HAIKYO BUNGAKU: The Critic

On Kobayashi Hideo

Under consideration:

On Reading by Kobayashi Hideo (Dokusho ni tsuite)

“Letter to X” / “On the I-Novel” by Kobayashi Hideo (X e no tegami ・ Watkushishousetsuron)

“Mozart” / “On Impermanence” by Kobayashi Hideo (Motsuaruto ・ Mujou to iu koto)

I had made a new acquaintance who, when I told her I liked Japanese literature, asked me whether I was reading anything at the moment. I explained my recent project — writing about untranslated books and authors — and then told her I had decided to begin with Kobayashi Hideo.

“Kobayashi Hideo!” she exclaimed. “I’ve read him before.”

“What did you read?” I asked, excited at the prospect of an erstwhile tutor.

“Oh, I don’t remember… it was part of my studying for the college entrance exam. They always use his essays for the reading questions because he’s so difficult to understand. He has an evil style.”

That’s the phrase — akubun, literally evil sentences or evil style. It refers to writing that is, for some reason or another, hard to read. I’ve seen it in a lot of blogs about Kobayashi Hideo, used by both his followers and his critics. It even comes up in an essay he wrote about his own prevalence as a citation for entrance exams and textbooks, the opening of which, I think, will serve as a nice introduction to the man himself:

“One day, my daughter showed me the questions for her Japanese exam and told me there was a reading selection she didn’t understand one bit. I tried reading it myself and found that it was terribly unclear. When I told her she ought to respond to the question by writing, ‘I don’t know whether this selection has any meaning to begin with,’ she laughed. ‘This is from one of your books,’ she said, ‘my teacher told me it’s from one of your books.’ To which I simply replied with ‘is that so?’ but to tell the truth, recently in my house, just as I’ve come to believe I could take on the role of the crotchety old man, my reputation has been done in. Education is a tough business.”

He is obscure, but he is also self-deprecating. Both seem to be innate, having been present in his writing since the beginning. “Letter to X” / “On the I-Novel” is a collection of his earliest criticism which includes a couple of long confessional letters adressed to unnamed acquaintances, and in his earlier years it seems his willingness to point out his own flaws was less humorous, and more desperate. He was a young man unsure of his place in the literary world, not knowing whether his uncompromisingly thick style would ever yield results for himself or for Japanese literature at large. But by the mid-1930’s Kobayashi Hideo was the biggest critic in Japan and had been awarded a professorship at Meiji University. Today, the Kobayashi Hideo Prize is the largest nonfiction award in Japan.

Yet he is practically untranslated. Searching on WorldCat, I found one translation of Kobayashi’s early writing (Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo — Literary Criticism, 1924-1939, trans. Paul Anderer), as well as a study of his wartime politics and a translation of a memoir about Kobayashi written by his sister. In spite of the popularity of writers contemporary to Kobayashi, such as Kawabata Yasunari (who he was friends with) or Mishima Yukio (who was inspired by Kobayashi’s aesthetics in writing Temple of the Golden Pavilion), and in spite of the current boom in Japanese literature represented by the popularity of authors such as Kawakami Mieko and Murata Sakura, Kobayashi’s essays have never been systematically translated and published into English. Outside of Japan, the only people who know about him are, I imagine, people with PhDs related to Japanese literature. Within Japan, it seems everyone knows about him to an extent I don’t believe can be matched by any critic in English. (How many engineering students, like my above acquaintance, can tell you about Edmund Wilson?)

My reasons for choosing Kobayashi were several. His fame and untranslated status are, of course, a cause for interest. His infamous style promised to be a break from a certain type of Japanese writing which I fully understand and am, as a consequence, fully bored with. I bought a handsome hardcover of On Reading during an afternoon at Okayama Station, and found those essays to bear a surprising resemblance to the aesthetic revelations at the end of In Search of Lost Time, which I had just finished but only wanted more of. More than anything it seemed wise, before setting out on a months-long, perhaps years-long journey into Japanese literature, to pick up a critic whose work was far-reaching and foundational, someone who could serve as a map or, perhaps, a walking stick.

It has turned out, however, that this last hope was uniquely unfit for Kobayashi. He can be summarized, or he can be quoted from, but he cannot be systematized. Perhaps this is why he hasn’t been translated nearly as much as one would expect — it is impossible to become his disciple, to write in his vein. He is not like Girard, Barthes, or Derrida. There is no such thing as “Kobayashi’s thesis.” He flits from Noh theatre to Rousseau and back again in the space of a sentence, and perhaps these acrobatics are possible just because he has no point to adhere to. His only goal is the dissolution of anything like a ‘point,’ the perpetualization of the artistic experience through a radical loyalty to that experience and nothing else. The excitement one feels while reading him is the result of his directionlessness, the fact that, at any moment, one of those great sentences that makes criticism worth reading may fall out of his pen to surprise you.

