initially write short stories only to later expand them into novels at a later date. This can be seen in the drafts of Plantation Boy, which started as a novella under a different title: Borrowed Bodies or The Borrowed Body.

The plays are arranged next in this series due to the fact that Murayama was a playwright and two of his shows were produced on stage. The plays themselves are arranged chronologically in the order in which they were written. Unlike the novels, the plays’ folders are more threadbare, consisting of mostly final drafts and manuscripts and not a lot of drafting. Like the novels, they are mostly typewritten. Whereas the published novels form a quartet with the same cast of characters, each play is starkly unique, standing apart from the others. There is the unpublished play Kings and Beasts, a high-society comedy-of-errors; Althea, a dramatic interpretation of the Massie Case which shook Honolulu in 1932; Yoshitsune, a kabuki play set in feudal Japan; and an All I Asking For Is My Body adaptation. There is also a one-act dialogue that is undated and arranged last among the plays for that reason.

Murayama invested a lot of time and effort adapting All I Asking For Is My Body into different formats. He not only self-published the original novel and then successfully adapted it for the stage, but he also wrote a screenplay and had a desire to one day see it grace the silver screen. A copy of this screenplay, titled The Debt, is present in this series. This film was never produced, though, which is why it is arranged after the novels and plays.

Murayama also wrote short stories and nonfiction. As such, there are a few folders in this series that contain drafts of (mostly) unpublished articles, essays, and short stories. These shorter works span Murayama’s entire lifetime. Some were written in the 1950s shortly after he left the military while others were written during the final years of his life. The topics covered in these shorter works include fictional stories about love and vignettes of specific memories of friends, family members, and other moments from his life.

The final type of manuscript in this series is Murayama’s Legacy Project Odds and Ends, which is a compilation of short stories and essays. This work is arranged last because it was the final work of Murayama’s career. Odds and Ends wasn’t completed. Murayama, right until the end, was constantly rearranging the stories in this work, suggesting that he was never completely satisfied with it. Further edits were posthumously made to this work by his wife. In this series, each new arrangement of stories is referred to as a “Compilation Attempt.”