[Special Feature: A New Theory of Reading] "My Own Classics": An Eccentric Pleasure / Yutaka Yukawa

What is a classic? A strange incident forced me to seriously consider this theme, which for me felt somewhat presumptuous.

After retiring from a publishing house, someone recommended that I teach at a university's department of creative writing, and it happened there. I was surprised by how little the students read, and on one occasion, I muttered in the classroom, "You really don't read the classics, do you?" I was still inexperienced as a teacher.

At that moment, an energetic male student stood up straight and asked, "Professor, what is a classic?" Since I had only muttered it unconsciously, I was at a loss for an answer. Come to think of it, what is a classic? In terms of literature, one could give a dictionary-style definition—works that people have modeled themselves after and continued to love over many years—but the fundamental question remained: what is a classic to me personally? I managed to gloss over it at the time, but the question remained stuck in my mind.

The reason it turned out that way was undoubtedly because, even if I tried to define a classic like a dictionary, I felt that I myself hadn't read many classical works, so I wasn't in a position to lecture the students.

It flashed through my mind for a second that, in terms of not reading the classics, I wasn't much different from the students who thought light novels for young people were literature. To confirm this later, I went to the library and looked again at things like the Chikumashobo edition of the "Complete Collection of World Classical Literature." Even when measured against that collection starting with Homer, my own volume of classical reading was truly meager.

On the other hand, regarding the classics of Japanese literature, I had an experience in high school where I rebelled against my "Classics" teacher, started skipping class, and was threatened with failure. That class covered a portion of "The Tale of Genji," and as a result, I turned my back on "Genji" for a long time. It was only after I had been working at a publishing house for a while that I finally felt ready to face this great classic.

"Genji" is well and good, but looking at the lineup of the Iwanami Shoten edition of the "Compendium of Japanese Classical Literature" now, I haven't read any of the Chinese poetry that highlights the literature of the Edo period, nor the vast amount of essays. In other words, I have to admit that my "classics complex" continues even with Japanese literature.

Under such circumstances, I really should not have accepted this assignment to talk about "my own classics." I was aware of that, but there was one thing I had been thinking about regarding the classics, and I wanted to try asking about it.

It is the matter of the "fluctuation" of the classics.

For example, Mori Ogai and Natsume Soseki used to be included in the "Complete Collection of Modern Japanese Literature." Literary works from the Meiji era onward were categorized under the framework of "modern" and were not considered classics. Somewhere along the line, that shifted, and now there is a sense that not only Ogai and Soseki, but even Junichiro Tanizaki and Naoya Shiga are being called classics. Even if a classic is, as defined earlier, "a work that people have modeled themselves after over many years," it seems that those "many years" have somehow become shorter. Accordingly, the classics have transcended the framework of time.

How to think about this or how to evaluate it is not necessarily a simple matter.

For instance, if we were to call representative works born in early 20th-century Europe, such as Joyce's "Ulysses" or Proust's "In Search of Lost Time," the "classics of the 20th century," one cannot help but feel that it fits quite well. Behind this must be the enormous influence these two works have had on world literature as a whole. If so, it can be considered a natural progression for the existence of a classic to transcend the framework of time.

Given such a situation, it seems possible to ignore the "classics" as positioned by works like literary histories written by university professors, and instead place the question of what a classic is to oneself at the center of one's thinking. Well, the reason I think this is also because, at my age, I no longer have the time to read everything listed in the old collections of classical literature. Perhaps it is permissible to honestly (and privately) recognize what one's own classics were or are, and to reread them or read related books.

Placing Tanizaki's "The Arrowroot" next to "The Tale of Genji," or Shohei Ooka's "Lady Musashino" next to Stendhal's "The Red and the Black," and taking an eccentric stroll through the classics that no one else is likely to empathize with—that is not without its pleasures.