Critical Aesthetics: Kobayashi Hideo, Modernity, and Wartime Japan (review)

James Dorsey's Critical Aesthetics is a rigorous, critical engagement with the interwar and wartime writings of Kobayashi Hideo (1902-83), who, as Etō Jun once wrote, succeeded in elevating criticism to the level of literary art. In fact, it is literature, as both practice and ideology, that forms the conceptual foundation of this study: Kobayashi's formulation of a particular ideal of literature (what Dorsey identifies as "literary aestheticism," a translation of bungakushugi) is seen as the basis for Kobayashi's far-reaching influence on the intellectual landscape of early Showa Japan. It also provides a consistent thread that ties together Kobayashi's critical output throughout various historical periods and stages in his life, from his early involvement with the cosmopolitan humanism of the Shirakabaha (White Birch School), to his confrontation with the fluid landscape of modern urban culture, and finally to his ruminations on the affective pull of history amidst the violence of war. Dorsey's study provides original insight into Kobayashi's thought and its impact on the broader intellectual landscape of this period.

Many of Kobayashi's key writings from the early Showa period were first presented in English in Paul Anderer's Literature of the Lost Home (Stanford University Press, 1995), including: "Samazama naru ishō" (Multiple designs, 1929), Kobayashi's survey of the ideological terrain of literary discourse in the late 1920s; "Kokyō o ushinatta bungaku" (Literature of the lost home, 1933), a seminal articulation of the sense of displacement and homelessness underlying contemporary culture; and "Watakushi shōsetsuron" (Discourse on fiction of the self, 1935), Kobayashi's influential critique of both proletarian literature and the I-novel. Dorsey examines these and other writings (both essays and fiction) from Kobayashi's early period, but the primary point of reference for his analysis is located in the wartime writings. What he aims to address is a seeming contradiction: Kobayashi, who criticized discourses of cultural essentialism and nationalism, also helped, in various wartime works, to aestheticize the violence of war, to the point that he was included in literary critic Odagiri Hideo's famous postwar list of writers bearing responsibility for the war.

For Dorsey, however, this is less a contradiction than a paradox, anchored in Kobayashi's consistent valorization of an "impenetrable" (p. 8) literary artifact defying explanation or interpretation. That is, the same emphasis on the singularity of literature that underwrote his resistance to any formulaic discursive system also allowed for the aestheticization of politics and acquiescence to the grand violence of war. Dorsey argues that Kobayashi privileged a conception of an intuitive, almost mystical literary work—representing a synthesis of the abstract and concrete, art and life—that is embodied in the writings of Shiga Naoya and that he worked out through a critique of the cerebral fiction of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, a writer whom he famously described as possessing nothing but nerves. For Dorsey, this conception of literature remained as a consistent ideal in Kobayashi's thought from the early Showa years through his later turn toward history.

Dorsey argues here against the existence of a tenkō or ideological conversion in the development of Kobayashi's thought in the 1930s, akin to those undergone by Marxists or some prominent modernist writers. Indeed, Dorsey emphasizes the distinction between Kobayashi's thought and that of the Japanese Romantic School, whose ironic mode of nationalism is exemplified by poet Hagiwara Sakutarō's depiction of a "return to Japan," a turn toward a cultural essence that is acknowledged to exist only in the world of the imagination. For Dorsey, while Kobayashi's thought is similarly characterized by a Romantic longing for a stable world existing beyond the dizzying changes brought about by modernity, it is distinguished from that of Yasuda Yojūrō and others by "his fierce dedication to the machinations of the individual subjectivity" (p. 123), which prevented him from yielding to the allure of a collective identity. Indeed, the model for individual genius that served...