My favorite novel is Journey to the West. I don’t think there is a more masterful text for metaphor and simile as that novel. John Bunyan’s Everyman can’t even compare. Another favorite book of mine is a Chinese novel, The Water Margin, which I still read from time to time. At one time, I knew the names of all one hundred and eight heroes in The Water Margin by heart.
Even before I entered junior high school, I found The Water Margin and Journey to the West far more interesting than Oshikawa Shunrō’s adventure novels or anything like that. I was an avid reader of Tokutomi Roka’s Nature and Man, Takayama Chogyū’s Thoughts on the Heike and Kojima Usui’s Japanese Landscape Theory.
At the same time, I was an avid reader of Sōseki Natsume’s I am a Cat, Izumi Kyōka's Elegance of Cotton, and Saito Ryokuu’s Shaken Sake. So I’m hardly in a position to make fun of anyone else’s taste. There was a time when I was into Leo Tolstoy, Tsubōchi Shōyō, and Oumachi Keigetsu, as I’ve previously described in the Young Writers’ Records in the Bunsho Club magazine.
After graduating from junior high school, I read many books, but I didn’t have any that I particularly loved. In general, I liked the gorgeously written novels of authors such as Oscar Wilde and Théophile Gautier. This may have been due to my temperament, but I think one reason that I liked them was that I was tired of Japanese naturalistic novels. Around the time I graduated from high school, my tastes and outlook on things underwent a major change, and I came to dislike Wilde and Gautier. It was around this time that I became interested in August Strindberg and others of that sort. At the time, I thought that all art that did not have the power of Michelangelo seemed like rubble. I think this was probably due to the influence of Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe, which I read contemporaneously with this attitude.
This feeling continued even after I graduated from university, but gradually my burning worship of power faded, and a year ago I began to be most drawn to books that have a quiet, powerful quality. I am not particularly interested in books that lack power, even if they are quietly executed. In this respect, novels by Stendhal, Prosper Mérimée, and Japanese authors such as Ihara Saikaku are interesting and useful books for me now. I should add that I recently took out Jean-Christophe and read it, but it did not excite me as much as it had in the past. I wondered if the books I read from that time were no good, but when I took out Anna Karenina and read a few chapters, I felt grateful like I did in the old days.
First published in Bunsho Club, Year 5, Issue 8
Issued on August 1, 1920
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