Theory of Fusao Hayashi

Yukio Mishima

Theory of Fusao Hayashi

Yukio Mishima

1.

I first met Mr Hayashi in 1946 or 1947, either way in the midst of the post-war turmoil, and once visited him at the Shin Yukan newspaper in a burnt-out building in Shinbashi. I climbed the dark staircase, its corners still battered from the fires, to the third or fourth floor and met Mr Hayashi in the editing room, where he was drinking. Mr Hayashi was already inebriated. On his way home, he urinated from the back window of the third floor, which had no glass.

I have no firm recollection of how I came to know Mr Hayashi, since I had not originally approached him out of literary interest. Until then, I had read very little of Mr Hayashi's work, and my familiarity with him was merely my own worldly interest as a fledgeling novelist.

I was more interested in the following two reasons. First, he took my immature short stories and praised them. Secondly, he spoke to me, a student who had not yet been treated as a formalised person by the world, as a full-fledged conversation partner and accompanied me with his characteristic youthful frankness. I could forget my own youthfulness in his presence. This alone was a great achievement. Thirdly, I enjoyed the thrill of "risky association" with the notorious Mr Hayashi, who was the target of so much criticism at the time that young people would have sneered at me just for associating with him, and not only that (and it's embarrassing to say this), I was willing to prove myself unconcerned with literary circles and public opinion.

I wanted to prove that I did not care about the literary world or public opinion, and that I should be proud to be associated with Mr. Hayashi. There is no need for further analysis of such a cluttered young man's mind. However, what I discovered soon afterwards was that I was unmistakably fascinated by Mr Hayashi's undeniable charm. The charms of people are unidentifiable, and it is difficult to explain where and how, but I felt more than the fixed static charms of his personality, and as a very young man I was fortunate enough to participate in the very first period in which he seemed to have the most dynamic charms.

It was precisely this infamous captain who, in a daring attempt to navigate through a period of drastic change, took the helm and, in a situation of unprecedented solitude, unlike some previous helmsmen, forced his way across a strait with exposed reefs on both the left and the right. I have never seen such a messed-up captain. If this captain was an opportunist, as some people claimed, he should have been more subtle and wise in his navigation, I thought. And, although I would be associating with such a man, I was not the only one who had seen him in the company of a young, frivolous, time-familiar literary figurehead. It was much more interesting than hanging out with the middleman.

2.

Now, once I was exposed to Mr Hayashi's human charm, he immediately started asking me all sorts of questions. For the first time, he became an insoluble mystery to me. His words were easy to understand and his expressions were plain, but his constant warfare with an invisible enemy, his outpouring of beliefs at any given moment, even when cheerfully exhaled with his breath reeking of alcohol, had a strange monologue-like quality to them. The more he spoke, the further away from a confession it became, a monologue that, though pleasant to the ear, gave the impression not that it was the speaker's belief, but instead was more of the effort and passion with which he was trying so hard to somewhat unwillingly believe in a matter. Even if it approached a kind of confession, it was not a confession of a matter or thought, but of an abstract passion. If one were to look at Mr Hayashi with animosity, one could say that it was not the speech of a hypnotist, but the transparent speech of a self-hypnotic effort.

There was something in the tone of his narrative, which had been from an accident, that captured the young man's heart. (For the same reason, it would have been a reason for adults to doubt his sincerity.) The young man would not be swayed by the fixed expressions of beliefs of others, but he would not be a stranger to the passion of trying to reach a certain place and fervently believing that he was already there. If that is disloyalty, is every young man disloyal?

However, Mr Hayashi's monologue has a strange disregard for the audience, and if he mistakenly tries to consider the feelings of the audience, the monologue will seem less like a monologue. In this respect, his overall impression is solitude.

What on earth is it to talk of ideas? It seems that Mr Hayashi was born with an inability to surrender himself to such an easy way of doing things. His inability (or lack of ability) to consider his audience corresponded to his inability to adequately confess his subject. Perhaps this clumsiness was the true nature of Hayashi's sincerity: he was not good at storing thoughts within himself and not good at using those stored thoughts. And in the same place, this is true of his deep form of scepticism.

Is it true that to speak an idea is to confess it, as if to confess one's transgressions, one's innate defects (which are unwillingly stored inside oneself)? Hayashi half unconsciously continued to think that it was impossible to confess one's thoughts, and that anyone who believes such a thing is suspicious.

If one is going to speak of borrowed ideas, it is better to think that ideas are permanently external and that only the abstract passions that push one inexorably towards these external ideas can be spoken of and confessed. If one is willing to stake one's entire self-respect on the identification of external thought with internal bounded beliefs, then one should keep only the principles of action inside oneself and isolate thought externally. But this isolation is only a dynamic condition, and the abstract passions are constantly pushing him forward, so that in the extreme he himself may become as free a being as he can think, in other words, he may become the very thought itself.

To embody thought, to become thought itself, was Hayashi's unfulfilled dream, but his intuition was probably aware of the impossibility of such an embodiment from the outset. Herein lies the deep root of his nihilism. That is where his peculiar gesture begins, in which he tries to convince himself that he has already embodied his thoughts.

It is not reasonable to assume that these psychic mechanisms, which could be described as ideological distrust, only emerged as a result of his conversion. As we shall see later, these features of his eloquence are closely related to his writing style, traces of which are already evident in his early works from the era of proletarian literature.

3.

The charm of the man as a human being was so extraordinary that my eye was forced to turn, albeit belatedly, to his work. At first glance, most of his works had the colour of a clear sky, as if they were a lie. I have never forgotten that he is a writer who can never confess, even once, although this is quite a bit too plain compared to his inscrutable charm as a human being. That is where his peculiar gesture begins, in which he tries to convince himself that he has already embodied his thoughts.

The best way to avoid the bad habit of constantly projecting the shadow of a human being into the work when reading the work after knowing the human being is not to supplement the work with the author, but rather to do the opposite.

The idea is to connect the visible characteristics of the author's person, one by one and separately, to the characteristics of the work, in the same way that a photograph is made. If the author is overfat, it is connected with the work's overfatness; if the author stutters, it is connected with the work's stutter; if the author's language has a certain regional dialect, it is connected with the dialectal elements of the work. This is to remove any room for valorising the work in terms of faults and virtues and to place the work under the same impartial fate as the author himself. One can stand in a position to predict the good and the bad. Moreover, as with the difference between a real person and a montage photograph, the synthesis of individual characteristics forms an overall impression that bears no resemblance to a real person, and we can rest assured that it is an impression of the work.

Seen in this light, Hayashi's work is exactly as it should be. Not only did his human charm not diminish the charm of his works, but the beauty and tenderness of his emotions, which he usually hides from the public, and the sense of despair that is the flip side of that, were scattered here and there in his works, like little flowers of grass between the stone walls.

By the way, it seems that for him, the work of art and its production were thought of as embarrassing good deeds. Like a timid philanthropist, he would do one good deed and then hastily impose upon himself the corresponding evil. This is because his works of art, his novels, have always only served to betray his life.

Here I discover a very strange relationship between the writer and his work, or rather between his life and his work, which is the opposite of that of an I-novelist, and the strange fate of his work always betraying him afterwards. It is impossible to explain this without assuming that he has always done so because of the bizarre urge to set off the time bomb device in advance in his works.

In each period of his life, his novels were written in a place of crisis, where the unrelenting objectivist demands of a novelist and his unfulfilled dreams were at war with each other, and yet the crisis was not conscious to the author and was never expressed as a crisis. The only notable exceptions are masterpieces such as 'The Four Letters' (1949).

This unfortunate association is evident from his early works. In each period of his life, when he believed he was full of hope, he was filled with despair; when he was about to start, it contained an end; when he thought he loved, he no longer loved; when he was burning with ideals, they were lost. I would not dare to call him an "optimist," nor would I have the confidence to call him a "perverse man," for I understand his false and clear blue sky strokes, which he only knows how to express as hope, departure, love, and ideals. I can only say that the charm of Hayashi's work lies in this strangely cheerful and strangely anxious quality.

4.

It may be said that Mr Hayashi was deceived by "politics." But fortunately or unfortunately, no matter what circumstances or tribulations he has endured, I do not believe the excuse that the writer was persecuted by some kind of delusion. The conversion may be a major event in the history of Japanese intellectuals. However, the beauty of Hayashi's 'Prison Record' has nothing to do with the history of Japanese intellectuals, and in that sense, his early works from the era of proletarian literature are just as beautiful.

The formation and transformation of man are summed up in the succinct and frightening words of Goethe's report to Mrs von Stein: "My virtues are diminishing while my beauties are increasing." How much more incidental is the alternation of ideas in man than the clinical report of a shuddering self-examination of human creation and transformation? His eyes had already seen through his destiny, but if his external gestures continued to oppose this, and he continued to "believe" in something, it would be a relationship between politics and him. It seems sufficient to say that it is a play of his own character, rather than a struggle between the two. These two contradictory predictions, therefore, kept creating a zigzag of harmony and discrepancy between his almost instinctive unconscious acuteness and the production of his works. When I said that the communist ideology of his early masterpiece, 'Shōwa Denki Kidan,' and the idea of happiness in his extraordinary post-war work, 'Happiness in Marriage' (1949), were of equal value as ideas, I suddenly realised, with the help of the author's critical biography, that even in his post-war work, the idea of happiness in his private life still had a strong communist overshadow cast over it. I am tempted to say that this makes his idea of happiness even more anxious, even more thrilling, even more revolutionary and terrifying than the lines that appear on the front page. But after carefully reading his early works and the prison memoirs, I was freed from this temptation. My interest then shifted to the tragic conflict between Hayashi's internal unconsciousness and his external, judgmental, quick view, which has always arisen in the making of art.

Here is a man who likes to keep himself open to misunderstanding, who tries hard to make himself like what others do not like, who exploits vulgarity in a poor way, or rather in a serious way, and who eventually manages to convey his sincerity to others. In the end, he is not afraid of being misunderstood.

There stands the tragic artist who almost gave up on the idea of "the spirit of the mountains and rivers" and who is now trying to place the nihilism he once discovered in politics at the core of his art, but is still hesitant to do so. Around this artist, all kinds of evil spirits and magic of Japan's modern history are gathered together, and the naked desires of the intellectuals of each era, which they do not want to be seen by others, are displayed. At the same time, the simplest and purest dreams of the young people of each era, who have risen and then disappeared, are shaking. In this sense, Mr Hayashi has become too much of a symbolic writer. I can read all kinds of symbolism in him and his works, but what the world welcomes, of course, is a writer who values only one unique symbol.

Early works

1.

The 'Newly Selected Works of Fusao Hayashi,' published in 1930 by the publishers Kaizōsha, is a collection of newly selected masterpieces from Ōgai and Sōseki to Shinzaburo Ikeya and Yasuko Miyake, all of whom are represented in one volume. The book was published in September, but Hayashi had already entered prison in July as a result of the verdict of the Supreme Court in the Kyoto University case.

The collection is much like a jumble of stones, consisting of some very good short stories and a number of works of plain and simple beauty, but of little artistic value. Compared to the works of other proletarian writers, from a sense of artistic value, Hayashi's works from this period seem to be more materially interesting than those of other proletarian writers.

The short stories have the advantage that, instead of being less powerful, they give us a glimpse of the great Romanesque outlines of the period. The taste of the good short stories is intellectual, while that of the simple and naïve short stories is half-fairy tale-like, the joy and pride of having been given the keys to a clear and valid interpretation of the world. What we see in these is how an immature, young intellect has shown great clarity in the face of a chaotic reality.

