Spring Dream (4)
75.
Nasida asked me about the “empty space.”
I thought it was an interesting question.
It was a point I had never once stopped to consider, and that alone made me curious. Criticism, by nature, is written rationally and consciously.
Even when emotion enters the work, it has to be built on a rational foundation.
That was because criticism was, at its core, an act of persuasion. But a writer was different.
Not only did a writer have to balance emotion and reason, but sometimes they filled in what reason lacked with feeling.
And that feeling itself could become persuasive. The problem was that feeling usually came from the writer’s unconscious.
Like Nasida’s own desire to rise higher.
That was why, when a writer became aware of their unconscious, they sometimes lost their sense of feeling.
Emotion that had been consciously calculated into the text looked artificial. So I found the whole thing fascinating.
The more a critic knew about themselves, the deeper their writing became, but a writer might actually lose something instead. If that was true, then how should I answer this question?
I had no obligation to answer at all.
And yet I wanted to tell Nasida.
After all, I was the one who had dug up his unconscious—albeit not on purpose. I quietly looked out at the view beyond the hotel window.
Cars and people passing by without a care in the world.
I let my eyes follow the flow of movement and gathered my thoughts. “This is how I see it,” I said, and Nasida focused on me. “Every writer has a temperament. Some write with a very cold intellect. But others write by feeding on emotion and the unconscious. In your case, writer, you’re the latter.”
At first he furrowed his brow, but then he nodded. “I hate to admit it, but that’s true. Funny, isn’t it? People think if you write mystery, then you must be writing rationally.”
“Mystery is rational. It has to be rational.” I smiled faintly. “But the atmosphere underneath it, the symbols, that sort of thing—that’s different. I don’t think you calculated those parts too deeply as you wrote them. But because you had such a distinct feeling of your own, the work developed that unique atmosphere and was loved for it.”
“...I think so too. When I write something that isn’t mystery, I try to loosen up.”
“It’s hard to say which side is right. If anything, once you find the method that suits you as a writer, that becomes the right answer. In any case, if you write by relying on emotion and the unconscious, then the empty space will affect you.”
“...I see.”
I could have told him it would be fine, but that would have been a lie. When he heard the answer for real, he looked somewhat devastated.
And as if he were asking me, Then what am I supposed to do? I could read it in his eyes.
Nasida was clearly someone driven by desire.
He wanted to be an outstanding writer. He had the desire to rise.
“My answer may not be the right one, so just take it as something to think about. When I read your work...” I recalled Nasida’s novels.
Countless Japanese words floating through the text.
Behind those words, a wavering violet aura. The color of that aura was not simple.
It was subtle, dark, and above all, deep.
It was too much to sum up with a single phrase like desire to rise.
“I think your unconscious is probably deeper than that.”
“!”
“There’s something even deeper down. Something far more intense and fundamental than what I found. Maybe it’s a dimension that can’t even be expressed in language.” And I thought that was Nasida’s real weapon.
A weapon most writers simply did not have.
“I obviously don’t know what it is, and neither do you. If you knew, it wouldn’t be the unconscious. But it’ll show itself when you write. In one way or another.”
“...”
“So trust that unconscious and keep writing. Freely. That’s the only thing I can tell you.”
This time, Nasida fell quiet in thought.
Then he slowly nodded. “I think I understand. You mean I have to trust myself in the end.”
“Well, it sounds a little like an advertising slogan, but yes. Put simply, that’s what I mean.” I didn’t know how he heard it, but I had meant it sincerely.
It was the first time I had ever told a writer what I really thought at this length.
And personally, I liked him, so I genuinely wanted him to get through this crisis—if crisis was even the right word.
Nasida tapped the rim of his teacup with his fingertips. “Writers are weaker creatures than they look. We live off other people’s evaluations, so we’re easy to sway, but at the same time our self-consciousness swells far too large.” Then he said, “Maybe I came here because I wanted to hear that. That I should trust myself and keep writing.”
“...”
“Meeting a critic like you, someone who says that kind of thing, is a stroke of luck.” Nasida gave a crooked smile.
I thought his attitude was admirable.
If he had really been a weak writer, he might have challenged me for writing that critique at all.
But he took the experience and claimed it as his own luck.
We talked about many other things after that.
Then, as if something had just occurred to him, he said, “By the way, I heard you’re doing something interesting?”
“Something interesting?”
“Yes. I heard you’re doing a reinterpretation of Spring Dream.”
“Ah—yes, that’s how it turned out. It was something I’d intended to post on [Pyeon], but First Printing offered me a spread.”
“Hmm...” Nasida said carefully. “Spring Dream is also a matter of Japanese pride. If you’re not careful, there could be a strong backlash, so I’m a little worried.”
