17—
The French Literature Circle

At Tokyo Imperial University I attended classes not only in the Faculty of Medicine but also in the Faculty of Literature. I had studied English and German at school, and though I had also acquired some reading proficiency in French through self-study, I attended a French class designed for students with no special background. The lecturer Nakajima Kenzo^[*] explained rudimentary grammar as we read Salomé , and when we came across grammatical intricacies that defied easy explanation, he would make the students laugh by saying something like, "I don't quite understand them myself. You don't expect me to remember this stuff to this day, do you?"^[1] Because the class was meant for students who were reading French for the first time, it was a little too easy for me.

I also attended, albeit irregularly, other classes offered by the Department of French Literature: "Nineteenth-Century Literary Thinking" by Professor Tatsuno, "A Study of Mallarmé" by Assistant Pro-

[1] Nakajima Kenzo (1903–79), a critic and French scholar, who founded the journal Furansu bungaku kenkyu^[*] (Studies of French literature) and published translations and critical commentaries (including Kaigi to shocho^[*] [Skepticism and symbolism, 1934], Gendai bungeiron [On contemporary literature, 1936], an attempt at literary criticism from the social and cultural perspective, and Gendai sakka ron [On contemporary writers, 1941], a study of Yokomitsu Riichi, Ibuse Masuji, and Takami Jun); his postwar activities included rebuilding the Japan PEN Club, establishing the Japan Comparative Literature Society (Nihon hikaku bungakukai, 1948) and the Japan-China Cultural Exchange Association (Nihon-Chugoku^[*] bunka koryu^[*] kyokai^[*] , 1956), heading the central committee of the New Japan Literary Society (Shin Nihon bungakukai) in 1950 and publishing Andore Jiido^[*] shogai^[*] to sakuhin (The life and works of André Gide, 1951), Showa^[*] jidai (The Showa^[*] era, 1957), and Gendai bunkaron (On contemporary culture, 1966).

fessor Suzuki, reading classes on Maurice Scève and Montaigne by Assistant Professor Watanabe, and so on.^[2] Professor Tatsuno's lectures, delivered in his crisp Japanese, were a pleasure to the ear and easily allowed his personality to come through. I suppose that was why he was so popular with the students—his lectures were always heavily attended. The "Study of Mallarmé" was exceptionally detailed. When I was taking the course, part of our study of the poet's life dealt with the amount of rent he paid in a certain year. When I expressed my amazement to Nakamura Shin'ichiro^[*] , then a student in the Department of French Literature, he said, "Stop complaining! You guys should consider yourselves lucky. At least this year we're talking about Mallarmé. It took us a whole year just to cover the period before his birth. One whole year! Just think about that!" As for Professor Watanabe's reading class on sixteenth-century literature, for somebody like me who did not even have a decent grasp of modern French, it was like returning empty-handed from a mountain of treasure. Nevertheless, as long as there was no scheduling conflict with my lectures at the medical school, I would sit at the back of the classroom and listen to the exchanges between Professor Watanabe and those evidently more gifted students such as Miyake Noriyoshi.^[3]

Besides French literature, I also took Mr. Yoshimitsu Yoshihiko's lec-

[2] Tatsuno Yutaka (1888–1964), the eldest son of the architect Tatsuno Kingo (see chapter 3), was professor of modern French literature at Tokyo University (1921–48). He worked with his colleague Suzuki Shintaro^[*] to establish French literary studies in Japan, translated works of Molière, Beaumarchais, and Rostand, and was an erudite man noted for his keen literary and artistic sensibilities and for his personal charm and wit; among his students were Watanabe Kazuo, Kobayashi Hideo, Nakajima Kenzo^[*] , Miyoshi Tatsuji, and Nakamura Mitsuo. • Suzuki Shintaro (1895–1970), a leading Japanese scholar of French literature from the late 1930s into the postwar era, was known for his meticulous study of French symbolic poets, particularly Mallarmé, and his translations of Villon, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Valéry. • Watanabe Kazuo (1901–75), a leading Japanese scholar of the French Renaissance who translated Rabelais's Gargantua et Pantagruel (5 vols., 1943–65), published Raburee kenkyu^[*] josetsu (A study of Rabelais, 1957) and Furansu yumanisumu no seiritsu (The formation of French humanism, 1958), taught French literature at Tokyo University (1942–62), and was a prominent intellectual figure of his generation whose cultural critique of Japanese society and uncompromising integrity during the war in particular influenced his disciples, including Kato^[*] , Nakamura Shin'ichiro, Mori Arimasa, and, from a younger generation, Oe^[*] Kenzaburo^[*] .