Some of these works were utilitarian in a double sense. Not only were they utilitarian in the sense of socialist purposefulness, but they were also utilitarian for art, in the sense that the young man who wrote the novels found a way to simplify the workings of reality and used them for artistic purposes. And this latter utility was hidden from the surface of his consciousness by the former's magnificent and unquestioning utility. The simple, clear, and from all points of view essential structure of the drama, the basic dramatic form allowing for a multitude of variations - this is exactly what the times and socialism offered to the young Hayashi, with which his talent was unhesitatingly associated and his sensitivity immediately embraced. His hatred and anger took the form of a frankly ugly capitalist, while his love and inferiority complex easily took the form of the people. And so these works were written. Modern society offers neither such a clear picture nor such a clear drama, and whereas in the 1920s the conformity of thought was a form of resistance, in the 1960s it has become the weapon of the enemy. But whatever the period, when a young man begins to write a novel, his first thought is how to formulate the novel, or rather the basic dramatic structure, in the face of the chaotic reality of himself and others.

It is a problem of discovering the form of the novel, or rather the basic dramatic structure, in the face of a chaotic reality. In Hayashi's case, this was given to him before he discovered it. It is precisely at this point that the strange union of talent and thought begins.

His talent, when he was in prison, was the wonder of his own words. The following few lines, written in a surreptitious manner in 'Tekimado no hana' (Flowers of the Iron Window) in 1927, may have been inspired by the motif in 'Prison Record' (1940): "I am fortunate to have a mother who understands my childish principles. But how many of the thirty-eight comrades are blessed with such idyllic kinship?" For a socialist to dwell on kinship is to dwell on the past. In order to taste the feeling of complete conflict between himself and the world, the direct isolation from the world, he had a deep-seated poetic fusion of the beautiful natural scenery of northern Kyushu and the nature of his childhood, which prevented him from experiencing the ultimate isolation. Prison gave him this, or rather, prison is the most inadequate place to experience this kind of isolation. In prison, he always returns to nature, to the mother of his talent.

Reading through his early works, I was struck by the stubborn tendency of this naïve, sensuous talent to speak of an "harmony with the world" that knows no absolute isolation, but only through the basic dramatic form given by thought. This was the reward of talent's utilitarian use of the given form, but at the same time it revealed his essential tendency, his originality, to separate thought from confession. At the point of contact where thought is about to degenerate into vulgarisation, it is only this kind of work by Mr Hayashi that saves it.

It is this kind of originality that saves it. If we take a look at Enbon's 'Proletarian Literature Collection,' a collection of proletarian literature, we find that various literary forms, from the I-novel to the avant-garde, were tried in a chaotic manner, and that the most neglected issue here was the "confession" and the "confession" of the "proletariat."

In later years, the conversion would poignantly remind us of this forgotten issue, but at the time, I felt that the common theme of socialism, as a forbidden idea, might have served as a substitute for "confession" to the reader. Hayashi's talent had foreseen the mysterious mechanism by which being the owner of a secret, forbidden thought alone could exempt him from confession. In that place, talent can only be increased.

For the young man, sorting out and simplifying the external haze is a task of equal value to sorting out and simplifying the internal haze, and the two are often confused. They become indistinguishable. The two have almost equal significance, and the self-analysis of the young man takes on a strangely persistent ethical character because the self-analysis itself contributes to the formation of a social ethic. In some cases, therefore, confession is substituted by social thought, and in other cases social thought is substituted by confession, but which way the scales of this substitution move depends mainly on the invisible demands of the "times." And his "time" was definitely moving in the direction of ideology. Hayashi's "ideological turn," which in later years became a source of public condemnation and notoriety, his tendency to rush from one extreme to the other without any deception or reflection, was probably due to a lack of some kind of safety valve, and what that safety valve was is a question that anyone would immediately think of. I tried to explore this question in his early works, and it seems to me that this is perhaps because, as I mentioned above, he first of all intuited the essential problem of the times as a simple formula. Moreover, since he was not born to believe in this "natural" intuition, this inner capacity for foresight, his next effort must be to believe in what he wants to believe in.

He was concerned with the disease itself. So he went deeper and deeper into the forest of germs, trying to catch the disease himself, but his strong immune system was slow to catch it, until eventually no one was able to reach him. He eventually reached a place where no one had ever gone before.

What is the safety valve to protect him from this? The first is to believe only in intuition and foresight, and nothing else. If you do this, all ages and ideas will suddenly become boring and you will have no need to go deeper. Secondly, never think of yourself as a test. Use the safety valve and you will succeed and and prosper.

There are more than a few writers who have succeeded and survived successfully using the safety valve from .

2.

Among his early works, his first novel 'Ringo,' 'Picture Books Without Pictures,' and 'New Isotsubu Monogatari' all share the somewhat boorish, overly kind and cheerful narrative of a simple, intelligent young man from the countryside, which is somewhat saved by the thorniness of 'New Isotsubu Monogatari.' This is also the reason why a short story that could have been a bit more phantasmagoric and gruesome, such as 'The Towing of the Park,' ended up being strangely bright and too lucid. The reason for these failures is that they are too clear, a kind of failure rarely seen in other proletarian writers.

A good short story such as 'N. Prison Station Punishment Diary,' then, reveals, behind the clarity of its subject, a strange, half-unconscious combination of romanticism with a strange coldness.

The story is that his uncle, who originally looked at the cosmopolitan's "longing, skeptical heart" "like a gold mine," suddenly returned to his home village to establish a peasants' association when he had been working for the prison department for a couple of years and had already been paid his benefits. In contrast to the gruesome prison, the beautiful scenery of his uncle's village, the birthplace of the peasant movement, is depicted in an idealistic and cheerful manner at the beginning of the story.

The uncle, initially a stern prison guard, gradually regains the glow of a gold mine deep within him and begins to see the crimes of the prisoners as "trifles, trifles...". He eventually came to realise that the prisoners were being punished "not because they behaved like human beings, but because they behaved like prisoners." I suspect that once he turned his eyes outside the prison window, he dared to take a sharp turn, thinking that there were people in real life who were only allowed to survive by "behaving like prisoners." This is a well-constructed and skilful short story, not an exception to the intellectual character of his successful short stories, but when read today, there are two points of doubt, which seem to have restricted him in his later years.

The first is that the impression in the prison guard's mind that he "did not behave like a prisoner" is a cold perception rather than a tolerant one, but the process of why this cool-headed perception immediately triggered action, and why it led to the peasant movement, is only described as a spiritual leap.

The other is that deep down in the heart of his uncle, who was once a young vagabond, was, as mentioned above, "perhaps a little bit of a wanderer."

There is no doubt that the longing, sceptical mind, which all cosmopolitans have and which does not want to be bound by anything, "lurks like a gold mine," and that this is what prompted the spiritual breakthroughs of later years. The author deliberately lumps together the purely romantic concept of longing and the rationalistic concept of scepticism with the phrase "a sceptic's mind, full of longing." These two points of doubt are the first time bombs that Hayashi himself has knowingly or unknowingly set off in his work.

It is a somewhat gruesome tale, isn't it, that his uncle's scepticism brings him to a cold perception, but the same scepticism that brought him to that cold perception suddenly fills his heart with longing at this moment, and with a bird-like mental leap, he is plunged into the peasant movement. Of course, there are demonic things in this world that make a man, with compelling force, suddenly run in a direction hitherto unimaginable. But what Hayashi is talking about is not that, but an inevitable leap of faith. It is, I dare say, an ideological leap.

And at the very moment when scepticism gradually exerts its power and reaches a cool-headed recognition, the longing that has been hidden for a long time is ignited, and explodes like a rocket, launching into the sky. But the right and bitter perceptions have already been left behind, and the right direction from now on will only be defined by the longing of the "beautiful wanderer."

Isn't this a rather unserious way of dealing with the "correctness" of thought, and a somewhat forcible adhesion between the principle of action and the principle of thought? At this moment, Hayashi is on the verge of discovering a kind of "joyful coldness" that is only natural to artists.

Sympathy for the proletariat would have been exhausted, and its minor explanation would have been given. However, it is hard to believe that his uncle, who had been freed from something by a feeling of longing, could not have been freed from the next thing, either.

The author finally settles into a beautiful paradise, where "the evening curtain comes, and the water is clear." There, "when evening sets in, fog descends over the paddy fields, drenched in mist, and the summer evening primrose lights up with Romanesque candles."

The best short stories from his early work, such as 'Classic Letters,' 'The Generosity of Chief Warden R,' and 'The Strange Story of the Shōwa Offering,' are also included. Especially 'The Assassination at the Grand Theatre in Kiev,' these are all intellectually chilling works with a refined style. Some of them are reminiscent of Mérimée. The story is a work in the tradition of the artistic short stories of the Taishō period, which entered into the history of proletarian literature.

The 'Generosity of Chief Warden R' is a clever satire, in which what was a poem that was inspiring for both the warden and the thought-criminal turns out to be a political fraud in its very lyrical effect, bringing disappointment to the warden and anger to the young thought-criminal. Morning glory vines are torn apart and slaughtered from inside and outside the prison windows. Here, the irony of the Romantic school tries to live with malice. A good old head guard was ordered by his boss to push morning glory vines into the windows of unsentenced prisoners who stubbornly refused to confess. He was simply looking forward to the growth of the morning glories, and the young prisoner was intrigued by the lyrical mood. As soon as the prisoner is told, he becomes enraged and cuts off ties with this lyric poem. The clarity of the roles of the Chief Prosecutor, the good-natured warden, and the young man's dream, which do not appear in this short work, is wonderful.

This is one of the most successful examples of the use of this basic dramatic structure. The Chief Prosecutor is almost godlike in the subtlety of poisoning the human heart by the unseen intellectual control of political power and the ruling class, down to the tiniest morning glory vine. The old warden, a blind pawn of the ruling class, a man of good intentions and mediocre civic sentiment, represents the "unaware" society outside prison. The prisoner is a fastidious and noble revolutionary, awake in his isolation, but furious not only at the ruling class but also at himself for being snatched up for his almost unconscious lyrical sentiments. And the morning glory? It is the lyric poem of the innocent, the murdered.

Here we have the novelistic crystallisation of the same theme as Shigeharu Nakano's poem, "I will no longer sing about the flowers that remain red."

But instead of a poet determined not to sing, there is a novelist here, presenting an objective narrative. Is this the story of a young prisoner's shame, pride and will? Or is it the story of the slaughtered innocent morning glories? Was the young prisoner's anger really a politically awakened rage? Or was it the anger of being betrayed by the poignant lyrical feelings within him? The author abandons this psychological enquiry, which probably gives him a crossroads, in order to preserve the structure of the short story.

"Go and snarl at the prosecutor. Don't take advantage of people's weakness. If you are going to play such tricks, why don't you just torture people openly?"

It is a heroic cry, but it lacks some compelling force.

3.

'The Classic Letters' is an excellent pathetic contrast, from the skilful development to the final scene, where the intersecting letters of a man and a woman fly from Kobe to Hong Kong, dripping with the hot blood of revolutionary fervour and ending with what sounds like the cry of a sharp little bird.

The six Annamese youths are terrorists who are after the life of General de Beaufron, an Annamese general who happens to be in Japan. The sister of the young men's Japanese friend is in love with one of them. However, the young man pursues General de Beaufron to Hong Kong, where he is killed, probably in a failed assassination attempt, and the next flight never arrives.