For Kobayashi, to write criticism is to become conscious of the aesthetic experience, and to be conscious of any experience is to be self-conscious. The critic cannot truly write about a piece of art or literature witout revealing themselves in the process. Additionally, any critic who believes they can reveal something about the world — that is, the phenomena lying beyond the relationship of art, artist, and audience — is lost. They are not, according to Kobayashi, writing criticism, but engaging in something else. Therefore, consciously political criticism is an impossibility. The convergence between aesthetics and politics happens, not within the critic, but within their wider context, which contains both art-objects and political systems. The relationship of a critic, of any human subject, to this wider context is such that they cannot write about it directly. What’s more, this context never ceases to change, so that all writing that attempts to deal with it directly, even if it did achieve some degree of reality, would become almost immediately inaccurate. Literature is not meant for learning about the world outside, but for learning about the world inside, though aesthetic experience is important because it confuses the barrier between these.

He labels his criticism “impressionistic.” The default structure of his shorter pieces is an opening vignette describing the circumstances under which he read a book, watched a play, or saw a painting, which then moves into an elaboration of the subject as a component of this scene before ending with a return to the larger world. His influences appear to be Nietzsche, Shestov, Baudelaire, and Saint-Beuve; as for Japanese forbears, Kenko (author of Essays in Idleness) seems to have left an impact on him, juding from his laudatory essay about the ancient monk. But he says in On Reading that, as a young writer trying out many different forms, he just happened to find that he could express what he wanted to through something like criticism; he never consciously made a decision to become a critic. Criticism, for Kobayashi, is not about drawing some essential mechanism out of a work and taking it apart; it is meant to be a collaboration between creator, object, and audience, and the only way to account for a work of art is to leave behind the neat logicality of arguments and take up something closer to the inner process of Dostoevsky (who, incidentally, he wrote a book on). When Kobayashi writes about Machiavelli as pseudo-novelist, or about Mozart as the supreme musician of immanence, he is not, perhaps, doing so to persuade his reader of these views. Instead he is showing one how they can refine their aesthetic experience, how the artistic encounter can be dwelt upon so that it becomes something more significant than a fleeting passion. “There is only one thing which draws my interest,” he writes in his letter to “X,” “and that is whether the world as it is can support a human creed or not.” If Western critics often claim the role of prophet and seer through whom a reader can be blessed, as it were, with new insight, Kobayashi instead offers a kind of training for his reader, a hard road to deep vision.

This isn’t to say that Kobayashi is without ideas, of course. But his insistence on particularity and impermanence (perhaps I should note here that he tends to use Buddhist vocabulary when discussing these) means that his ideas are no different from his sentences — they appear, startle, challenge, then disappear into the growing pile of pages in the readers right hand. The ambitious early essays (“Several Designs,” “On the I-Novel,” “On Expression,” “Literature and Politics”) are overbrimming with enthusiastic ideas, many of which have been crafted with the clear aim of prodding everyone else on the Japanese literary scene. Take his thoughts on the I-Novel, for example. The I-novel is (or as he would say, was) a failed attempt to adopt European naturalism in Japan which was no longer capable of innovation by the 1930’s — long before the I-novel or autofiction made its way West. According to Kobayashi, the left-wing “proletarian literature” movement was the end of the I-novel as represented by Shiga Naoya. Individual, psychological experience was now dominated by social ideology (which Kobayashi is by no means a supporter of). Meanwhile, he looks to Andre Gide’s The Counterfeiters as the model for a new literary form, one with a more nuanced view of subjectivity and socialization, one which will achieve a richness the I-novel never could. At the end of this long essay, Kobayashi writes, “Though the I-novel is exhausted, people have hardly overcome that ‘I.’ The I-novel will come again, and in a new form. It will come as long as that famous scheme of Flaubert’s, “Madame Bovary is myself,” is not exhausted.” He predicts the birth of a new genre of subjectivity in literature, but he does not prescribe it. His ideas are signposts left along the path he has wandered, signposts left by a wanderer which lead in no direction. These ideas end with the essay that contains them. No doubt some people will read this and think it’s all well and good that Kobayashi has not been translated into English, and his detractors in Japan are by no means few. But then there are those, myself included, to whom the character of the flâneur is endlessly appealing.

So Kobayashi is something of a flâneur; he is also a “living room writer,” which is to say he is the sort of writer you can imagine seated across from you in an armchair, conversing through their prose. What is remarkable about this impression is that I have it in spite of the evil style. There is something about reading in a foreign language which defangs supposed obscurantism. Literally not knowing what this means in a way which forces me to spend half of my time researching kanji preempts the higher-order version of that same feeling, and it is as though the mystery of Kobayashi’s exact meaning cannot grow while my mind is so busy churning through the mundane confusion of grammar and vocabulary. Any sort of communication in a foreign language brings one into a filial relationship with their interlocutor; just as it is difficult for a ten year-old to conceive the kind of rebellion they will carry out seven years later, the not-quite-fluent speaker is literally incapable of planning their own revolt against the text.

But I have understood at least one of Kobayashi’s tenets, and understood it deeply, because ever since my reading of In Search of Lost Time a version of it has been rolling through me, formless as a wave. In “Several Designs,” — which is tied with “Mozart” as a favorite out of the essays I read — Kobayashi describes the artistic spirit using the following scenario: “A child is taught by his mother that the sea is blue. If this child goes to draw the sea at Shinagawa and, seeing the color of that sea, feels it is neither blue nor red, is startled by it, and throws his crayons, then he is a genius.”

