Sparks of Thought, Flames of Criticism: The Spiritual Journey of Kobayashi Hideo, 1902-1983

Sparks of Thought, Flames of Criticism: The Spiritual Journey of Kobayashi Hideo, 1902-1983

Kobayashi Hideo (1902-1983) was one of the most influential literary critics of modern Japan. His style of writing, while seemingly difficult to understand, demanded intense tension of thought from the reader, and had the power to make the reader question from the very bottom up what it means to read literature and what it means to appreciate a work of art.

Born in Tokyo in 1902, Kobayashi attended the former Ichiko High School and then the Department of French Literature in the Faculty of Letters of Tokyo Imperial University, and as a young man he was devoted to Rimbaud and Baudelaire. In 1930, Kobayashi published "Various Designs," which made a strong impression on the literary world of the time and made him a household name. Since then, Kobayashi has continued to explore the relationship between style and thought in his critiques of writers such as Naoya Shiga and Ryunosuke Akutagawa, and has gone beyond mere interpretation to explore what it means to read.

Kobayashi's characteristic is not to analyze a work dispassionately, but to immerse himself in the flow of the author's thought and perceive the inevitability of the work's birth. For him, criticism was a dialogue between the heart and the work, an activity that was deeply concerned with morality, views on life, and aesthetic sensitivity. In particular, his postwar masterpiece, "Mujyo to Iu no Iu" (The Truth of Impermanence), he questioned rationalism and the view of progressive history, and developed speculations based on Japanese sensibilities and a view of life and death.

In "Hon'i Nobunaga," a major work from his later years, he thoroughly reexamines what it means to "think" through the eyes of an 18th century scholar of Japanese studies. He delved into the roots of language and thought from the character of the Japanese language itself, highlighting a way of thinking that is different from Western logic and modern ways of thinking. His writing is closer to a philosophical book than a literary criticism, and demands a profound intellectual tension from the reader.

Kobayashi's reflections on art also have a unique depth. He does not regard art as mere artifice or sensual entertainment, but rather as an "act of the spirit. For example, in "Van Gogh's Letters" and "Modern Painting," while discussing the works of Impressionists, Cézanne, Rouault, and other painters, he explains that painting is an activity that touches the depths of the act of seeing itself, not "what can be seen. He believed that the truth of art lies in the painters' anguish and madness. He maintained that art is above all an act that requires sincerity and is an ethical response to life.

In music, Kobayashi was particularly interested in Mozart. In his essay "Mozart," he pursues the question "What is music?" from both the senses and the intellect through his experience with the music of the genius composer Mozart. For him, Mozart was not merely a composer of beautiful melodies, but also a man with "a mysterious spirit who, through his innate sense of formality, sublimated even the shadow of suffering and death into a bright style. Kobayashi found in Mozart's music a "form of beauty" that lightly takes on the tragedies of life, which he describes as "comforting" and at the same time as "terrifying expression.

Kobayashi's Mozart essay is more than a musical critique; it is also the culmination of his thoughts on art itself. The idea that art is not an outburst of emotion but an act of inscribing a soul within a form echoes his other theories of art. He saw a depth like silence in the hint of death lurking in Mozart's lightness.

His criticism had a strong influence on later thinkers and writers such as Takaaki Yoshimoto, Yukito Karatani, and Kenji Nakagami, and rooted the notion in Japan that "criticism is an art. Criticism that goes beyond mere evaluation and interpretation and asks the meaning of the reader's own thinking - this is the legacy of Kobayashi Hideo.

Kobayashi's representative works include "Various Designs," "The Thing Called Mujo," "Nobunaga Motoya," "Modern Painting," "Van Gogh's Letters," "Moozart," and "Hints to Think," all of which are gems of writing that go beyond form and argument to deeply explore "reading" as an activity of knowledge.