I have never been able to read much in the way of novels or long poems, but I have read a lot of dialogues with literary scholars.
In the field of modern Japanese literature, A clan consisting of Kikuchi Kan has left us many oral dialogues since then. Mishima, Dazai, Nakahara, and others.
The presence of Kikuchi Kan and Kobayashi Hideo is unshakable, but then Yoshimoto Takaaki and others came along and created an indie-like trend. Then came Takaaki Yoshimoto and others, and a trend like that of the indies began to emerge.
I have already mentioned a man named Nobuo Kojima, who was about the same age as Takaaki Yoshimoto.
In the interview talks about Kobayashi’s prose, which probably has its origin in the French literature that Kobayashi majored in. Recently, I often see negative sentences like “Don’t imagine a pink elephant” on tiktok. This is the Showa version of such an anecdote.
In fact, when I read a paper by Hideo Kobayashi at the beginning of this year, which was the runner-up in the modification, I found that the negative form is beautifully woven into the design. The negation of the negation of the negation of the negation of the negation of the negation of the negation of the negation of the negation of the negation of negation, and at the end, something sparkling that cannot be fully negated remains. I thought of this as a technique to make a strong affirmative sentence from a double negative. I don’t cite it, but the technique is
“I’m not talking about the technique.
nor is it some kind of hand-playing fudge that can be read in a small way.”
And so on. I feel much better when I write. I also feel a sense of self-affirmation.
A senior colleague of mine whom I respect compared Hideo Kobayashi’s writing to a travelogue. I think some of Kobayashi’s writings in his later years may be But the writings of his younger days are too much like a travelogue. Perhaps he did not write openly about the then-popular communism. In modern Japan, prose poems that do not write openly about communism, which was popular at the time, would be called thought or criticism. I could grasp the appearance of it for some reason. If it were today, it would be called transhumanism or something like that.
When I wrote that we are now “absorbed” or “absorbed” in the digital world, I meant that I actually feel that way. In retrospect, however, our Japanese language education was not so bad. We could still read Chinese texts from around the Meiji period if we wanted to. We did not hear that Chikamatsu and Nobunaga were being burned in books.
It is up to us to choose whether or not to believe in them, whether or not to write them down, or whether or not to erase them.