A Revered Teacher and His Times, Part 3

English translation

AI-assisted English translation. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

AI-assisted English translation. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

Originally published: 2021-03-08

This material was published on the Japanese website. Dates and notices in the text reflect the original publication.

In memory of Takao Suzuki, Professor Emeritus of Keio University and adviser to this Society

A Revered Teacher and His Times

3. Knowledge Has Value Only When Brought to Life

(1) Surrounded by Intellectuals

Professor Suzuki was very different from the other professors.

Perhaps one should call him a “walking treasure house of knowledge.”

In class I was astonished that he knew even such things. But when I looked at the sources of his knowledge, Keio had many such treasure houses. Why did knowledge pour out so readily, one thing after another, during a lecture? Before marveling at the structure of his brain, I became interested in the process of retrieving knowledge. Some classmates tended to explain away their frustration at being unable to keep up as a question of inborn superiority: his mind was simply built differently from ours. But I thought that was not right.

Professor 由良君美's lectures on the difference between T. S. Eliot's perfect critic and imperfect critic were lucid too. I liked his way of developing an argument, and since his method of analysis resembled my own, I felt that I too could interpret Eliot's appeal as well as he did. In brief, the series of knowledge produced by combining cause & effect with key word had a necessary sequence and was easy to understand.

Analyzing Professor Suzuki's thought processes in that light, one saw them branch out from linguistic interpretations of words and phrases into politics, society, culture, history and international relations. From language to other fields: they flew without limit. In academic terminology this could be described by the jargon inter-disciplinary, not yet widely known at the time. Expounding language through this method connects it not only to literature, with which language is closely related, but also to sociology and philosophical dialectics. Expand the field of inquiry further and one can trace it into politics and economics, the natural world and the whole universe of things. Naturally, one can also bring different sets of data together and extend these relationships into richly varied configurations.

In other words, Suzuki's method draws out points related to a single proposition. Once their great interest becomes apparent, they lead from one to another in a kind of rhythm, setting off a chain reaction. Thought becomes three-dimensional. The apparent inexhaustibility of that formation was a pleasure to the listener.

On the other hand, professors who might seem at the opposite pole—白井浩二 in French literature, 奥野慎太郎 in Chinese literature, and 西脇順三郎 and 厨川文夫 in English literature—can be understood in terms of differences in the accumulation of specialized expertise rather than the quantity of knowledge. To draw out their essence, reading original texts was indispensable, quiet work that took time. In seminars, continued application allowed the information they gave us to mature.

Perhaps scholarship is, after all, methodology.

Before I knew it, a professor would ask, “Shall we go and have lunch…?” More and more teachers did so, until sharing meals with them became ordinary. Professor 池田弥三郎 often took me to an anmitsu shop down an alley, immediately to the right after leaving the 幻の門. Lively discussion: a lecture on the Manyoshu in an anmitsu shop. Edo literature came up too. One-to-one, I heard many sophisticated little tales.

Professor 白井浩司, the Sartre specialist, was always extremely busy translating. Keio had little money then, and his office even had to serve as the office of 『三田文学』. I discussed Sartre with graduate students in French literature, participating as a Keio student rather than simply a student in the English department. The only way to make up gaps in my knowledge was to read more. As soon as I returned to my lodgings I reread the work we had discussed, and the next day joined the conversation with its keywords and facts lodged in my head.

Professor 大橋吉之輔 specialized in American literature. Unlike the public, among whom Hemingway and Steinbeck were then fashionable, he was not drawn to the glittering Lost Generation, but instead interested in Anderson's depictions of life in the rustic small towns of the American Midwest. His personality responded warmly to the human relationships depicted in the novel 『貧乏白人』 and the short-story collection 『ワインズバーグ・オハイオ』.

I compared the Beat Generation then rising on the West Coast with the Lost Generation of the 1920s Jazz Age, comprehensively investigating the writers in both groups and writing a comparative account of their philosophies of life in English. It became as thick as a doctoral dissertation. I submitted it, but Professor 大橋 apparently did not like it. I still remember his complaint that it was an inappropriate sort of paper for an undergraduate.

My four undergraduate years passed in a flash in this way. After graduation, I became an English teacher at 桐朋高校, a school preparing pupils for university entrance in Kunitachi, Tokyo.

(2) Deduction within Suzuki's System of Knowledge

Professor Suzuki's system of knowledge remained fascinating and unforgettable. It was interesting—but being interesting alone does not make a method of deduction. To use it as a way of studying, one must follow its deductive process. I had my own theory of English grammar and published it through the dictionary company 研究社. Yet it did not become a work substantial enough to break free of the domain of Western grammarians. I did not continue down the grammatical path, but returned to literature, reading Maugham's novels one after another, racing through such novels as 『月と六ペンス』 and 『人間の絆』 and his South Seas stories. I read in Maugham's frame of mind, wondering whether human beings could really be so base, then went to a classroom full of pupils intent on entrance examinations. I doubt my lessons were much good.

It was a period of stagnation. I missed Professor Suzuki's and Professor 由良's classrooms, and sometimes immersed myself in drink. But that self-indulgence eventually subsided. I felt moved to reread Suzuki's cultural essays, recovered my footing and began working seriously toward studying in America.