[3] Miyake Noriyoshi (1917–) became a linguist in French, a translator, and a professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University and Gakushuin^[*] University.

tures on moral philosophy in the Faculty of Literature.^[4] His articulate discourse had a different sort of eloquence from Professor Tatsuno's. For two hours he could go on and on without a moment's pause in incredibly long sentences. Whenever I came in a little late for class, I would find him in the middle of one of his long sentences that went for another several more minutes: "in the context of Barthesque, Brunnerian, and Gogartenian dialectic crisis theology, and in connection with the trembling soul of Saint John on the night he received God's grace, its repeated manifestation was seen."^[5] Hearing only half of what he said, I had no way of telling who saw what. As a matter of fact, even if I had listened to it from the beginning, I would not have been able to understand what it meant at all. But after I read Yoshimitsu's major works and then Iwashita Soichi's^[*] , I became interested in Catholic theology.^[6] But at that time I was in no way prepared to embrace a religious faith. Like Western scholars of Japanese history with an interest in Buddhism, perhaps I was just intellectually interested in Catholicism when I first began to read French literature.

Even with my meager knowledge of Catholicism, I could immediately see French literature from a new light. Not only was its cogent order of rational thinking a virtual gem in itself, it seemed to me that its presence was more than sufficient to explain the origins of seventeenth-century rationalism. The ideas Péguy so passionately espoused—that evil represents the ultimate outcome of man's goodwill and that every new descent into the abyss of sin conversely enhances the possibility for one's salvation—struck me as some of the most profound and subtle observations on the dynamics of the human condition. Though they did not convince me, I thought that if faith had such a paradoxical structure

[4] Yoshimitsu Yoshihiko (1904–45) taught at Tokyo's Sophia University and the Tokyo Catholic Seminary from 1931 and succeeded Iwashita Soichi^[*] (see note 6) as the leading Japanese Catholic thinker. A translator of his teacher Jacques Maritain's Art et scolastique , he examined the contemporary relevance of Thomism, wrote on Dostoyevsky and Rilke, and influenced such Catholic writers as Endo^[*] Shusaku^[*] . His works are collected in Yoshimitsu Yoshihiko chosakushu^[*] (Misuzu shobo^[*] , 1947–52).

[5] Karl Barth (1886–1968), a Swiss Protestant theologian. • Emil Brunner (1889–1966), a Swiss Protestant theologian. • Friedrich Gogarten (1887–1967), a German Lutheran theologian.

[6] Iwashita Soichi (1889–1940), a Catholic priest and philosopher, student of Greek and medieval thought under Raphael Koeber at Tokyo Imperial University, and teacher at the Seventh Higher School who wrote Shingaku nyumon^[*] (Introduction to theology) and Shinko^[*] no isan (Legacy of faith).

at its core, those who professed it certainly had good reasons for doing so. For the first time I could see what Claudel in his plays and Mauriac in his novels were getting at. And there was no longer any doubt in my mind that all of Graham Greene's novels could have only a single theme—it alone embodied such a wide range of possibilities that even the lifelong efforts of one novelist would not exhaust it. What I knew about Catholicism also enlightened me about the Middle Ages. I had no knowledge of Western medieval history, but rather than imagine the Middle Ages as an era of darkness antithetical to the Renaissance, I chose to follow Etienne Gilson in thinking of it as a positive period that witnessed the profuse flowering of systems of values and ideas.

My association with Catholicism had begun with those Western nuns who scared me as a child. Later on, as a university student, I was attracted to contemporary Thomist and Catholic writers. During the interval, however, I had never been to a church, never attended a holy service, never listened to a sermon, and never talked to a priest. As a matter of fact, I could hardly ever perceive any church influence on the society around me in the first place. I had never personally experienced the enormous pressures from converts, religious orders, and the church in influencing elections, in swaying personnel decisions at universities, in inhibiting abortions and divorces, or in ruthlessly censuring the conduct of the girl next door. Perhaps I was having a Platonic love affair with Catholicism. But once you live with it under the same roof, human nature makes it impossible to keep matters of love and hate nice and clean.

