Kobayashi Hideo: The Long Journey Toward Homeland, 1902-1945

The famous Japanese critic, Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983), passed through five broad stages up to 1945. In the first stage (1929–32), he sought to reinstate the claims of “the man,” the feeling, thinking human being, in writing, in place of the various literary dogmas adopted from the West: “Behind literature, see the man.” In the second stage, (1933–37), he attempted to define the “modern individual” in a Japanese society of change, anxiety and chaos, adopting the term the “socialized I” to explain his sense of a self integrated into society. In this period he sought a model in the West and found Dostoevsky. The impetus behind this stage can be summed up in the saying, “Behind the man, see society.” In Stage 3 (1938–39), Kobayashi concluded that the “silence” of Japanese people expressed a “wisdom” that accepted the “inevitable” or their “fate” in history. This stage can be summarized in the dictum “Behind society, see history.” Kobayashi’s key direction in stage four (1940–41) is “Behind history, see nature,” the latter term meaning nature (fused with humankind). In the fifth stage, from 1942 into the postwar period, Kobayashi adopted a Dostoevskian “harmony and serenity” in espousing a transcendence of the human realm, when the human organism in its greatest struggles sees the need for beauty in art. This stage can be summed up in the saying “Behind nature, see (that which inspires) beautiful literature.” The thesis charts these five stages with biographical material, some of it gleaned from interviews, and with analyses of Kobayashi’s works, as well as works by Dostoevsky, the alter-ego of Kobayashi from 1933–43. Kobayashi emerges as a figure who lived a complex series of intellectual and personal changes, in strong reaction to the revolutionary political and cultural transformations in prewar Japan.PhD Doctorat