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130 Literary Stances The Structure of Iki j. thomas rimer The Structure of Iki is a most unusual text. Atypical among the works composed by Kuki Shūzō, this brief and sometimes provocative study, although most often read and commented upon as a work of philosophy, actuallyopens itself up for examination from several directions at once. Read as philosophy, it has been subjected to analysis in terms of the formal ideas its author presents, as well as in the context of the book’s philosophical, cultural, even political implications. This is as it should be; still, it seems to me that there are other ways to examine this text. The Structure of Iki could be read as a kind of elegant example of cultural anthropology, or, in my view, as an example of a work of literature, composed in the spirit of the heritage of the European manner. Literary texts, as opposed to many other kinds of writing, are by their inherent nature many-sided and ambiguous. They exist both inside and outside their time, one generation after another drawing from them the insights that best match their own concerns. Some texts fade from view because they apparently do not manage to transcend their period sufficiently to interest readers at a later time. Some reemerge and find new relevance. The Structure of Iki may not, to a reader raised in the traditions of American or British literature, appear on the surface to qualify as a work of literature, setting out as it does to explicate a series of ideas within what appears to be a Western philosophical framework. Continental European and East Asian assumptions about the nature and scope of literature and of literary texts, however, are generally more inclusive. While the essay form is relegated to a marginal position in the British and American literary canon, there is a long tradition, particularly in France, of regarding such writers as Montaigne, Pascal , and many others as central to the literary traditions of that civilization. Literary Stances 131 The same is certainly true in the Japanese literary heritage, where such highly regarded medieval classical texts as Kamo no Chōmei’s An Account of My Hut and the Essays in Idleness of Yoshida Kenkō have for many centuries been read as literature, both for the power of the style in which they are written and for the ideas and emotions they express. Taken in this light, Kuki’s Structure of Iki may justifiably also be considered and so examined as a work of literature . Indeed, I would make a case for the fact that this text is in many ways a literary performance, in which Kuki articulates with considerable fairness and more than occasional irony his personal responses to his own education, the human experience, and personal temperament. It is true, by the same token, that there lies within his exposition a certain sense of urgency, for the author betrays implicitlya conviction that manyof the elegant and sophisticated attitudes found in early nineteenth-century Japan with which he felt such sympathy were disappearing from his contemporary culture and, indeed, from even the consciousness among his contemporaries of their prior existence. Insofar as Kuki addresses or comments on these matters, it seems to me, The Structure of Iki can absolutely be read and examined as a work of literature, at least in the European sense. Hiroshi Nara, in his essay in this volume, has provided some striking and informative details on Kuki’s upbringing and education. These need not be repeated here, other than to note that Kuki’s exposure to the kind of broad and inclusive categories of thought propounded by his teacher Raphael von Koeber, stand revealed in the attitudes toward culture and the nature of the aesthetic experience adopted by a number of that European teacher’s gifted Japanese intellectual progeny (here the writer Abe Jirō and the philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō come to mind). If von Koeber was to create in Kuki his initial enthusiasm for German culture, Kuki’s first period of residence in Paris, from 1924 to 1927, brought him under the kind of French influences that con- firmed other aspects of his tastes and inclinations, just as they had for the writer Nagai Kafū during his visit to France some twenty years before. It is undoubtedly true that Kuki devoted a good deal of attention throughout his career to what might be termed professional philosophy. Even the essays he wrote while in France...

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