In those days, the Department of French Literature had quite a gathering of men of character: Tatsuno Yutaka, Suzuki Shintaro^[*] , Nakajima Kenzo^[*] , Mori Arimasa, Miyake Noriyoshi.^[7] But it was their casual conversations after the lectures rather than the lectures themselves that filled the air with a peculiar dynamism. It was completely different from the atmosphere at the medical school, where students had almost no chance to talk with their teachers outside the classroom. In addition, there was something about the French literature circle that sharply distinguished it from the external society I knew. Perhaps it was the fact that one could,

[7] Mori Arimasa (1911–76), a philosopher and literary critic, taught French literature and philosophy at Tokyo University (1948–50), studied Descartes and Pascal, and wrote Dekaruto no ningenzo^[*] (Descartes's image of man, 1948), Dosutoeefusukii oboegaki (On Dostoyevsky, 1950), Babiron no nagare no hotori nite (On Babylon's riverbanks, 1957), and Uchimura Kanzo^[*] (1958). His collected works are Mori Arimasa zenshu^[*] (15 vols.; Chikuma shobo^[*] , 1978–82).

to a considerable degree, feel free to speak his mind on any subject without having to play the power game. Professor Tatsuno, with his dashing manner and open demeanor, would rattle on and on, inserting jokes that amused others as well as himself. In fact he was very perceptive about people's feelings, and his thoughtfulness was expressed with impeccable sensitivity. One was almost compelled to conclude that his penchant for telling jokes was his way of loosening up others who might otherwise be intimidated by his all too penetrating insights into every matter. Each time he saw me, he always asked, "How is your father?" Father had been his family's physician since his own father's generation and he never for-got to send Father his regards, even indirectly through me.

"There are many talents at the French department," he observed. "Like Watanabe, Mori, and Miyake. They are the best people we've had since the department first started. If there is anything I don't know, I ask Watanabe. He knows just about everything. Kobayashi [Hideo] is also quite brilliant . . . but not in the same way as Watanabe; he never comes to class and reads all day at home.^[8] He takes books from my house and returns them smudged with cigarette ash. But he really studies hard. He didn't do well in exams because he never came to class. And then he had the nerve to ask me to pass him! He only brought along his graduation thesis and asked me to read it. When I did, I was just flabbergasted. That was a great piece of work! I gave it the best grade.^[9] Watanabe, Kobayashi, and Mori . . . Mori likes to talk about Descartes and Pascal—and let me

[8] Kobayashi Hideo (1902–83), generally regarded as the foremost modern Japanese literary critic, whose interests ranged broadly from Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Valéry, and other modern European and Japanese writers to the Japanese classics, Motoori Norinaga, historical meaning, Western music, painting, and the art of living; his works include Bungei hyoron^[*] (Literary criticism, 3 vols., 1931–34), Watakushi-shosetsu^[*] ron (A discussion of the I-novel, 1935), Dosutoefusukii no seikatsu (The life of Dostoyevsky, 1939), and Mujo^[*] to iu koto (The notion of impermanence, 1946). See Paul Anderer, trans., Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo—Literary Criticism 1924–39 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era, Poetry, Drama, Criticism (New York: Henry Holt, 1984), 582–610; and Edward Seidensticker, "Kobayashi Hideo," in Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture , ed. Donald H. Shively (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 419–61.

[9] Kobayashi graduated in March 1928 with a thesis on Rimbaud. His reflections on his student days under Professor Tatsuno are in "Tatsuno Yutaka Sa. E. Ra ," in Bungei Tokuhon Kobayashi Hideo (Kawade shobo^[*] shinsha, 1983), 35. For Kato's^[*] recollections of Kobayashi, see chapter 37.

tell you, he's another great talent. We really need people like him in French Lit, though he sometimes baffles us with his difficult ideas."

Mr. Nakajima was always the one who brought the French literature circle news about the war. Wiping his face, he would rush into the room like a gust of wind and announce, "This is no time for just sitting around doing nothing! Something big has happened!"

"Oh my! So they really bombed the enemy warships into pieces and sank them," said Professor Suzuki.

"That's how they took over Hawaii."

At this boisterous scene, Professor Watanabe came in from his lecture, and then all of us went together to the White Cross tearoom on Hongo-dori^[*] . Sometimes Assistant Professor Nakano Yoshio from English literature and Mr. Yoshimitsu Yoshihiko from ethics would join us.^[10]

"Wouldn't it be fun to play golf in Hawaii?"

"Maybe. But the mainland is untouched. I tell you, the war is going to get nasty," said Professor Watanabe.

