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Translated and annotated by Chia-ning Chang. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999. 508 pages, $50 (hardcover), $19.95 (paperback)
Kato Shuichi, who was born in 1919, is renowned in Japanese, French, and German literary circles and by Western japanologists as an essayist, playwright, poet, intellectual historian, and medical doctor. In one year, 1971, he wrote Form, Style, Tradition: Reflections on Japanese Art and Society, "Ein Beitrag zur Methodologie der japanischen Literaturgeschichte," Shi oyobi shijin (Poetry and Poets), Bungaku to wa nanika (What is literature: [new ed.]), and "Beichuu sekkin-kanso mittsu" (The U.S.-China rapprochement: three thoughts), among several other works. He was one of the founders of the literary group Matinee Poetique, in 1942, and later joined Kindai Bungaku (modern literature), a group that helped define postwar Japanese intellectual thought. Also a doctor, Kato worked in a Tokyo hospital during World War II. He traveled to France on a medical research fellowship in 1951 and stayed in Europe until 1955. During that time, he learned French and German, translated many of Sartre's works into Japanese, and published articles and essays on French and German literary and intellectual analysis.
His memoir traverses his many interests. He writes about his childhood, growing up the privileged son of a doctor whose family lost everything during the war. Like many gifted people, he felt awkward and out of place at school, yet developed close bonds with some of his teachers, particularly those who taught literature. While studying and then beginning to work in medicine, Kato cultivated his interest in literature and, at the age of eighteen, began to publish under the pseudonym Fujisawa Tadashi. Kato writes with fondness and excitement about literature and his close literary friends, such as Kubota Keisaku. He often mentions his feelings of alienation-at school, while on the faculty of the Tokyo Metropolitan Hospital, upon going to Europe in 1951, and upon returning to Japan in 1955. He also writes of his feelings of love for a woman he left in Japan when he went abroad and then a Viennese woman. Yet, little passion runs through the sections that deal with love and inner feelings. Perhaps this is because Kato is an analyst, a critic, and therefore examines his own life as if he were an outside, objective observer.
At times-when discussing the rise of Japanese nationalism in the 1930s or war, for instance -his writing is imbued with much more intensity. However, even with Kato's strong feelings about nationalism and war, he writes coldly about his experiences on a joint U.S.-Japan medical mission in Hiroshima immediately after the war. Although he must have seen terrible destruction during this mission, he writes little of his observations and thoughts on the bomb and his investigative role. Rather, he concentrates on describing the difficulty of communicating with his American counterparts during the trip.
Some of the most interesting chapters of the work deal with the years Kato spent living in France while he was on a medical research fellowship, in England where he devoted himself to writing and reading literature, and later in divided Berlin where he was a guest university lecturer. He discusses Western art, literature, and music and introduces us to some of the foremost intellectuals in these lands, with whom he has interacted and formed friendships. He writes of his conversations with the Flemish artist Frans Masereel and of his friendship with the French poet Ren¨¦ Arcos and his daughter. The way in which Kato attempts to make sense of the West, of Japan, and of himself through his living abroad comes through interestingly and clearly. He becomes infinitely aware of the differences between British practicality and French idealism, and sees that although he often leaves Japan and feels distant upon returning, he will always be Japanese.
Throughout the work, his interests in art, music, literature, and medicine mix with his personal experiences to form a context of intellectual analysis as well as introspection. His comparisons of Japan and the West are intrinsic to the work, and through them the reader can glean many insights. However, many topics are only touched on, and there are variations in style, from intense criticism to sadness to concentration in some parts on descriptive detail. It is best to take this work as it stands-the writings and thoughts of one very versatile man who does not succeed in attaining complete self-revelation and does not find all the answers to the world in the work. Rather, he ponders them in a way that the reader will find fascinating.
Rebecca Spyke Gardner, who has a Ph.D. in International Studies from the University of South Carolina and a Master of Science degree from the London School of Economics, is an International Programs Specialist with NASA.
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