In the spring of 1907, when the French government, through the Japanese government, ordered the expulsion of all Annamese living in Japan, the six Annamese youths wrote one word after another at a farewell banquet with their Japanese friends: "wrath."

This short story, in a strange way, corresponds to the terrifying despair of the post-war 'Four Letters.' The youthful, innocent, fiery "wrath" in 'The Classic Letters' corresponds with the eerie, ashen four letters in 'Four Letters,' a cipher for nihilism itself: the four characters for "death." The background of the former is the demise of the colony of Annam, while the background of the latter is Japanese-occupied Nanjing. It is frightening to see youth as beautiful as the flaming trees of Asia and emptiness as the bottomless wells of Asia, separated by twenty years, as if they were a pair of images by the same author.

Asia's young fire-breathing wounds and Asia's old, hideous sores, bleeding and healing, healing and scabbed over. This macabre continental physiology of bloodshed has a fatal fascination for Hayashi. This is the main tone of Hayashi's poetry and nihilism, which is closer to the emotional politicalism that pervades contemporary AA countries than to politics itself. The other poem, the poem of the morning glory vine in 'The Generosity of Warden R,' is a weak, isolated lyric that is used by political power and becomes a trap for political power. Mr Hayashi, together with the young and noble prisoners, showed their determination to reject it. That's fine. But far more important than this kind of poetry is the poetry of politics, the poetry of the pastiche heroic with images of reality transformation, poetry such as that in 'The Classical Letters,' poetry that was truly only realised in the distant continent and in the old Meiji Restoration. This is because, although emotional politicalism and fairy-tale idealism require a corresponding reality, the reality that the young Hayashi discovers is, in fact, only dreamt of. The period of the Great Depression, which began with the Wall Street Crash of 1929, was a glorious vindication of Soviet Russia, but it was also a period in which the romanticism of the revolution was completely ended. The infiltration of the dream of a politics compatible with art, common to his early work, is in fact an example of how the discovery of political "poetry" is proof that we are already dreaming of reality, and implicitly speaks of the fact that the political movement in which the young man is now engaged no longer needs such idealism. It is interesting to know to what extent he was aware of this essential and politically unnecessary element in himself at the time. It is possible that ideological repression is a truly ironic policy, in which repression secured his dreams, while repression prevented him from becoming aware of such an unnecessary part of himself. In fact, when he started writing his novels, he was given a basic dramatic structure as a methodology, a set of rules for interpreting reality and the world.

It is difficult to say whether it was a comedy as a left-wing activist or a tragedy as an artist that, while he had made the formula his own, it had, on the contrary, prevented him from coming into contact with Japanese reality, and even his political ideas had been undermined by his dreams. In the end, this is the reason why, after his conversion, he was able to match his own dreamed-up image of Japan, which had become so unrealistic and megalomaniacal, with his own dream for a while. It is a dream that constantly and precariously hovers between revolutionary poetry and nihilism, and it is only through such a "national dream" that he has lost touch with reality. Moreover, and this is strange for an artist, this is also the force that guarantees the unusually vivid non-historical modernity of the historical novel 'Seinen.'

'Prison Record' and 'The Heart of the Emperor'

1.

'Seinen' was first published in book form in the spring of 1934 (Kadokawa bunko edition, with commentary by Katsuichiro Kamei). The first part of the 'Prison Record' was written in Toyotama Prison between 1930 and 1932, when Hayashi was between twenty-eight and thirty years old.

In the tenth letter, dated May 17, 1931, he wrote: "I got the idea for a large work entitled 'Youth.' This is a great work without a price. If it turns out well, it may even surpass the base of Tōson's 'Before Dawn.' The first work to be completed is 'Seinen' (Youth), which will naturally be followed by 'Sōrennen' (Mature Years)."

'Sōrennen' develops into a trilogy. I was vaguely depressed because all the novels I had come up with were of the same style as before. I was a bit nervous about leaving it to Kobayashi and Tokunaga, but after getting 'Seinen' I suddenly felt more energetic. There's a saying: "A hen that crows before she lays her eggs does not lay them."

The previous statement can be seen.

The second part of the 'Prison Diary' is a chronicle of his life from the age of 32 to 33, during the Shizuoka Penitentiary in 1934-35.

By the way, 'Kinno no Kokoro' (The Heart of the Emperor) was published in 1943, The introduction to the book states that it should be seen as a continuation of his previous book, 'Prison Diary,' so we will discuss them together. The book is dedicated to Mr Masaharu Kageyama.

In the postscript to 'Prison Diary,'

"The upheaval and confusion are particularly acute in the first part. Even in solitary confinement there is vanity. I have small ambitions. I write down my reading notes meticulously, I give my writing a strong and humorous tone, and all this is done in the course of twenty years of my life.”

These are no doubt the manifestations of the vanity and sentimentality of an immature soul between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty. For example, the 'The Theory of Conversion' in the twentieth verse is an expression of the immaturity of thought and the fragility of the spirit. What appears to be a "non-conversion theory" is actually the first step towards a conversion. The human mind is a subtle thing. The departure from Luxembourgianism seems to have started around this time. This is a clear and honest reflection that is very typical of Hayashi.

2.

"The rain has stopped and the August-like day has arrived. From the window I can see blue skies and clouds." Again, the first line of the prison diary begins with Hayashi's leitmotif, "blue sky and clouds."

The prison diary should originally have been a record of how Hayashi awoke from the paradoxical drama in which the idea of reforming reality somehow made reality dream of itself. The first part of the 'Prison Diary' reveals almost nothing about whether the destination of this awakening was reality or a deeper dream. From this collection of letters, which at first glance seems to be a "book of conversion" by Hayashi, who was the earliest to switch sides, we can see what conversion means.

The first part of the book, 'The Book of Conversion,' reveals almost nothing. If this book reveals Mr Hayashi's qualities more honestly than any other, it is because it is constrained by strict censorship and constant consideration for his family and is the furthest thing from a confession of any kind. Even metaphors and allegories are not permitted. What is permitted here is not even the sentiments themselves, but only the pleasure of communication itself, which serves as a proxy for various sentiments. The first part of the 'Prison Record' left me with an unexplainable sense of discomfort, wondering why such a kind-hearted, untainted by worldly dust, such a hard-working and studious young man should be moaning in prison. The Hayashi we see in the first part of the book is a young man of unquestionable quality, and we have no choice but to believe him to be innocent.

Herein lies the curious character of 'Prison Record.' Contrary to his originality, Hayashi, who separated thought from confession in his early works, seems at first to have adopted a banal method of protecting his thought by making no confession at all in 'Prison Record.' Under this art of concealment, he appears to be at ease only with his "safe feelings." It is clear, not to mention his afterword, that the style of the first part is a "pretended" style. In time, the image of the jovial, cheerful, humorous, optimistic young man whom I want to present to my correspondent seems to gradually become self-sufficient and start walking on its own, escaping from the image of my other true self, the unhappy, lonely young man with wounds all over his body. Why did such a thing happen? Because the desire to be that way is so strong that, according to the rules of his destiny, the way he wants things to be must be fulfilled. And in retrospect, the underlying motive for such a strong desire is a sweet and tender family feeling. The young Hayashi must have thought that his essence was an idea and that tender feelings for his wife, mother, and aunt were the most appropriate and "safe feelings" to satisfy his prison letters, but this was gradually reversed and he began to believe in the importance and truthfulness of these feelings. And this is not an "idea" from any point of view.

However, Hayashi's individuality, having reached this point, also takes a unique turn. In other words, these sentiments are illuminated and justified by natural intuition, and he cannot believe them as they are. This is where Mr Hayashi's characteristic deliberateness begins, as if he expects his wife to go to the dance hall, but when he finds out that she has gone, he cannot help but tell her about the self-analysis that he unconsciously felt uncomfortable about. Here, Mr Hayashi's peculiar artificiality begins, and his own self-approval that is neither sympathetic nor malicious. The style of writing is born.

The reason why this happens is that Hayashi has already taken a unique turn here, and has come to feel that the important natural sentiments he has discovered in himself (and which are clearly never thoughts), are the sole symbol, proxy, and stand-in for the workings of the mind towards ideas, in other words, the tangible representation of his abstract passions. Confession is established there for the first time. For it is this abstract passion that he will never tire of confessing.

It is at this point that the reader's image of the author of 'Prison Record' as a gentle, innocent young man, and the author's image of himself coincide perfectly. It is clear that he believed in his own innocence at this time. He certainly had an abstract passion for thought, but how could he be punished for an "idea" that he himself never possessed!

The first part of the 'Prison Record' always seems to exclaim: "I have a wife! How can my beautiful feelings for my wife, my mother, and my aunt be dangerous thought? Then punish it."

"When the flowers bloom, go and see them together and tell me all about it. I'll feel like I've been there, too."

How can it be dangerous thought to write "I'll feel like I've been there, too." (the seventh letter)?

The first part of Hayashi's 'Prison Record' is his unique clinical record of conversion, and its important significance for the times and for intellectuals lies in its blunt honesty that, for a person isolated from the conformity of thought, conversion is a completely individual, personal, experiential, and internal matter. The conversion is rather a matter of literature.

It is in the second part of the book that the issue is discussed in more depth, but in a more accessible way. However, as we have already noted, there is no intrinsic loneliness in Hayashi's 'Prison Record.' The sense of affinity with the world continues uninterrupted.

"We can touch the living air, the living rays of light, the living sky, and the living sun every day here [in the prison yard]" (first letter).

Then he spent half a year in prison.

"Recently," he writes calmly, "the outside has begun to look like a very nice place" (fifth letter). Rather, the tone of his artificial humour, which has been rather harsh and deliberate, has been scattered over the past six months, and when he says this, he has already been cured of something. The first time the reader is inevitably introduced to the question of what is a turnaround is in the following paragraphs of the fourteenth letter.

"...I am many times more serious and reflective than I was outside, I have almost frighteningly modest demands on my life. I recall with almost tearful vividness the days of my poverty. I have a renewed enthusiasm for those who are tormented by poverty and victims of the inconveniences of society. I remember my father with new affection. I thought I should be kinder to my mother and aunts. I thought that the passion and sympathy I had always felt for the poor was not enough to be a true socialist."

In the eighth letter, three months ago, the same man lamented that his mother had changed her hairstyle when she visited him and said the nostalgic image of his mother, whom he had nurtured for thirty years, was rubbed away, and he felt as if his mother herself was being torn from him.

"This is one of those conservative sentiments, but isn't such conservatism allowed?" he writes.

Furthermore, in the eighteenth letter,

"I present to you the two most important results of my contemplations during the past fourteen months.

1. Man has not changed much since the foundation of the world. He will not change much in the future.

2. Man is both stupid and sensible. "

He has published what he calls a "truly terrifying thought." Of course, the thoughts that come to mind during his days in prison do not always have a logical connection. However, those who do not doubt the brightness of the thoughts of Neighbourly Pity in Oscar Wilde's 'Prison Chronicles' must admit that Mr Hayashi, while resisting on his own, is walking irresistibly towards a place where his previous standpoint is in jeopardy.