"Nah, we're absolutely invincible."

"Well, I hope so."

"Looks like Ka-chan is too pessimistic.^[11] Cheer up!"

At this point, Professor Tatsuno said in a loud voice, "I am completely in favor of the Greater East Asia War! Provided . . . " After a short pause, he continued, "Provided that instead of sending promising young men to get killed, they draft people from their age upward. If they sent guys from the General Staff Headquarters or deadwood like me or Suzuki to the battlefield, I'd be completely in favor of a Greater East Asia War."

When the war first began, Professor Tatsuno was happy about Japan's big military victories. To him, Pearl Harbor was a "thrilling" performance, and "His Majesty the Emperor" a figure worthy of great respect. However, he could also see through the minds of the power-hungry military and the opportunists who were jumping on the bandwagon of militarism. And all of a sudden, he surprised everyone with his comments.

I also liked Lecturer Nakajima, never a devious man with dirty tricks up his sleeve. He treated a mere stripling like me as his equal. Never pretentious or deceptive, he was the kind of man who could immediately make one feel at ease. His interests covered nearly everything: contemporary music, assembling engines for self-powered bicycles, international

[10] On Nakano Yoshio see chapter 13 text and note 2.

[11] An affectionate reference to Kazuo, Watanabe's personal name.

affairs, recent developments in the Physiology Society. While he lectured on French symbolism at the university, he was also active in numerous committees and organizations. He'd be here one minute and gone the next, and then there he was again leisurely talking about something else. He was always on the run all over Tokyo and seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of energy; yet none of his many activities was undertaken out of self-interest. It might be difficult to tell what his current activity was, but I could very well appreciate why he was doing it. I was absolutely amazed at his indefatigable vitality, and I could feel a responsive chord with—how should I put it?—a certain quality in him.

But the person who had the greatest influence on me was unquestionably Assistant Professor Watanabe Kazuo, a man who seemed to have descended to wartime Japan from heaven. No sense of defiance against the realities of militarism he found around him caused Professor Watanabe to seek spiritual asylum in faraway France—he knew French culture much too well and he was too deeply involved with Japanese society for that. Instead, as he lived within Japanese society, where all the ugliness had been laid bare for everyone to see, he endeavored to determine what all this meant from a larger world perspective and from a broader historical context. He seemed to scrutinize himself and his surroundings both from the inside and from the outside, and even from the lofty heights of Sirius.^[12] In this respect, he reminded me somewhat of the enlightened minds during the bakumatsu period. Recognizing the futility of expelling the "Western barbarians" and the anachronism of national seclusion, they realized that Japan's "backwardness" lay not only in the state of its technology but also in its traditional educational system and in the Japanese way of thinking itself. Thereupon, they proceeded to trace the historical roots of the problem. And if we had not had Professor Watanabe's indomitable spirit on our side, continually confronting madness and anachronism and identifying them as nothing less, I doubt very much if we could have survived all those long war years without losing our sanity.

Even though I wished to observe Japan's conditions from an external perspective, I had never been abroad and my knowledge of the outside

[12] An allusion to Voltaire's 1752 satire Micromégas , whose eponymous protagonist travels from the star Sirius and makes observations on the earthlings. According to a private communication from Kato^[*] , Professor Watanabe was fond of referring to Voltaire's philosophic hero.

world was limited. At that time I had just begun to get acquainted with the works of French writers after World War I by checking out from the department's library issues of Europe and Nouvelle Revue Française published during the interwar years. For Professor Watanabe, the contemporary literature we spent our days reading was probably no more than one night's diversion from his study of sixteenth-century France. His work was not simply a thorough and meticulous study of that period. The sixteenth century was precisely the time of the Wars of Religion and the Inquisition, an age in which devotion to abstract systems of thought led increasingly to fanaticism. This development in turn led to the emergence of a number of humanists who spoke out fervently for religious toleration. In other words, these were not just historical events from a faraway foreign country; they were part too of the reality of Japan and the contemporary world around it. Through scrupulous handling of materials, the more one closes in on the realities of the past, the more one simultaneously discovers the present in the past and sees the past in the present. Professor Watanabe stood before us as the living embodiment of its truth. Yet this scholar in his awesome wisdom and sensitivity always managed to conceal his affinities with the bakumatsu samurai-thinkers behind a veil of subtle ironies and paradoxes, as if suggesting that cultured behavior called for understatement and self-restraint. Racine, for example, would have the death of his protagonist announced onstage but would never allow the sight of blood.