When I incorporated this as a principle into my method of debate and rebuilt it, each terminal of a system of knowledge such as Suzuki's could extend a connector ready to link A → A′ → A″. If one understood this approach and developed it, it should prove exhilarating to use. I devoted it to criticism in Eliot's manner, reading new American literary works one after another and publishing in literary journals.

Associate Professor 池田弥三郎's method of studying Japanese literature was empirical. In his readings of the Manyoshu, one could feel the emotion of someone who, like 芭蕉, had walked the actual places and experienced them. Naturally, he could lecture in a way that gave listeners a vivid sense of reality. This influenced me too. To understand the early American struggle for independence, I walked all over Boston's freedom trail, visiting even the East India Company's office and the post where Paul Revere tied his horse. I traveled by train to Lexington and Concord, going so far as to put my fingers into bullet holes made in the fighting between British regulars and American militia. My lectures gained force, and I could use the data I presented at those moments vividly.

Around then I was a member of 『新日本文学』 in Nakano, taking part in a fairly progressive literary movement with 野間宏, 佐多稲子 and 中野重治. At the same time, my work was serialized in 中央公論's 『海』, 文春's 『文學界』 and 研究社's 『英語青年』. I became a full-time lecturer at Tsurumi University and, a few years later, was recommended for a faculty position at Tohoku University.

I had missed the opportunity to enter graduate school and earn a doctorate through a dissertation in English. But one major reason for the invitation to Tohoku was the esteem in which my translation of the difficult, 450-page work Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman, written by a psychoanalyst, was held after it was found to contain almost no mistranslations.

This was not some paltry technique for obtaining a university position. Immersing myself in Percy's kind of psychoanalysis as I read, I became a psychoanalyst myself. It was only because I was devoted to psychoanalysis and psychology, beginning with the then-fashionable Freud, that I could undertake the work.¹ Eight hundred manuscript pages in all. The pages I was carried along into producing were no burden. I read with interest, interpreted in Suzuki's manner and translated into language that any reader could find convincing. It was a volume I completed with considerable enjoyment after teaching entrance-examination English at high school.

Takao Suzuki reconsidered America from a Japanese viewpoint. After graduation, while teaching high school, I labored with the professors at the University of Tokyo's Komaba campus to construct the vertical and horizontal axes of a new field, “American studies.” Professors 斎藤光, 斎藤眞, 久保田きぬ子 and 本間長世 were all still alive then, and their enthusiasm for research was exceptionally vigorous. Through the bodies of knowledge I gained there, I too became someone with a little to say.

It was a few years later that I became an associate professor at Tohoku. In the meantime, I was often invited by the “American Literature Society,” whose monthly meetings were thriving, to serve as a symposium panelist. I wrote prolifically in monthly literary journals such as 『海』, 『新日文』 and 『三田文学』. With the still-young 亀井俊介 and myself among those involved, we built American studies on three elements: history, ethnicity and immigration, introducing them into the literary world too. At first glance, this might appear to have produced a system of knowledge quite far removed from Suzuki's theory. But I think he felt that this was all right in its own way.

In later years I published book after book, drawing on the abundant information I received at the American Cultural Center and on the American studies built within the “American Studies Society” born at Komaba. Although my perspectives differed from Suzuki's, our exchanges on history fitted together interestingly. Perhaps the difference was for the best: I feel that I became closer to him still.

(3) Suzuki's Research Method during My Years in America

I was about thirty-five and an associate professor at Tohoku when, while teaching postmodern American literature to graduate students at the State University of New York at Buffalo, I was invited to lecture at a nearby high school. Near the end I said, “We read Shakespeare in Japan too—in graduate school.” The pupils looked puzzled.

Concerned by their reaction, I asked the teacher who had invited me after the lecture. “In America we read Hamlet and Macbeth in high-school textbooks. Here, this one,” he said, dropping a thick volume into my hands. Astonishingly, these were not extracts. They read the whole work without skipping to the end, one play in two weeks. Does the Japanese approach of closely reading a small amount really lead to ability? Every part of Suzuki's enormous stock of knowledge was alive and active. What ability, then, comes from the precise but small amount of knowledge cultivated for university entrance examinations?

Knowledge is an immense system. With the method of memorizing every word and scoring a hundred, one cannot possibly become even the humblest intellectual.

In the end, it was good that I kept up what might be called “literary debate,” desperately reading and hammering things into my head in preparation for tomorrow's spark or topic, so that I could retrieve them immediately whatever arose. The self-training I began as a student bore fruit. Take, for example, Takao Suzuki's 『鈴木孝夫の世界』, Volume 3 (冨山房, 2012), and this becomes clear.

With the books Professor Suzuki gave me before me, I reflect anew on what a precious experience it was to study in the English department of Keio University's Faculty of Letters. Thank you, Professor Suzuki. All the teachers who appear in this memoir have now departed this world. Thank you, everyone. I too will soon set out for the land of the dead, but I still want to keep striving. Please watch over me with eyes that challenge and encourage. (End)

1. Translation note: the source uses 「聖心分析」 in this passage alongside references to psychoanalysis. It is rendered according to that explicit surrounding context. The source's differing spellings 白井浩二 and 白井浩司 have both been retained in their respective places.