The person who at first thought he was secure in his natural sentiments by placing them in the envelope of conservatism (the eighth letter), gradually became unable to help seeking a congruence between his sentiments and his ideology (the fourteenth letter) and eventually came to the cold realization that his sentiments had nothing to do with his ideology (recall the 'N Prison Station Punishment Diary'). The path that the young Hayashi followed in prison until he came to the realisation that his feelings and thoughts had nothing to do with each other is entirely predestined in his early works. And leaving his cool-headed awareness behind, he would once again be lured by directionless longings and dreams. In this sense, Hayashi's turn was not only unique, but also logical: he saved only the beautiful purity of his feelings (which he could safely save because they were not thoughts) and flew away, leaving only the garb of his ideas, which were his skeleton, in the hands of the authorities. The matter was to fly away, leaving only the garments of thought, which are the remains of the clan, in the hands of the authorities. The government officials were not allowed to see the thought of the clan.

And then, in the midst of that sentiment, he has successfully imbued only the abstract passion that is the principle of his own action. ...Such a conversion is unlikely to be a matter of conscience, and will not touch upon the insoluble contradiction between spiritual freedom and the will to defend thought. The question that troubled many intellectuals in their conversion was whether adherence to Marxism alone was the fullest expression of spiritual freedom. Some of them sensed by the transcendent powers of the mind itself that there were other spheres of freedom for the mind outside of Marxism, but for the time being all spheres outside of Marxism were in the hands of the authorities. In fact, the form of freedom of spirit that was tolerated was the worst form of freedom of spirit.

The unique thing about Mr Hayashi is that he did not fall into this kind of dilemma when he converted and was not troubled by the contradictory rules of spiritual freedom. The direction of his conversion was not in that direction. His inner unconscious foresight must have been looking ahead to a time when Japanese reality would begin to imitate the appearance of the strange dream that had been shifting in the wake of the collapse of the revolutionary reality he had dreamed of. A time when, where he had dreamed of a reality that never existed, now reality itself would be distorted into the form of a dream. In the past, dreaming was a labyrinthine process. Where once he had unwittingly left Marxism by dreaming, he is now taken to a place where he can only follow the reality of Japan by dreaming. His extraordinarily sensitive intuition seems to confirm that for a convert there can be no freedom of spirit at all.

3.

The second part of his prison chronicles is only a quarter of the volume of the first part, but it is much larger than the first part. The author himself also appears, showing marked growth: "Last time I was much sanctified. This time it will be very vulgar." Here we see an increasingly cheerful Hayashi, but this is not the same as the author himself. With the cheerfulness of someone who has known despair, there is no longer a shadow of the artificial humor that was seen in the first half of the first part. Nevertheless, the following deeply beautiful passage, which we see for the first time in the second part, is a good example of the kind of humour that is present in the first half of the first part.

"Today is my third month in prison, but the taste of prison really starts to come out from around the third month. It seems that the thoughts and desires that you bring with you from the outside world are physiologically removed from the prison. I think the taste of Zen and meditation also starts to emerge around the third month. The body is drained of worldly cares and the heart becomes as clear as the winter sky. When the sun turns silvery with sorrow, from the cloudy sky silver powder begins to fall with invisible finesse into the depths of my stomach in an invisible, fine mist. It continues to fall day after day. This silver powder is important. It can be the dust of wisdom that arises from knowledge plus reflection. Sometimes it is the critical spirit of anger purified by self-control. It is a very small amount, but it is not something that can be expressed in such simple terms as knowledge or thought, which are common sense, but something very precious... (omission) When the powdery snow is falling and a vast silver field is forming at the bottom of your stomach, a single single hepatica flower blooms in that field when you can't think of it at all." (Third message)

This year marks exactly ten years since 1926, the first year of the Shōwa Era, when Hayashi was escorted to Kyoto in his university uniform and hat. Throughout these ten years he has been both defendant and prisoner, spending four years in jail, unsentenced and in prison, fifteen or sixteen police stations, a dozen trials, five prisons in Kyoto, Ichigaya, Toyotama, Chiba, and Shizuoka. The other six years he was out on bail. That's why, after I was overwhelmed with emotion that he had enough free time to write a novel, the right passage came.

Hayashi recalls his first imprisonment at the age of twenty-four, when he was the first victim of Japan's Peace Preservation Law, and the many emotions and resentments he felt during his first imprisonment, the poems that remained with him from his second imprisonment. I will compare his highly prosaic state of mind during his third prison term, when he was already the father of two children.

"I don't have many dreams during the daytime, so perhaps I have more dreams at night." In fact, the second part of the book contains an overwhelmingly large number of uninteresting, but strangely coherent, nightly dream reports. However, it is highly doubtful whether there are many daytime dreams in the second part of the 'Prison Record,' and while the extensive reading in the first part of the book reminds one of self-deprecating work, the reading in the second part begins to have the systematic nature of a novelist who has reached maturity, selecting and choosing according to his own fiction theory, and each letter is a literary account centred on the launch of the Nihon rōman-ha movement. Each letter was overflowing with the vitality of literary ambition, and not lacking in Mr Hayashi's unique and insane dreams of life, such as the fantastical dream of turning his son into a novelist, accumulating the education of three generations, and creating a great artist. Consistency is abundant.

On the other hand, however, it is also clear that the "silver dust" of the past was beginning to sprout inside him. This silver dust did not sprinkle only in prison. The silver dust that fell daily over the rest of his life took on an increasingly bizarre meaning.

The "silver dust" was not limited to the powder of wisdom and critical spirit. In later years, when the cell took on the form of an inextricable symbol in his memory, the "silver dust," too, passed from its initial moral purity to become a crystallisation of the mysteries of human creation, the paradoxical structure of freedom, the unreliable and indefinite nature of experience, ...... All of these crystallise into something inexpressible. The four dreaded letters "Gakugasha sha shinsha shin" (Death of the Learned) may also be drawn by this silver powder, by the unpredictable forces of fate.

At any rate, some form of disintegration must have begun in his mind when he first became aware of the silver dust. Literarily, the basic dramatic form, which had so clearly and so solidly supported his early works, must have begun to disintegrate. He must have seen the irony of man's role in society smoothed out by this silver dust, like the shallow unevenness of the snow-covered ground. Instead of roles, history and destiny appear. But to what extent can the unevenness of history and destiny also resist the silver dust that continues to fall on it?

The powder seems to have a strange double effect. That is, what is an accumulation, a transformation, and even a generation when it falls on his inner self, when it falls on his outer self, it opens up an infinite, flat landscape, devoid of any dramatic oppositional structure.

It is not enough to say that the time has come for the inner and outer to be reconciled, because the young man who has received the key to organise and simplify the outer has thereby been able to leave the troublesome inner untouched, but when he turns thirty-three and becomes aware of subtle inner shifts, he faces a bleak, desolate snowscape. It is not enough to say that the time has come for the inner and outer worlds to be reconciled, but something else must have happened. His intuition suggests that this is not the case.

The same is true of the "dream." Nevertheless, have a dream! Blow your horn! His natural disposition dictates. This is where the rather boisterous atmosphere of the second part of the 'Prison Record' comes into being.

4.

In 'On Conversion' in 'The Heart of the Emperor,' we encounter for the first time the genuine confession of Mr Hayashi.

Here are all the conditions for him to make a confession. What he confesses here is not an idea but an elusive sentiment, the workings of a spirit that tries to move towards some idea, its abstract passion, and the unrelenting criticism it dares to make. It is also the most splendid voltre of a "convert." It is an interesting literary irony that in such a poignant experience in 'Prison Record,' Mr Hayashi, who only managed to grasp the beginning of a confession, fulfils it so beautifully in the objective description and critical style of 'On Conversion.' The legend that derives from the fact that Hayashi's behaviour is more than just a public misunderstanding, and the public who are annoyed by his behaviour take revenge and paper him with more and more exaggerated labels, while Hayashi himself makes no effort to remove the labels. Or, at last, the origin of the legend, where it assumes an extreme form, is so entwined with cause and effect that it is difficult to unravel.

Did he turn from the extreme left to the extreme right, from his ten years of youth in prison to the side of severe political power? Did Hayashi not simply leave one ideology and turn to the side of sentiment? And by the time he realizes the barbaric power of this sentiment, he is already neck-deep in it and will never turn back.

Behind the 'On Conversion' lies a competition for the enviable integrity of the post-conversion intelligentsia. If no one is in doubt, one must hurt someone else to prove one's innocence. 'On Conversion' is at once the most beautiful and sincere text in the world, and at the same time a hellscape for proving sincerity, and in that sense it is the ugliest text in the world. The fact that the issue of conversion was written so clearly from the inside is a disgraceful exposure to all the converts, and no one else has ever behaved with such a lack of courtesy. Hayashi's analysis and description of the unique race of converts is so accurate that it is rare to find a work that so clearly illustrates the gruesome effect of a single ideological failure on the human character. 'On Conversion,' however, is neither a statement of thought nor a psychological portrait.

Here, only the sentiments he discovered in prison, and only the sincerity of those sentiments, are measured. When Yoshi Hijikata's portrait hangs in the corridor of the Tsukiji Little Theatre, one must understand that it is only the sentiment and the sincerity of that sentiment that he is taking issue with. Today's readers might glorify such a portrait as a sign of wartime resistance. However, Mr Hayashi is impeaching the inexpressible emotional dishonesty of the resistance of the converted. It is no longer a matter of ideology, which is why he is able to speak so freely and clearly.

The corruption of the convert's mind is presented eerily vividly in 'On Conversion.' "On the right is despair, on the left is a quagmire, a veritable spiritual hell."

Finally, this book, a sequel to 'Prison Record,' fulfils a confession and critique not found in 'Prison Record,' and in common with 'Prison Record,' the sincere reflection and confession here is once again a linear extension of the innocent, vulnerable youth of the first part of 'Prison Record.' Even in such a sincere confession, there is a certain gesture, and one can sense an effort to persuade him to believe something, but it is still possible that he is saved by 'On Conversion.' This is because his "reflection" puts everything in a transitional state. Never has he spoken more honestly about his efforts at self-consciousness than in this book. In other words, about his incurable proclivities.

"It is not enough to say "Confession and kowtow." Not even "From Marxism to Japanism." You have to let go of everything and go directly to self, directly to man, directly to God. We must be aware of as a matter of spiritual emancipation in our entire life, otherwise we will perish and collapse."

But when I read passages such as these, I cannot help but feel the thrill that I always get from Hayashi's overemphasis on the passage. Although Hayashi's sincerity is unquestionable, in passages such as this he overextends the problem of conversion and universalises it psycho-historically.

After having come so deeply into his feelings on the occasion of his conversion, he once again attempts to universalise this most internal and individual problem. At first, this was clearly the work of his keen intuition, but he had already lost faith in his first intuition. What a thrill!

The idea is that we have abandoned our feelings and are turning towards thought. If it is true that during the war he became a right-winger, as the world says (in fact, he was so moved by the February 26 Incident that he became a visiting student at Daitojuku), then it seems that the period when he was a true right-winger was a period when he left ideology behind and became self-sufficient in the depths of his feelings. The right wing is not a matter of ideology, but purely of heart. While the whole school was chanting a Norito prayer of congratulation, Mr Hayashi, inebriated, shouted out a revolutionary song by himself, and the president, restraining the indignant youths, said: "I am not a right-winger."

"Don't be angry. Don't be angry. He has not yet sufficiently purified himself. But that spirit will surely carry over to the school."

