Kuki Shūzō: A Philosopher's Poetry and Poetics

by Kuki Shūzō (Editor), Michael F. Marra (Editor)

Kuki Shûzô (1888–1941), one of Japan’s most original thinkers of the twentieth century, is best known for his interpretations of Western Continental philosophy. His works on and of poetry are less well known but equally illuminating. During his eight years studying in Europe in the 1920s, Kuki spent time in Paris, where he wrote several collections of poetry and many short poems in the tanka style.

Included in this volume are these Paris poems as well as other verses that Kuki appended to a long essay on poetry, "Rhymes in Japanese Poetry," written in 1931. Included as well are translations of two of Kuki’s major critical essays on poetry, "The Genealogy of A Guide to Poetry" (1938) and "The Metaphysics of Literature" (1940).

Michael Marra, one of the West’s foremost authorities on modern Japanese aesthetics, prefaces his translations with an important essay that gives an account of the current state of Kuki studies in English and presents an intriguing and original interpretation of Kuki’s writings. Marra argues that there is an unresolved tension in Kuki’s thought between a desire to overcome the rigid schemes of metaphysics, garnered from his knowledge of French and German philosophy, on the one hand, and a constant hesitation to let those schemes go, which is expressed in his verse.

Genres: Philosophy, Japanese Literature, Japan

376 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2004

About the author

Shūzō Kuki (九鬼 周造 Kuki Shūzō) was a prominent Japanese academic, philosopher and university professor.

He was the fourth child of Baron Kuki Ryūichi (九鬼 隆) a high bureaucrat in the Meiji Ministry for Culture and Education (Monbushō). At age 23 in 1911 (Meiji 44), Kuki converted to Catholicism; and he was baptized in Tokyo as Franciscus Assisiensis Kuki Shūzō. The idealism and introspection implied by this decision were early evidence of issues which would have resonance in the characteristic mindset of the mature man.

A graduate in philosophy of Tokyo Imperial University, Kuki spent eight years in Europe to polish his knowledge of languages and deepen his already significant studies of contemporary Western thought. At the University of Heidelberg, he studied under the neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert, and he engaged Eugen Herrigel as a tutor. At the University of Paris, he was impressed by the work of Henri Bergson, whom he came to know personally; and he engaged the young Jean-Paul Sartre as a French tutor. It is little known outside Japan that it has been claimed that Kuki influenced Sartre to develop an interest in Husserl and his student Heidegger's philosophical approach. Sartre's actual engagement with Husserl's phenomenology however began several years later, dating to a remark by Raymond Aron in a coffee shop discussion in 1932.