“It’ll be fine. I’m Korean, after all. If people turn on me, I can just catch a plane and go home.” I wasn’t afraid of people’s reactions.
Especially not if their response came from patriotism or national pride—feelings that had nothing to do with the work itself.
And privately, I had become curious.
How would Nasida read my criticism?
“Would you like to see it? As a Japanese reader, or... as a junior to Writer Kazuma.”
“What? You mean you’ve already finished the manuscript?”
“I finished it yesterday before dawn.” There was no reason to hesitate.
Nasida’s eyes lit up. “I want to see it. Show me.”
“Just a moment. I wrote it by hand and took photos of the pages....”
I pulled up the photos saved on my phone.
When I held the phone out to him, Nasida looked a little stunned. “Honestly, if you’re going to do it like that, you might as well just write it on a laptop...”
“For now, handwriting is still more comfortable.” Nasida enlarged the photo and began reading the critique.
And I, too, recalled the manuscript from last night exactly as it sat in my head.
My critique began like this. It is warm. Just as though it followed directly from the final line of Spring Dream.
There is no need to explain what comfort those few words brought to the people of the postwar era. This is a matter that must be acknowledged regardless of the author’s nationality or the nationality of anyone reading this essay. One cannot simply claim that what happened never happened. As citizens of a defeated nation, the Japanese fixated on that line in Spring Dream, poured all their attention into it, and analyzed it with every fiber of their being. And in doing so, they found solace, recovered their sense of humanity, and drew strength.
The important thing comes next. And then time passed. No—an era and a generation changed.
I was not going to speak from the emotional outlook of the postwar period, but from that of the present.
It was time to look at Spring Dream not through a microscope, but through a telescope. Within the full context of Spring Dream, how exactly does “It is warm” function? And is it really... warm?
The real critique began there. In Spring Dream, this description of warmth is repeated exactly twice. One is the final line we all know so well. The other is the moment the woman is embraced by the arms of a man she does not love. Later, she will become his wife, and she will come to depend on him completely. As we know, the woman’s resigned, dependent, and even defeatist attitude so clearly reflects the nihilism of postwar Japan.
And though this may be a painful thing for some to hear, the “warmth” of the final line is almost identically nihilistic to the earlier “warmth.”
Nasida’s brow tightened.
It seemed he had just read the part I had been thinking of.
Let us examine the nature of this warmth. It is also the comfort one feels when one places oneself entirely in another’s hands. In other words, the ease of one who does not bear responsibility. In that sense, the man’s words—“I will take responsibility for you and love you”—can be said to have perfectly fulfilled what the woman desired.
I pointed out the woman’s dependent attitude throughout the work.
The defeatist streak hidden beneath that passionate prose.
But what I had wanted to say was not that Spring Dream had therefore been overrated.
Spring Dream was still an outstanding work, and the author had deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Japanese could be proud to have had a writer like Kazuma.
Only, the greatness of Spring Dream that I had discovered was entirely different from that of the scholars before me.
And to prove that, we need to talk about the author. It was necessary to trace the life of Kazuma himself.
For this, I had gone through all sorts of materials the previous night.
Kazuma was unable to serve in the military because of his frail body and severe depression. Of course, the many diaries he left behind clearly reveal antiwar sentiment, so he likely neither approved of his country’s war of aggression nor wished to take part in it.
But his feelings toward the ordinary young men who were conscripted were surely different. He felt a debt toward those who were dragged to the front simply because they were healthy, regardless of their own will, and this too is clearly reflected in his diaries. One could hardly be wrong in saying that, in those days, Kazuma’s life depended on the deaths of young men his own age. Because they died in his place, he was able to live.
This part was based on Kazuma’s diaries and the academic papers written about him.
And then I added my own imagination on top of it.
That strange pain, mixed with resentment and a sense of debt—would it be an overreach to say it deepened his depression?
The perceptive man must already have known. He must have felt it especially clearly when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Once his generation was gone, the world’s condemnation of the Second World War would fall upon the dead soldiers. And he himself would remain only as a great author, thanks to his talent with words. He would never have to bear responsibility for history, and other people’s deaths would become a warm, comforting shield. Kazuma’s shame and defeatism began here. Perhaps the “warmth” of Spring Dream is the record of the shame he felt.
Nasida’s fingertips trembled.
I recalled my final paragraph.
Finally, it is worth remembering that the subject who feels this “warmth” is a corpse. A corpse: a being who has completed life and entered rest. There is no one who has been more completely freed from the responsibilities of living than a corpse. Even after becoming such a corpse, the woman’s soul clings to the warmth of a stranger’s touch—perhaps that soul was Kazuma’s own, a soul he could never fully forgive.
That was how my critique ended.
Click.
Kazuma lowered the phone.
His eyes were... astonishingly bloodshot red.
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