In fact, Hayashi studied his own feelings and wrote 'Saigō Takamori.' He wrote 'The Heart of the Emperor' and 'The Spirit of the Meiji Restoration.' In the process of writing, perhaps he felt that for the first time, the emotional poetry of politics, the poetry of political sentiment, had found a suitable time and subject. Japan was then dreaming of Japan itself. He dreamt of Japan in the depths of his heart and was intoxicated by the principle of change through sentiment itself, which had become extremely "ahistorical" in the eyes of left-wing thinking and later became infamously known as spiritualism. No wonder, then, that he thought that the poetry that had been smoldering in him for so long had now discovered a reality that was appropriate to it. In a sense, this discovery was accurate. The wartime national dream was built on a passion of denial of reality, perhaps of the same kind that had intoxicated the young Hayashi, and the denial of spiritual freedom had allowed the emotional release of the spirit. How could Hayashi not have foreseen some coming setback? But the frenzied denial that unfolded here, the thoroughness of those who flaunt their purity, is a sign of the end of the world.

What the president saw in Mr Hayashi at this time was his emotional state. Denial, an almost self-destructive denial of the outside world and all the enemies within, or, to put it another way, the denial of the earth by the blue sky and the clouds, fascinated his mind. It may perish sooner or later, it may disappear in the blink of an eye, but for a moment it took the form of an idea and dragged him, as usual, to its extremes. This kind of denial is the poetry that he has long harboured, and the reverse side of nihilism.

Wasn't this the mother of nihilism?

There is a line in 'The Spirit of the Meiji Restoration' that, when I read it now, strikes me as eerily poignant. It is a line that at first glance seems mundane, an old and banal expression, but which reveals the consistency of Hayashi's life and explains the suffocation of contemporary Japan in the 1960s and all its anxieties from the depths of the national psyche. It is as follows. "The spirit of the Restoration is not a spirit of emergency. It is the Japanese spirit of normalcy."

'Seinen,' 'Sōrennen'

1.

In the autumn of 1961, on the plane to San Francisco, I re-read 'Seinen' and was even more impressed than on the first reading. Thanks to the wave-like romantic sentiments of 'Seinen,' this prose-like plane trip was coloured with the passionate longing of the youth of the past, and the unusual journey to the USA was imagined as a full-life achievement of holistic ambitions and dreams. On the other hand, the tasteless time on the plane, with its comfortable chairs and cheap meals, called for more and more curses for this kind of airplane trip, but that was only a delusional impression of a cowardly writer. The following summer, a heroic young man, just like the character in 'Seinen,' appeared and sailed across the Pacific Ocean. The enormity and splendour of the phantom vision of his destination during Horie's voyage must have been similar to that of the young men of the Meiji Restoration in the days of 'Seinen,' which we today would not ordinarily possess. The adventures of the young Horie, however, were more gratuitous than those of the youth of the Meiji Restoration, and remained in the realm of sport.

The period in Japanese history when the destructive power of the youth was effectively utilised and when the power of the youth itself eventually became power, was partly the Sengoku period and partly the Meiji Restoration. An era like the Meiji Restoration was probably unprecedented. It was an era in which the power and culture, body and intellect of the youth coalesced and came together to create rapid construction and order. An era that could truly be called the "age of youth." ...... Compared to such an era, the seventeen years after the Second World War can only be described as an era in which the vitality of youth was used most inefficiently. It was at the end of such an era, which began with one disillusionment and ended with another, that I was so passionately intrigued to re-read 'Seinen.'

However, a close reading of 'Seinen' reveals that beneath the bright exterior of Hayashi's style lurks an unusually pessimistic, dark undercurrent. Rarely has a novel been so full of passion and action, but also rare is the novel in which every action is rendered null and void. In the end, it is only the immeasurable "force" of the times that triumphs, and the real protagonist of this novel is Shinsaku Takasugi, who says, "Man cannot defeat momentum." (Kadokawa bunko edition, vol. 2, p. 131).

2.

At the beginning of the novel, the young Kaoru Inoue and the young Hirobumi Ito appear as typical "converts" who went from studying abroad for the purpose of exclusionism to becoming open-minded and returning to Japan. "Because he was an extreme advocate of expulsion of foreigners, he became an extreme advocate of the opening of the country! Therein lies the favourite secret of man." (Vol. 1, p. 21, above)

The reader is already drawn into an allegory, but because the author's historical setting is so scrupulous and accurate, nay, the more scrupulous, the more the historical analogy emerges from the reader's mind with a certain thought. Wipe away the extension of the story, and let only that sentiment come to the fore. In the first edition of this novel, Hayashi openly wrote that he "adopts Marxism as a literary method," but in the novel 'Seinen,' it is no longer ideas that intoxicate people, but the "rebellious spirit" itself. The growth of Hayashi compared to his early works can be seen in the power of this kind of emotional liberation, which is the result of his own talents.

"The rebel has no reason to fight the old. He has only feelings and actions."

Shunsuke's self-defence of his "poetry and wine debauchery" is nothing more than the author's self-awareness and declaration. In all the volumes of 'Seinen,' I honestly know only words of praise. Two young men return on the black ship, their fiery passion, their caustic opposition, and the turbulent Japanese archipelago in their sights.

The Anglo-French Combined Fleet at anchor in front of the brick deck. Hayashi has chosen the Japanese Chōshū clan to represent contemporary Japan, with its whirlwind of conflicting ideas, and the British fleet to represent Byron's poetic vision, which he himself embraces. From this bird's-eye view, the story unfolds from a vast perspective.

What an alarming contrast to the final, dark, death-defying, heated debate under feudalism in the Chōshū clan's Imperial Council, which comes after the bright, free dialogue on the Barossa. The story alternates between the bright world of the conquerors and the world of the Japanese youth, bound by dark tradition and convention, struggling to break free over the promise of the two young men to return to their ships. There, the unhappy perspective of Shunsuke, who has already known and seen the world, conveys the constant spasmodic irritation of the spirit and its pleasurable pain. A Romanesque contrast between the intellectual and introspective Shunsuke and the dynamic and impassioned Monta.

What a foreshadowing of the story the prologue is filled with, as the two young men appear in the midst of the social unrest of a Japan on the brink of ruin, a few years before the Meiji Restoration. Then comes Dr Boulin, the dreaming revolutionary, the ally of Byron and the youth, the only observer on the side of the world spirit. The voyage of the sea-going ship Barossa. The anchorage off Himejima in the Bungo Channel and the landing of the two young men.

(In the dialogue between Boulin and Sato, which is exchanged in Chapter 11, in the contradictory clashes and conflicts of interest between the progressive mission of a great power and the revolution of an underdeveloped country, it is as if it were a critique of the world policies of today's great powers. Next, we are introduced to an even darker side of conservative Japan, the swarms of terrorists who gather at old hot springs.)

Chapter 13, which follows, is backed up by the author's prison experience and is the most beautiful chapter of 'Seinen,' forming the clear and quiet centre of gravity of this novel that jumps from passion to passion.

The fact that the traditional Japanese nihilistic view of man, inspired by the figure of the kutsugae worm, was so precisely and steadily expressed through Shinsaku Takasugi is not only an artistic sublimation of Hayashi's 'Prison Record,' but also a dramatic overthrow of this idea by the visit of the young man Monta, as if the whole theme of 'Seinen' had been crystallised here.

The old, tenacious bonds of the family system, however, bind the young Monta from afar, even as he is so moved by Shinsaku Takasugi. The anxiety of the people. A picturesque, exotic Japan seen once again from the perspective of the Combined Fleet. The second half of the novel is literally breathtaking, beginning with the second Imperial Conference, the ever-increasing crises, the characters' agitated movements, the Straits War that finally breaks out, and the peace talks three days later. What other writer could have depicted such a dramatic and tense encounter between the anguish of a small, backward country's departure and Western civilisation with such power and such tireless novelistic development? The novel is a tale of small clashes between major clashes, in which the characters are forced, whether they want to or not, towards their respective roles in history and forced to confront themselves in those roles. One by one, the external dramas correspond to the internal individual dramas, and the reader is constantly awakened along with each character. Under these circumstances, any character, no matter how insignificant, can utter a few words that sum up his life. For example, Seitaro Shimizu, a young retainer just over twenty years old, says: "From today onwards, I'm going to put the idea of exclusionism down in my heart. Of course, as a Japanese, I can't completely abandon the idea of expulsion of the barbarians. But for the next fifty years, I will keep my head down and say nothing about it." (p. 14)

It gives a sense of existence. The twentieth chapter, in which Lord Asada is recalled from the siege due to a change in the situation, and decides on his own to appoint Shunsuke as his envoy to the peace talks, is a wonderful scene in which exhilarating drama crosses the dark sky like a bolt of lightning. Furthermore, at the end of chapter 21, where the role is not fulfilled in time and is wasted, the emotions of the characters are conveyed directly to the reader's mind. It is the most beautiful and most parsimonious scene in 'Seinen.'

The climax of the war scene is magnificent. This was later expressed in the words of Shinsaku Takasugi: "A country can never be destroyed by an external enemy." The novel enters its descent, from the peace talks to the epilogue in which Lord Byron's poem once again connects Shunsuke's Japan with Pyro's verses, and in which Shunsuke is served Japan's first Western cuisine. The novel is one of the few long novels written after the Meiji era that should remain as a classic.

3.

This is, in essence, the story of a "returned youth." In his mind, he believes in the universal validity of the ideals once acquired. Not only is he convinced, he himself is "caught" by the ideal, but in the reality of the Japan to which he has returned, none of the ideals seem to have any validity at first glance. He was determined not to be defeated by reality and fought it with his life. Because, although most Japanese are unaware of it and most people on the main road are blind to it, deep within the Japanese reality is a reality that is already moving in a certain direction.

The young man's ideals should be valid because they have the potential to move him, and it is in this potential that his ideals should have validity. This was, after all, the "opening of the country" as the two young men saw it. However, the actual opening of the country followed a different path and took a different form than they had envisaged, and was achieved as if it had nothing to do with their efforts. This is the "momentum" of time. The constant despair that has pushed them from place to place in the meantime has forged them and made them "mature" in the end.

'Seinen' is a terrifyingly interesting novel even when read without any allegory, but the allegory of this novel has an ironic structure, so that the historical analogy becomes a critique of the times. The theory of opening the country held by the two young protagonists is itself nothing more than a simple political idea, but Hayashi's aim is to show how, in the melting pot of the embryonic period of the Meiji Restoration, all forms of thought - conservative and innovative, progressive and radical, liberal and reactionary - clash indistinguishably with each other and eventually all flow into the unity of the new era. In the process, it seems to depict the fusion of ideological labels such as Emperor and Sabaku, expulsion of the barbarians, and opening of the country to the outside world, in a chaos of ambiguous political passions where the labels themselves have no meaning at all. The two young men's apparent conversion, for example, from traveling abroad for the purpose of expelling the barbarians to returning to Japan with an open-minded view of the country, seems to be the opposite of Hayashi's own conversion, but in fact, it is not.

As is clear from the writing of 'Seinen,' Hayashi's transformation was to drift away from absolute thought to the world of relativity of thought. Moreover, he put himself in the middle of this conflict of relative ideology, seized by an "ideal" and martyred by a single passion. This is a very ironic setting, since an "awakened" person who has already known and seen something cannot become one of the blind again, and the ideal is an Enlightenment ideal, different in dimension from all the other relative political thoughts.

The theme of 'Seinen,' however, is not so simple. The two young men were the bridge between Japan and the West, the link between the Japanese spirit and the spirit of the world, and although they may have learnt their ideals of openness from Western literature, in the way they were "caught" by these ideals, in their dark passion and devotion to them, they had the blood of the "reactionary" Chōshū clan. Dr Boulin has insightfully stated:

"It should be the "opened" ideal of a person."