Throwing the crayons is essential. The beginning of any creation, of anything which will pass through mimicry and into the zone of reality which art alone inhabits, is the throwing up of all existing tools without plans for anything new. Mozart, Balzac, Koetsu: each, according to Kobayashi, found no ready expression. He writes elsewhere, in a letter to a friend, that the only writing which appeals to him is writing which bursts from its preconceived form. An early piece of Kobayashi’s deals with his inability to stop a feeling he describes as an “itch inside his brain,” which seems to be another description of what the prodigy feels when looking out from the bay. A restlessness, an inwards friction that cannot be resolved by anything in the outer world. If there are no ideas in Kobayashi’s criticism which are built to last, this friction is what replaces them. It is the characteristic mood of Kobayashi’s writing, what extends beyond his difficult style.

But it takes time for this effect to come around, and it is, admittedly, quite fleeting. I found many of the shorter pieces said nothing of interest. Like most intellectuals who find themselves tied to shorter writing — not books, but essays — Kobayashi Hideo often says the same thing time and again, something made very clear by On Reading, which collects all of his essays on the subject. D. H. Lawrence’s skewering of modernism — “Did I feel a twinge in my little toe, or didn’t I?” — comes to mind in several of these passages. Kobayashi is ocassionally humorous, consistently humble, but not charismatic enough to trick a reader into caring about these minor judgments. But there are many long essays which are wonderful and would offer many insights, not only on literature, but on aesthetic experience in general.

But one cannot look at the birth-and-death dates — 1902-1983 — without wondering how a man utterly devoted to aesthetics made it through. Kobayashi’s greatest failure, the one which causes me to pause in my final assessment of him, is his political life. Looking from the Western point of view, Kobayashi’s opinion of the wartime regime may not seem as dreadful as, say, Pound or Céline’s pamphleteering anti-semitism, but my (admittedly non-conclusive) perusal of note¹ blogs about Kobayashi points towards much Left-liberal disdain for his wartime activities. This may be the reason why Kobayashi’s pre-war works are as of now the only ones translated into English. Always insisting on the importance of context, and the inability of the individual to ever truly understand the fullness of their historical situation, Kobayashi seems to have neither wholeheartedly rejected nor accepted the war. He participated in some government activities, most notably a propaganda tour of China, and seemed to espouse the Confucian view that, if the nation was at war, then it was the duty of the citizens to support the conflict in whatever way they could. This did not involve Kobayashi’s own enlistment or drafting. After the war had ended, he remarked that, “I am ignorant, and therefore I don’t do anything in the way of self-reflection. A clever man, however, ought to do plenty of reflecting.” What all of this might say about Kobayashi’s ideas about the relationship between literature and politics is not to be ignored.

Being already set upon by the gap between my native English and my imperfect Japanese, the gap between talented critic and unrepentant citizen threatens to draw me into a total abyss. Yet if there is one insight I have into Kobayashi’s slack-spined collaborationism, it is that, perhaps, a sinful critic is less easy to forgive than a sinful poet or novelist, especially when it comes to political sin. Plato knew that artists were no-good, politically speaking. Advocates for Republic-style censorship of poets are a rarity nowadays, for a multitude of reasons that expand well beyond the bounds of this essay. I mention this all to say: the critic can have their flights of fancy, too, but they must return to order. To put things in terms of Kobayashi’s child-with-crayons, whereas the artist is allowed to discard the tools of the past forevermore, the critic commits to remembrance. Kobayashi’s refusal to remember even the facts of his own life, in addition to constituting a political failure, turns into a professional one as well. “The hermit has not thrown away the world,” as he writes in “Several Designs,” “the world has, in fact, thrown him away.”

Without a doubt, Kobayashi’s pre-war criticism is superior to his post-war output. After the war he falls into the same patterns of thought as his conservative cousins in the West, making vague criticisms of the uncontrollable system of science which he saw as the new world order rising out of World War II. After the war he became an antiques dealer and continued to write about Japanese art, but what I have read of this period (with the exception of his essay on Mozart) is dull in spite of style. He can write as he did before, but his vision is impaired. Whether the war is to blame, or whether this is a simple fact of age, I cannot say. But something in the deep structure of his writing is certainly reduced.

Kobayashi Hideo was a man talented in opposition. His failure to oppose the greatest force with which he came into contact during his lifetime seems to have marred his talent. But all the same, he is well worth reading for his idiosyncratic application of traditional Japanese aesthetics to Western art, his commitment to the aesthetic experience, and an intellectual style unlike anything I’ve found in Western writing. Forced to choose between the earlier and the later phases of his career, I would select the earlier half without any regrets (save his Mozart essay). In the best of his work, one sees clearly that, as Kobayashi wrote, “thought and knowledge must be thrown like a shotput,” that “at the point where merely living cannot be believed to be sufficient, expression appears.”

1. Japanese Substack, basically.