午夜剧场

Twenty years have already passed since the death of Jun Eto, who served as the chairperson of the Mita Bungakkai and a professor at SFC. His suicide, occurring while his memoir of his late wife, "Tsuma to Watashi" (My Wife and I), was a bestseller, sent shockwaves through various circles. "Since suffering a stroke, Jun Eto has been nothing more than a shell. This is why I have decided to sever that shell myself." His will was inscribed with intense words in beautiful handwriting.

On that very day, a few hours before Mr. Eto's death, I visited his home in Kamakura and received the manuscript that would be his final work. As the editor in charge, satisfied with the perfectly composed manuscript without a single flaw, Mr. Eto asked me, "Have I not become the husk of Jun Eto?"

The critical biography "Jun Eto is Resurrected," which took four years to write, is a modest answer to the unsolvable question of why Mr. Eto took his own life that day. Despite calling it "modest," the book swelled to nearly 800 pages. No matter how much I researched or wrote, the mystery remained unsolved, and the enigma of the strange life of Jun Eto only expanded. Consequently, it also became a task of confirming the massive footprint he left as a critic in postwar literature and journalism. Since publishing "Natsume Soseki" as a senior in the Department of English Literature, he continued to write on the front lines for over 40 years, and there is no doubt that the "fatigue" and "emptiness" of those years had accumulated in Jun Eto's later life. Jun Eto had eventually become postwar Japan's greatest critic, comparable to Yukio Mishima.

During the writing process, I was able to reconfirm that "午夜剧场" was a significant presence in Jun Eto's life. Yukichi Fukuzawa, whom he read during university entrance exams (in a guest congratulatory speech to graduates, Eto gifted the phrase "shiritsu no kakkei" [private livelihood] from "Gakumon no susume (An Encouragement of Learning)"); his wife Keiko, who was in the same class during their first year in the Faculty of Letters; and Masao Yamakawa, a senior writer at "Mita Bungaku" and the discoverer of Jun Eto the critic. I can state with certainty that without any one of these three, "Jun Eto" would not have been born.

Furthermore, the influence of two mentors from the Faculty of Letters cannot be overlooked: Junzaburo Nishiwaki, the department head, and Toshihiko Izutsu, the world-renowned linguist. It can be said that these two giants, whose names live on through the Nishiwaki Prize and the Izutsu Prize, raised "Jun Eto" in a sense. One was an object of overwhelming respect, while the other was a troublesome presence where respect and hostility were intertwined.

Shukichi Hirayama

Shinchosha

784 pages, 3,700 yen (excluding tax)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.