"The opening-up of the Shogunate was only a sham progressivism born of feudalism's desire for self-preservation. However, although Chōshū chauvinism may appear reactionary at first glance, it was fundamentally a radicalism that broke with the status quo, and at a certain point it could easily be transformed into a proper open nationalism. In other words, only when the breakthrough spirit of Chōshū is combined with a genuine open-mindedness based on a correct international understanding, as represented by the two young men, will the revolutionary tide in Japan take a direction towards civilisation." (Vol. 1, p. 122)

This is clearly dialectical thinking. Moreover, Shunsuke had already "rediscovered the 'holy ruler' and longed for an ideal world" in the image of the "Holy Son of Heaven" that he had heard about from a Satsuma samurai before he travelled abroad, when he was still passionate about exclusionism and "the exclusionist movement had turned into a conscious slogan for overthrowing the shogunate." The image of the "canonisation of the Holy Son of Heaven" would then be the ultimate source of his revolutionary ideals.

Shunsuke's theory of opening the country to the outside world may at first glance appear to be a bright, Western-style, rationalistic Enlightenment, but once he came into contact with the issue of Japanese revolution, he found himself rather absorbed in the undercurrent of the Chōshū clan's fierce, status quo-busting spirit and, furthermore, he saw the radiance of "Holy Tenshi" in the depths of it. In other words, when he thinks of the revolution, he is not only looking up to his own.

If his "ideals" did not go down to the bottom of false tradition and sentiment, then his conversion would have been only a fake, because its open-mindedness would lose its most essential element when he lost the emotional backing of his barbarism.

The two extremes of communism and exclusionism seem to be two different sides of the same coin. However, when the assumption that there is no difference in essence as much as there is in appearance is allowed for all ideologies, we no longer live in a world of ideological relativity. At that time, Mr Hayashi is allowed to be even more acerbic in his irony. In other words, his former passion for Marxism, his aspirations, and his devotion to the "cause" were originally the most primitive "Japanese heart," the oldest and darkest, the most unconsciously revolutionary, the same as the barbarianism of the 'Seinen.'

If there is an ideal that is not justified by this kind of sentiment, I would like to see it. And the special appeal of the novel 'Seinen' to today's readers is that, alongside the ideals of youth, there is the "disillusionment" of youth, which would not be out of place in a volume of Balzac's human comedy. Never before have Hayashi's two opposing powers of foresight been so happily matched as in this work. The motif of a Japan that had one ideal and dreamed of the potential power to fulfil that ideal, but all will and effort was in vain, and that the "opening of the country" was only awakened by the bombardment of the black ships, were the two motifs of 'Seinen.' The motif of Japan only awakened by the bombardment of the black ships is an eerily accurate prophecy of Shōwa history from 1933 to 1945, when 'Seinen' was written. It is not, of course, a repetition of history per se, but a work of art.

It is a prophecy of how one treats this subject at the end of his ideological wanderings.

4.

In the novel 'Seinen,' the author's eye for depicting youth penetrates into every nook and cranny, depicting its purity and passion, its ideals and delusions of grandeur, its unnatural pride and thorough misery, all its frailties and sweetness, its courage and boldness, its willingness to risk its own life, its disbelief and easy despair, all in the same breath. ...... In short, it depicts everything in youth in a bright, positive tone.

But are Shunsuke and Monta, two young men who embody the respective ideals of reason and action, not too much like "youth" in the conventional sense of the word? Perhaps this is partly because the role demanded of youth by the times and society at the dawn of the Meiji Restoration was fixed. The author's intention was also to portray an exemplary, typical, and positive image of youth. Nevertheless, these images of youth are too much like youth, in other words, they do not possess the secrets of youth.

Ōgai's "seinen" have a an old-man-like quality to them. The same is true of the young man in Miyabi. I don't mean to say that this is realism by any means, but the youth is not as young as one might think. In Japanese literature, which has developed only in the tradition of edifying Yujiro, the vivid depiction of the public, political, and ideological passions of youth was an original creation of Hayashi and proletarian literature. Aside from the historical framework of the story, these two youths' overarching sense of justice and their complete lack of secrecy are are undeniable.

It is, without a doubt, linked to Hayashi's innate anti-confessional character. In the likeness of the characters in 'Seinen' to Hayashi, it is possible to read in their overly heroic portraits an artistic manifestation of the particular state of mind in which Hayashi creates his fictions, that is, the body language of his eagerness to believe that he himself embodies an idea, but at the same time, we must immediately believe that, like these characters, Hayashi has no secrets.

Mr Hayashi had no secrets about any of his thoughts, about any of his private life, and this is the cause of all his misfortunes. This is why, in 'Seinen,' while depicting the upheavals of the times so clearly, he does not fail to depict the first-class adolescent loneliness of the young man in confrontation with the world. The world that the protagonists of 'Seinen' confront is Japan, the relative world of politics and ideology. Faced with such a world, the young man cannot be truly alone, but even after his conversion, he could not abandon his affinity with the world. So the whole play of 'Seinen,' despite the accumulation of crises and the sincerity of the play, has the character of a play about a kind of accommodation between youth and the times, youth and society. The youth are tossed about, tired and despairing, but they have no doubt about the true nature of their passion. If he is tormented by scepticism, it is only "the longing sceptic's mind" and logic does not drag him into the abyss of destruction.

I could say that this was the character of the Meiji era, but at the same time, it was the unfulfilled dream of Mr Hayashi's politics. Alain quotes from 'Manon Lescaut,' and translated it again to Julien.

The following passage, which I consider to be one of Sorel's distinctive features, never appears in the whole of 'Seinen.'

"Oh, why am I so..."

Even in chapter 9, where the author goes into Shunsuke's mind in the deepest and most analytical way, he feels himself like a small unglazed pot that has been swept away by the violent currents and turned into a mess, and after feeling sorry for himself for being so far behind, he thinks as follows.

"Shunsuke did not get up and crossed his arms. Is it really so? Wasn't there a more beautiful, more pure motive in his heart? Yes, there was. The simple desire to live a carefree life. If it is within our power to bring about a world in which all human beings can live freely, then we want to bring about that. If we could push the course of history even one step in that direction, I would like the world to recognise that I had a dedicated feeling in the corner of my heart that I would not mind killing myself. Yes, even if the world doesn't recognise it, I will. I have now come to the point where I may be killed tomorrow in order to carry out this pure motive."

This beautiful self-recognition, this affirmation of the ultimate beauty of the self, is Hayashi's true nature. If everything comes down to the discovery and experience of this "beautiful soul," and if everything flows out of it to reach the highest good, then this can be called a kind of dialectique empirique.

5.

In the first letter of the second part of 'Prison Record,' it is written: "I have already written 'Youth' by Heine and 'Mature' by Byron. The whole piece is divided into three parts, but the plot of the first part has already been completed, and even if I am released now, I will be able to put down the pen immediately. In quantity and tone, it is just a prelude. One can only imagine what a grand romance it would make. I intend to publish notes in preparation for this. But for now, please concentrate all your energies on the inclusion of the 'Complete Works of Byron'."

The fifth letter further states,

"What's more exciting is that it's finally becoming clear that Byron will indeed be the main tone of 'Midsummer.'" In the postscript to the first part of 'Mature Years,' Hayashi writes: "'Seinen' dates from the third year of the Bunkyu era and the first year of the Genji era. 'Mature Years' began in 1881 and lasted until 1923. It includes the inauguration of Hirobumi Ito as President of the Council of Councillors, the formation of the Liberal Party, the Fukushima Incident, the Rokumeikan era, the Security Ordinance, and the promulgation of the Constitution. The first part is this volume, the second part is the Fukushima Incident, and the third part is subtitled 'The Kanarukan Era.' 'The Late Years' includes the Russo-Japanese War, the annexation of Korea, the assassination of Hirobumi Ito and other events, in other words, 'The Late Years' of the Meiji era.

However, 'The Late Years' was never written, and 'Mature Years' was eventually aborted after the second part. In the midst of the tediousness of the Japanese literary world, the rapidity of selection, and the uncertain evaluation, how Mr Hayashi struggled to create this masterpiece, and how he must have abandoned its completion in an unspoken anger.

'Mature Years' begins with a prologue containing a distant foreshadowing of the Fukushima incident, but it is a moving moment in Chapter 7 when Hirobumi Ito finally appears, the matured version of the protagonist of 'Seinen.' However, the story is not a simple one.

The most outstanding creation in the first part of 'Mature Years' is probably the doctor Otoda Hyoue, who went to France to study under the tutelage of Dr Boulin in 'Seinen,' and who, by chance, ends up playing the role of Boulin in 'Seinen' as a Japanese. The most brilliant scene of all is in Chapter 20, the last chapter of Part I. The scene of the confrontation between the two young nephews of the government and anti-government factions has a dramatic power that could be called great, and the theme of 'Seinen' is condensed in the moving recollections of Hyoue here. This is Hayashi's own endless reminiscence, clearly stating the subtle and dangerous relationship between the novelist's objectivist imperatives and his endless dreams or passionate blood, which both negotiate and defy each other. It is hard to overrule the fact that 'Mature Years' is more melodramatic in a bad way than 'Seinen.' The placement of characters, the way the story is told, everything reveals a kind of convention. Another fault of 'Mature Years' is that here, too, the rebellious youth and the anger of the people are brought to the fore. The two figures of power, Hirobumi Ito and Michitsune Mishima, who occasionally engage in youthful human conversation and are occasionally struck by a sense of nihilism, are increasingly buried in the busy historical narrative, and their monstrous character is more and more buried in the historical narrative. The monstrous reactionary politician Michitsune Mishima is only indirectly depicted in Part 2, Chapter 4, in a list of documents. The young innovator becomes a formidable reactionary figure when he comes to power.

The author, however, did not depict this kind of character in the story in a way that would be the most interesting theme of 'Mature Years.' The author has ceased to write without fully developing such a character into a novelistic figure.

The repression and rebellion in 'Mature Years' lacks the thrill and dynamism of the turbulent times in 'Seinen,' where the perpetrator may turn victim and the victim may turn perpetrator, and gives an unexpectedly static impression, although the passion for action is depicted one after the other. Power and police politics have already become halfway unmovable. And there, the same pattern of ideological repression of the Shōwa era is already evident in budding forms. Thus, the reader cannot enjoy the pleasure of historical analogies, as paradoxical as those of 'Seinen.' The character of Ichiro, a member of the government faction, is also too pure-hearted and conscientious, without cynical interest. The young man who later approaches Michitsune Mishima's daughter could have been the Julian of the Meiji era.

Nevertheless, 'Mature Years' is a magnificent multifaceted work that edges on the age of disillusionment and measures the nature of that disillusionment from the perspective of various characters. Here, too, the most macroscopic view is that of Ootoda Heihei.

"I have no intention of joining the government or the Liberal Party. I am only surprised at the mystery of the times. An energetic young man of the loyalist faction named Shunsuke Ito, who is now Hirobumi Ito, President of the Council of Counsellors, is determined to suppress the civilian party in order to establish a constitution. (omitted) A young man of the royalist faction named Shinjiro Kono, who is now the chairman of the Fukushima Prefectural Assembly, is determined to overthrow Ito's government in order to establish a constitution." (Part 2, Chapter 7)

I imagine that when Hayashi wrote 'Mature Years,' the shadow image of his enemies was fading. This tends to happen to all writers, not just Hayashi. The enemy in 'Mature Years' is portrayed as much more hateful than the enemy in 'Seinen.' See, for example, the description of the tormenting deaths at the end of Part 2.

