Anri Yasuda’s Beauty Matters: Modern Japanese Literature and the Question of Aesthetics 1890-1930. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024
Of the three transcendentals of classical philosophy, which one has suffered, at the hands of modernity, as beauty has suffered? Immanuel Kant famously clipped the wings of the imagination, afraid that her fecundity should compromise the understanding. Taste, for Kant, was a corrective discipline; a harsh governess to the wayward pupil of individual genius. He develops, from this attitude, an ascetic aesthetics. Under the guise of giving beauty independence from the dictates of reason and social convention, beauty is pushed aside into the ethereal realm of art. Hegel, pushing beauty still further describes a growing rift of resentment between beauty and the understanding. Beauty is impoverished, lacking strength, and suffers in inactive isolation.
The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar reads the story of beauty, in the modern period, as the story of a neglected, orphaned transcendental. Abandoned by religion, and tacked on as mere afterthought by the philosophers, for whom beauty is reduced to the shallow play of appearances. The consequences of this abandonment are far reaching and severe, not for beauty alone, but for the good and the true, and even for being itself.
“In a world that no longer has the confidence to affirm the beautiful, the proofs of truth have lost their cogency. In other words, syllogism may still dutifully clatter away like rotary presses or computers which infallibly spew out an exact number of answers by the minute. But the logic of these answers is itself a mechanism which no longer captivates anyone.”1
Originally published in 1961, von Balthasar’s work shows a remarkable prescience with respect to contemporary conversations around artificial intelligence, consumerism, and the commodification of cultures. Condemned to a world of narrow self-interest our attention beings to wane and falter, because we have not cultivated an appreciation for beauty and, in the end, beauty matters.
Beauty Matters, by Anri Yasuda, is an exploration of the importance of aesthetics in a particularly bounded portion of the modern period, namely Japanese literature from 1890-1930. The definitive bracketing of a time period in the book’s subtitle gives it an elegiac quality, as though Yasuda were writing the obituary for Beauty, or, perhaps more accurately, the obituary for modern Japanese literature. In a sense this is precisely what she is doing; following Karatani Kõjin’s pronouncement of the end of modern literature, Yasuda eulogizes.
Like all such endeavours, however, the purpose of her reflection is not merely to consign literary efforts to the dustbin of history, but instead to celebrate its achievements and to ask what literature, and aesthetics, are still able to accomplish going forwards.
The state of literature as an academic discipline is not looking good. Enrolment in the humanities is down, and we are seeing a generation of people with “less education in the human past than ever before.” Yasuda argues that the “cultural shift in how we perceive humanities skills as abstract or impractical in an era ruled by quanitifiable rigour” demands that we take a good look at “literature’s unique contributions to our continued, species-wide quest to understand what it means to be human.”2
“Well, I’m living in a foreign country, but I’m bound to cross the line. Beauty walks a razor’s edge, someday I’ll make it mine. If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born. Come in, she said, I’ll give ya, shelter from the storm.”3
The past, they say, is a foreign country, and literature, with its peculiar geographies of the imaginations is doubly so, making the subject matter of Japanese literature in the early 1900s a landscape thrice estranged from me, and yet, in its aspiration to communicate something of universal importance it necessarily crosses boundaries. Yasuda is an able guide, willing to buck the trends of reading Japanese literature strictly along the lines of its varied responses to social and ideological contextualization. This type of categorization, she will argue, misses the incredible imaginative and aesthetic power of literature. Yasuda hopes to open up a richer discussion of the literary episteme of late Meiji and Taishõ Japan which moves beyond the narrowly subjective realism of Naturalism.
“[S]erious meditiations on beauty entail reflections about one’s navigation of the world as it apparently is alongside one’s imaginations of how it could otherwise be, and… such lines of thought often exceed the insularity that purportedly dominated the literary episteme of late Meiji and Taishõ Japan.”4
Modern Japanese literature arises out of a grappling with Western art. Yasuda follows Karatani Kõjin’s analysis of the turn to psychic interiority in late Meiji literature as a result of Japanese authors considering the conventions of Western landscape paintings. The paintings are based on the idea that there is a fixed agent who observes the world. A cohesive self is born, or created, and this gives rise to the I-novel. The razor’s edge of literature, at least for the authors that Yasuda examines, however, is that literature is ‘a simultaneously aesthetic and critical endeavour.”5 Already in 1919 Akutagawa Ryūnosuke is able to outline a literary landscape which identifies the limitations of a narrowly subjective realism overwhelmed with the painstaking and unglamorous details of quotidian life. For Akutagawa the literary landscape follows the categories of the three transcendentals with the Naturalists rallying around Truth, the Aestheticism group around Beauty, and an emphasis on Virtue emerging with Mushanokõji Saneatsu.
Yasuda’s work, at least in part, is to follow Akutagawa in his analysis of the literary situation in modern Japanese literature, and particularly in his own break and grappling with what was called “Naturalism” which often exhibited a flat writing style which “downplayed the mediating qualities of language as a narrative medium.”6 Akutagawa himself, of course, had a literary history, as did the various responses to the Naturalist school of writing, some of whom predated the codification of Naturalism as a literary movement in Japan.
The figures that Yasuda chooses to examine are iconic Japanese authors. Natsumi Soseki, Mori Ogai, Mushanokõji and the Shirikaba, and, of course, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. In each instance she is looking at these authors in terms of their aesthetic sensibilities where beauty is both an expression of intrinsic subjectivity and a conduit for communing with others. The contours of beauty are still basically Kantian in orientation – a disinterested interest. Or, as Yasuda will come to see it an affective quality that “moves us in a certain way.” Beauty does not motivate a crass desire for possession, but rather has the power to impact the way one navigates reality.
For Soseki, this takes the form of a quest for a “feeling of beauty,” in a world which often seemed to harshly oppose such an affection. For Ogai, the “inner flame of beauty” offers a light by which to clarify misconceptions and harmonize Japanese and foreign philosophies and cultural paradigms. For Mushanokõji and the Shirikaba writers the love of art inspired a desire to change the world. For Akutagawa the literary allowed for a greater range of experience than ordinary, everyday life permitted, and formed an cornerstone of his admittedly fraught intellectual life.
Each of these authors wavers, throughout their careers, in their estimation of what exactly art is capable of accomplishing, but the contemplation of beauty always remains central to the project. It is a project of understanding what it means to be human, what it means to be Japanese, and of the interplay between Western aesthetic form in the fine arts and Japanese literary practice and identity.
It is often said that art imitates life, or that life imitates art, but in this particular telling of the story it is also a matter of art imitating art – and of artists wrestling with different ways of perceiving the world which challenge their experiences, and experience which challenge their artistic perspectives, sometimes, as in the case of Akutagawa, beyond what they are able to handle.
Yasuda therefore includes various pictures of paintings and sculptures alongside her analysis of key texts and biographical descriptions of the authors. Her work, in line with the vision of the authors whom she examines, is intended not simply to give an outline of a few key modern Japanese authors, although she certainly does provide a good introduction for anyone interested in the works of Soseki, Ogai, Shaneatsu and Akutagawa among others. However, her vision is broader seeking to make a compelling case that even in the midst of our highly commercialized and mechanized world that art is still capable of doing something, and that beauty matters.
The Mourning Cloak 
What do you think? Leave a comment below..