At the French department I also became friends with Mori Arimasa and Miyake Noriyoshi, both working as teaching assistants. In those days Mori was living in a room at the Hongo^[*] YMCA where he buried himself among books, cigarette stubs, dust, and unlaundered underwear and socks. In between reading Pascal in French or Calvin in Latin and playing Bach's organ pieces, he would converse eloquently, not only at the department but also at the coffeeshop named South American in front of the YMCA. Joining us there was another YMCA resident, the dramatist Kinoshita Junji, so I got to know him as well.^[13] Miyake had a small,

[13] Kinoshita Junji (1914–), a student of Victorian drama under Nakano Yoshio at Tokyo Imperial University and a preeminent dramatist of the postwar realist theater who writes in a new dramatic language and anchors his plays in a rich array of historical themes (Furo^[*] [Winds and waves, 1947], Okinawa [1963], and Kami to hito to no aida [Between God and man, 1972; Eng. trans. by Eric Gangloff, 1979]). His celebrated folklore play Yuzuru^[*] (Twilight crane, 1949; with Yamamoto Yasue in the leading role) earned him international recognition.

slender build and a pale complexion. He was never loud or excitable, but he had an incredible tolerance for sake. A man with a gentle heart and an interest in every conceivable subject, he also possessed an outstanding intellect and impressed us with his precise knowledge and his meticulous analytical skill. When we got into heated debate at the department, he would just listen quietly; but as soon as he said, "Now, on that point—just a second!" everyone would stop to reexamine his thoughts. Whether it was about an interpretation of French, a statistic, or a historical period, subsequent checking revealed that he was hardly ever wrong. He and Mori were no less stubborn or uncompromising than Professor Watanabe in their refusal to be deceived by war propaganda. Whenever I stepped into the French department from the medical school, I always felt I was entering a completely different world.

The progress of the war unfortunately demonstrated the accuracy of our views. The Allies, now joined by the United States, were pressing against the German army in Europe and were beginning to retrieve the Pacific islands that the Japanese army had once occupied. At the university, the time required for graduation was reduced—April graduation now took place the preceding September—and "student mobilization" was implemented. After my graduation from medical school, I began to work at the university hospital. But I continued going to the French department whenever I had a chance, and this continued for a long time, until the medical division itself was "evacuated" to another location. What drew me was no longer French literature but rather my need to talk to someone in the midst of the storm. As the country faced impending ruin, I increasingly felt that I myself was being driven into a tight corner.

At about that time Miyake and I were attending Professor Kanda's Latin reading class.^[14] Besides us, there was only one other student. At a time when military drills and student mobilization were the order of the day, it was not surprising that few students were interested in the long and short vowels of a classical language. On campus or along Hongo-dori^[*] , nearly everyone wore the "national uniform." Professor Kanda alone came to class in a British-made suit. He always put on that perfectly tai-

[14] Kanda Tateo (1897–1986), a New Testament scholar who published the journal Girishago seisho no kenkyu^[*] (The study of the Bible in Greek) in 1934, and later was vice president of the Japan-British Society. His writings are collected in Kanda Tateo chosakushu^[*] (5 vols., 1976–81).

lored suit—provocative as it must have been to everyone's eyes—to go to his weekly lecture in Tokyo all the way from his home in Gotenba by train.^[15] When the evacuation of Tokyoites to the countryside began and the trains became more crowded, Professor Kanda remarked, "People are getting in and out through the windows. When a train gets this crowded, it's impossible to even read a book. You can't get any work done this way." His voice was characteristically gentle and self-possessed.

We read first Cicero—the passage containing his famous line "O tempora, o mores!"—and then Virgil. On the day in June 1944 that we heard about the Allies' Normandy landing, Professor Kanda was reading Virgil as usual. When he finished translating Dido's lament over her love (pronouncing the name "Di'do^[*] ," as the British do), he closed his book and was getting ready to leave. While he was doing that, he spoke softly, almost as a monologue. "Well then, with this, both our enemies and our friends are going to have a very difficult time." And then he got up and walked toward the door. He suddenly stopped, turned around in our direction, and said, "By our enemies, of course, I meant the Germans!" For a moment, we only looked at one another completely dumbfounded. When we recovered, Professor Kanda had already gone.

[15] Gotenba is a city in the foothills of Mount Fuji in Shizuoka Prefecture.