However, such hatred is not a narrative colouring; in Hayashi's mind, the enemy is probably dying. He is trying hard to arouse the enemy in his memory, and through this evocation, he depicts the violence of the authorities. The emptiness of such efforts leads to disillusionment, and 'Mature Years' presents the horror of disillusionment in a double sense. The disillusionment on the front, namely, the betrayal of ideals, and the disillusionment on the back, namely, that the enemy is dying.

He can no longer portray the idealistic, fear-filled, diabolical image of the authorities with the lucid force of his earlier works. This is one of the unintended effects of the conversion. He had neglected too much the great enemy behind him, the popular public. After the war, he came face to face with this enemy for the first time, but this was nothing compared to the government officials who had once thrown him into prison.

It is regrettable that he broke his "mature" brush without discovering this kind of popularity within the youth itself. The glorification of youth and the people continued, and he failed to recognise the blade that was closing in behind him. The year after the publication of 'Seinen,' the Greater East Asia War broke out. Popular fervour took everything away. It was the last chance for those who had missed the boat to redeem themselves, but Hayashi had already done so. He wrote 'On Conversion' and 'The Heart of the Emperor.' At that time, he unwittingly walked towards the solitude favoured by the government. The young man who once knew no solitude in the conformity of Marxist thought, gradually deepened his solitude in a mind that had lost its real enemy. He must have seen a lot of things. He must have seen vividly the practical consequences that the romantic passion of Asiaticism... And what does seeing add up to?

He should have seen the direction of the sharp incline of one reality, which is not any reality.

'The Four Letters,' etc.

1.

I then finally came back to the time when I first saw Mr Hayashi. He had been ostracised, which he accepted as a matter of course. He wrote anonymous scribblings, drank heavily, and urinated from the window of a building. No wonder I saw in him, more than in himself, the symbol of a failed era. For me, as a boy, it was indeed a fresh and violent period of frustration. And I had made the concept of failure the core of my aesthetic conception ever since I witnessed the February 26 Incident in my youth. Those who persevered and survived were, for me, a symbol of vulgarity. I longed for my premature death, but I was still alive, and I foresaw that I would have to live on. Thus, Mr Hayashi formed a double image, a double shadow image that was essential for me at the time. In other words, an image as a symbol of the failures of the times, and an image of a reluctant, persistent snobbery that I had to emulate, an image of mind-numbing self-abnegation and an image of irrational, forced, all-encompassing self-affirmation.

I can say without exaggeration that, for a certain period of my life, I did indeed live by the shadow image of Hayashi. At that time, within him, what was most characteristic of him, his affinity with the world, had had collapsed. In colloquial terms, he preferred to describe it as "political despair," but the problem was clearly much deeper and greater.

Some people, at twenty, can taste the collapse of their affiliation with the world. But what is characteristic of Mr Hayashi, however, is not only that it came late, but that everything is grand, an irrational, unnatural knot between politics and interiority, revolutionary passion and objectivist philosophy, and so on. Appearing as a discontinuity, his "despair for politics" is mixed with despair for Asia, despair for Japan, despair for humanity, and despair for himself, and so on, all rooted in the collapse of his affinity with the world.

As is his wont, when his predictions come true, he is no longer in the spot where they were, so he believes himself to be a new-born human being, and avoids the trouble of tracing the threads of causality. All I could do was save myself the trouble of watching. This gesture of refusing to be constrained by the past with such a fastidiousness was a far cry from the young man's mutterings of "Oh, why am I so old?" (Manon Lescaut), which made him sound like an ageless man's murmuring.

However, by cutting off his sense of affinity with the world, he was cut off from the beautiful scenery of Kitakyushu, where he had spent his childhood, as well as from the essential feelings from which he had descended so deeply. What must be noted, however, is that his devastation had no connection with the desolation of the post-war era. It was a devastation of a completely individual nature, which he had already foreseen when he avoided solitude at the beginning of his life.

2.

However, a writer's creative motivation is often a strange thing. In the midst of infamy and misfortune, Hayashi wrote some outstanding short stories. They were vivid scenes of recollection, tales of exhilarating fishing in Sumatra ('Ghost Fish'), the magnificent sunsets of Manila Bay ('The Lost City') and the blood and luxury of occupied Nanjing (the 'Four Character' Stories).

These are the kind of works that could only have been written by someone who, perhaps for the first time in his life, had to face real loneliness, and Hayashi must have known a fertile solitude that he had never known even in prison. Ironically, these works, which are marked by the curse of war, are nothing more than works built on the opulent gains of war and its recollections, and in the literary circles of the time, which glorified the traumas inflicted by war, they are considered abhorrent and heretical works.

In these short stories, Hayashi's technique, treatment of subject matter, and stylistic refinement show an unprecedented poise, and it is in these anti-chronological works that he seems to have come into his own as a writer for the first time. It is certain that the quiet time in which a man of action comes to know for the first time the meaning of his actions as he recounts his recollections, flowed through Mr Hayashi's mind when I first met him. But he did not stop there for long. Once again his "ideological" work begins. 'The Son's Youth' and 'The Son's Engagement,' which can be seen as one of the precursors of the post-war interim novels, are, despite their mundane appearance, "ideological" works in which he once again begins to narrate away from his intuition.

Having failed under normal circumstances, he became absorbed in the ideas of self-cultivation and calamity, and returned to the tradition of the boorish Meiji Enlightenment family novel and its discursive conversation. He began to depict the next era of 'Seinen' and 'Mature Years,' albeit in a different guise. The family novel was, in a sense, a novel of the age of "kaika" (opening up). Its tone was the tone of the opening of the country.

The idealised picture of an enlightened family, encompassing the difficulties of life immediately after the war, the elderly man's poverty, and many other elements that could be portrayed darkly, is simplified by his unchanging gestures towards "ideology." When the misfortunes of his personal life are taken into account, the humour of the novels is like a reproduction of the humour in the first part of the prison memoirs. What is even more tragic than in the first part of 'Prison Record' is that the humour no longer has the same affinity for the world, and in one symbolic incident, Ochi's mother has already died, so that even the humour is underpinned by a certain lonely deliberateness.

In these family novels, he is also gradually finding his once-lost enemy, and although his intuition clearly sees it, he fails to grasp it. Far from being devastating, his peculiar gestures once again drive him to make himself appear as an ally of this new foe. The enemy was an enemy more powerful against artists than the Thought Police of the past, namely the masses.

Perhaps one of the reasons why his youthful faith in the "innocent people" reared its head again in his post-war production of family fiction is due to the prejudices of the post-war literary world and the support of the new middle-class readers of his middle-class novels. The image of the poor, the people who arouse a writer's sense of justice, has been the rice chest of some writers for most of the post-war period, but Hayashi foresaw a new and different image of the people by the growing middle class as Japan's social and economic situation changed and developed.

It was indeed correct foresight to see that he had written a kind of moralistic novel, and that his trust in the people had enabled him to do so. But here, again, he finds the old-fashioned contradiction between intentions and results, and was heading in the direction of cultivating enemies for his own sake.

This image of a "cheerful little citizen" is the egg of the American vulgarity, the embryo of the conformist monster, Norman Mailer. He said, "We're being killed by motherfuckers" (Advertisement for Myself). In these family novels, he talks about freedom and courage, yet he unwittingly begins to conflate the ideas of conformity and happiness. After all, he does not believe in happiness. And in this case, ironically, it is synonymous with the fact that he did not, and still does not, believe in ideas.

3.

At the beginning of 'The Lost City,' scenario writer Kasahara's dazzling description of Luneta Square illuminated by the famous sunset over Manila Bay "as if stepping on a Persian carpet" is truly beautiful, indeed. This bizarre sunset is full of portents of the story to be told and symbolises all the life of those who live on the cusp of crisis.

The novel begins with suspense in the style of Mérimée suspense, and then takes the reader through the behaviour of the Catholic woman in the church of Intramoros, the encounter with the cheerful novelist Astoriano, the appearance of the eccentric young painter Dolorigues, and the mad party in the Astoriano household, all in a richness of tropical colours, a ferris wheel orgy of colour.

The scene is drawn to a close, and eventually all the compositions are reduced to a single point, revealing that Astoriano is in fact a captain in the guerrilla unit of the Filipino Independence Army, and that such colours and music were the guise of a patriotic secret society. In a moving finale, the human bond of trust between Kasahara and Astoriano is confirmed, but completely ineffective, leaving only a flash of trust like a bolt of lightning that instantly scatters between friend and foe, all ending in death and the mysterious sunset of Manila Bay again spreading wide and empty in the reader's mind.

"The world-famous Manila Bay sunset is not in the sky or clouds, but in the rays of light and the air. Moreover, this beautiful sight appears only two or three times a year, and today is that day." (Shinchō Bunko Edition)

I have seen Caribbean sunsets similar to this one. I know that only a lonely heart can see a sunset like this. It is no wonder that the sunset of 'The Lost City' gives the illusion of being far away in time and space, yet present in the here and now, far more distant than Mr Hayashi's post-war vision of wartime Manila Bay, for it is a vision of the recollection of his youth itself. This sunset is a return to his first motif, a return to the pure, fierce, and brutally beautiful youth who risked their lives for a political movement, a return to the motif of the 'Classical Letters.' Moreover, the youth of Annam had Japanese friends, and the characters in his early works were all like them, but in 'The Lost City,' Hayashi's former "innocent young man" takes the form of an aspirant of the independence movement who is an enemy of the Japanese army. He passes through various things, encountering who he used to be and who he was as an ally and enemy. Exchanging only the lightning bolts of mutual trust is not the unwritten subject of the unfinished 'Mature Years.'

4.

'Four Characters' (1949) is the best short story written by Hayashi. It is a portrait of the Minister of State of the Nanjing Government who committed suicide the day after the defeat. This politician, who once slaughtered hundreds of young Communist Party members, lived his days as a member of the Nanjing Government in heartfelt optimism and opulent revelry, and finally to "I."

The flat character of the word "Vulnerable" indicates that. "He was the only passenger on board, knowing the fate of the fragile luxury ship that was the Nanjing regime. He shared his fate with the ship. But there was no intention from the start to save the ship. As an eternal passenger, he did everything he could in luxury, unafraid of the heavens, until the very last moment. (omission) He was an apostle of nihilism and the most dangerous type of politician, who had at some point in time become an apostle of the heaven-fearing Demon Lord. He did not die in obedience to the will of heaven. He died arrogantly by his own hand."

"Learning I die - he who learns me dies."

Here Hayashi has written a truly romantic piece, reminiscent of Delacroix's 'Death of Sardanapalus.' Such a "dangerous politician" is exactly the kind of person who should have appeared in 'Mature Years.' A heart full of adolescent longing, a passionate political poem that thrives on illusions, and this final, world-encompassing nihilism.

I have already mentioned the apparent contradiction and inextricability of the inner reality of the Nanking government, but it is carefully concealed in the 'Four Characters' that a minister of the Nanking government probably had a period of fervour in his youth.

"It was here," the minister repeated. "I killed them. Two hundred ... two hundred and fifty. They were all young students. They said they were Communists, but I don't know how many of them were Communists. They were mowed down with machine guns. I had them killed. ...... Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm."

How such a laugh resembles a laugh of self-immolation more than a mere cruel laugh! How could such a laugh be produced if these two hundred young students were mere outsiders to him? If the two hundred young students had not been inside him!

It was not like the slaughter of the innocent morning glories in 'The Generosity of Warden R,' but the execution of criminals whom the Minister himself had inspected and carefully convicted - youth, zeal, loyalty to an idea - in short, everything that had once been "poetry" to him. When the Minister had realised that real power could not survive a single day without the slaughter of those mortals, that universal poetry and universal power were mutually incompatible, at the very same time he was awakened to the totality of all power. The pure poetry of political passion. If the pure poetry of political passion is immortality, then political power, which is essentially mortal, cannot tolerate the existence of immortal things. It must immediately knock down these immortal beings with its machine guns. The death of the immortal must be impressed on the populace.

His principle of action, then, is to despise his perception of knowing the essence of mortal and real power by actively participating in it. This is because the perception of the inherently delinquent is the tie that will forever bind him to the students he has killed. In other words, since this perception is what killed them, action must be in opposition to perception.

The minister's debauchery is thus the only expression of his behaviour, and he is farthest away from escapism. He does not believe in any ideals. He does not believe in any ideology. But he actually participates. This participation resembles a kind of renunciation, and in the days of drunkenness he painstakingly obliterates his justification and the universalisation of his principles of action.

The minister is stubbornly stuck at the point of disbelief in an ideology. He never moves a muscle in the face of the comprehensive nihilism of the world. He never ventures into the world of sentiments, and even laughs at his own sons, bestowing upon them the honours of a game of charades. Thus, he despises his own perception, distrusts thought, transforms idleness into action, and, moreover, sees such an extreme form of human existence as thought. Moreover, he resolutely rejects the temptation of the inner mind to generalise and universalise such an extreme form of human existence.

The "He who learns me dies" is in every sense a renunciation of universalisation, a nihilist's eye penetrating all corners of time and space, a prompting that does not allow the existence of one's own similitude. If he who has "learnt me" should try to live on earth, even for a moment, it would be a flaw in the world-inclusive nature of his nihilism. The world of the nihilist is not a place for the nihilist.

Perhaps here lies the culmination of Hayashi's Byronism, its ideal form. This is what Hayashi always dreamed of, but never achieved: "to embody thought."

It was only when he realised that he was a man of the world and gave up his impossible dream that he finally succeeded in his artistic creation. In the figure of the minister, everything he could not do is projected, and in the solitude of the post-war period, he finally fulfils the promise that all writers secretly make in their first works.

5.

As I mentioned earlier, I was not a good reader of his family novels. I waited for the day when he would return to his essential subject.

After his forced trip to Latin America and his illness, it seemed to me that he was gradually digesting what he had taken in from that wild climate and returning to his true world, a world of cheerfulness and despair, of frustrated passions, irritated reverie, and the gods of dead youth. He was a man of passion. He was absorbed in fishing and suddenly spoke of death in that insistent tone. I have never seen anyone other than a young man talk about death in such a tone.

Mr Hayashi's famous violent drinking habit had long since disappeared. Incredible as it may seem, after such a long association, I have yet to witness with my own eyes his drunken assaults.

His new wife has beautified the house and completed a magnificent garden over the valley. He has a grandson. When I was a young man, I often wrote long letters to Mr Hayashi with literary impressions that came to my mind. At the time, he said with a smile, "You won't have time to write such long letters anymore.".

The impression I felt could not possibly disappear forever. I spent a great deal of time ruminating on and digesting his problematics. This is a man who has walked clearly through the history of the Shōwa intellectuals' anxiety, agitation, and temporary certainty in the most openly, the most absurdly honest, and the most detrimental position. This is a man who has offended people by deliberately trampling on the feminine psychological complexities of the process. In fact, in some ways, no one has more blasphemed the sense of nuance that the world holds dear than Mr Hayashi.

When I told him that I could never tell whether something was good or bad, he smiled and said, "Never say never." He said, "You'll know when it's good or bad," but now he is very fussy about food. In this way, all of his predictions have come true.

However, I am not of the nature to gradually approach a spirit like his, become accustomed to it, and be dissolved by the ease of it and the human relations of others. Drama is immortal.

It seems to me that it would be negligent to talk about the intellectuals of the Shōwa period without clearly tracing Hayashi's trajectory and making a thread through it. It seems almost futile to discuss the fate of intellectuals in this turbulent era without considering Mr Hayashi. Mr Hayashi certainly has something that would make one think that way.

Once again, Mr Hayashi had given up his physical body and became visible to me only as an individual spirit. His private life was of no interest to me. I have already mentioned that he is a thoroughly non-confessional writer.

6.

In the New Year's issue of 'Shinchō' in the eighth year of Shōwa, I came across a short story by him. This novel, 'Mere Old Man,' like 'Seinen,' is the story of a man who returns to Japan. How many thousands of times must a Japanese writer return to Japan from birth to death? The Japanese archipelago is like a bow, constantly flicking Japanese people away and attracting them like a bird. The 'Mere Old Man' is the best and newest story of his return and we will never get tired of this kind of story. Twenty-eight years ago, the "mere old man" was forced to leave his village with his wife Yukie, who was from a Buraku community, and returned to see his dreaded village after becoming a successful leather merchant in South America.

Standing on the terrace of a hotel in Karuizawa, "In the depths of the midday haze, the village of our birth, the village that drove us out, is sinking." This is the familiar tone of Hayashi's example. The return of the exiled, the Japanese climate that is gentle on the outside but thorny on the inside, from which he is again and again rejected and to which he must return again and again. I think back to the thrilling return of the two young men in 'Seinen.' What made them return to Japan was the passion for reform. But the return of the "mere old man" was only to see the village filled with hateful memories one more time while he was still alive, pursued by the thought of his approaching death. In the past, he had fantasised about Monte Cristo-like revenge, "in the bitter cold of the foreign highlands and the miasma of the jungle," but "in hindsight, it would have been just a way of relieving the weariness of body and mind by fantasising."

"It was nothing more than the irrational sentiment of nostalgia that pulled me back, and nothing but the indescribable "feelings about Japan" that began to linger in the hearts of first-generation overseas residents. And only to "see." I had to have my facial skin replaced twice by plastic surgery due to a mine explosion and a car accident, and on top of that, "the barren Andes and the humid Amazon make me age two years a year," so no one would recognise "me" as still in my fifties."

Here is an old man whose age is unknown. A monster who is both an old man and a young man. Twice as old on the other side of the world, but still a young man in his twenties in his native Japan, he is the self-portrait of an intellectual who, at the end of his journey of ideological itinerancy, has had his face changed several times by plastic surgery, but is now returning to the rebellious feelings of a young man. Moreover, the dark, conservative Japan, full of the old, dark, and frightening traditions, is at the same time another name for youth. This irony is explained in detail in the second half of 'Mere Old Man.' "I don't trust the progressivism of the young. It is the young people in their thirties and forties who maintain the old bad habits of the village. They work too hard and are blind. They don't want to change anything."

"I" finally boarded a bus to the village, and among the passengers "I" recognised the face of an old enemy from thirty years ago. When he arrives at Changsho-ji Temple, he discovers that the boy playing the trumpet in the precincts of the temple is the grandson of the enemy. When the boy heard that "I" had returned from South America, his eyes glittered with longing. The boy blushes. “He is already taller than I am. There is an adolescent melancholy and rebellion in his clear eyes." This encounter is the most moving part of the 'Mere Old Man.' In the village of fearful causality, the "mere old man" once again encountered a boy who had once lived there.

"There is a boy just like me, and he is the grandson of my enemy. And no matter how many words I try, I cannot shatter the boy's longing."

Hayashi calls this the chain of longing, the chain of passions that he knows will be nullified anyway, the chain of intense "poetry" of the youth that not only flows from one generation to the next but also into the blood of the enemy army, as in 'The Lost City,' or into the blood of the enemy, as in 'Mere Old Man,' he sends forth a higher degree of lyricism. The "mere old man" is a man of high lyricism. There is something there that is linked to his idea of immortality, and only when this chain of poems is present do all wars cease and reconciliation and repose are brought forth. The boy, moreover, is exceptionally set up as a man who understands the old man in general.

He leads "I" to the village baseball game for old people, in which his grandfather's enemies are also participating. There is cold laughter and grotesque humour in this portrayal of the old man's baseball game, and its comical view is also "infused with the enlightened spirit of the old grand masters' play," all of which are emblematic of his self-satire.

Unfortunately, the structure of the novel 'Mere Old Man' becomes confused from this point onwards, and gradually loses its objectivity, causing the audience to lose interest. The reason for this is that 'Mere Old Man' has since then been trying to make the novel's dramatic structure into a one-man show. That is to say, from this point onwards, he even trampled on the dramatic structure of the novel.

The reader, who had been emotionally invested in "I" through the author, is now forced to listen to the words of his enemy, the old man, who is now the "mere old man.'

The reader, who had already empathised with "I" through the author, was now so emotionally invested in the words of the old enemy that he lost sight of the objective contours of the novel. The antagonist Jukichi Ohara sees right through "I" and tells of his plans to attend the funeral of a Buraku and presents his own progressive discourse. It almost corresponds to Hayashi's own view of the elderly, that when they were young they worked too much and had no time to think, that "for those who don't think, it is convenient to follow habits," and that they were stubborn conservatives.

"The old man must begin by not working," he said, asserting the legitimacy of the leisure and thought of the old, which naturally leads to the most rational and progressive thinking.

This is the reason why the old man must start by doing his job. I think this theory raises a lot of eyebrows. The "mere old man" is saying, "The old man is overworked, overworked!" Jukichi Ohara's tone is so imbued with Hayashi's own monologue that I feel as if I were in the presence of Hayashi's ever-changing youthful speech, the speech in which he pretends to believe what he wants to believe. What is being described here is only a paradoxical old man, and he does not confess to any of the physiology of old age.

Moreover, at the bottom of it all, there is still that abstract passion that could destroy a short story. This kind of passion, which is essentially directionless in whatever it is directed towards, neither grows nor wanes, and which can only be named his daemon, is rightly confessed. And just as in the past, it speaks in hushed tones, half knowing that people will not believe it, far from cleverness, irritated and impatient. This is not old age. He is not capable of ageing in the first place. "The future does not belong to the young. It belongs to the old. When he has the future, he will be an old man. Nothing could be more obvious."

He speaks of the world's darkest thoughts in the manner of a bright simplification, dares to plunge his bare hand into the abyss, and then seizes and shows what is unsatisfactory even to himself, what his own intuition will ultimately not accept. This is not what an old man does.

"I" who came to the hotel said to his wife,

"What happened to Jukichi Ohara?"

"He says he won't fight anymore, but he is fighting."

This is the most decisive line in which Mr Hayashi describes himself. How many times have I heard Mr Hayashi say "I will not fight anymore"? At that moment, knowing that he was already fighting, I knew nothing but to return a smile. It was Mr Hayashi's ingenuity that made youth a chronic illness for him. No matter how many times he was wounded, it was his secret wisdom of life that eventually protected his own chronic disease. In fact, the term "eternal youth" is used rather carelessly, but no one deserves it more than Hayashi. Probably no other "eternal youth" so clearly embodies the fate of modern Japan in this title than Mr Hayashi. Mr Hayashi is the kind of person who should most definitely do the "work of a young man."

Theory of Fusao Hayashi <First published> Shinchō, February 1963 <First published> "Theory of Fusao Hayashi", Shinchosha, August 1963