Vita Sexualis Read Free

in the dorms he must carry a dagger to protect himself from the "queers." And during all of these possible sexual escapades, confrontations, tightrope excursions, Ogai's hero keeps his balance, observing, commenting, sometimes humorously, sometimes seriously, always self-critically.
    When the anonymous reviewer in the August 1909 issue of the Teikoku Bungaku magazine said, "I . . . firmly believe . . . Mr. Ogai has become deranged of late," and advised Ogai "not to write this kind of worthless work and by so doing join the younger writers of our time," the critic must have been quite unaware of Ogai's intentions. For while it is true that the philosopher-protagonist of Vita Sexualis had misgivings about the worth of his performance, Ogai did manage to write a believably vivid portrait of boyhood and adolescence and young manhood. The mystery of sex is set forth in Ogai's clear logical style, and that he could place sex in a rational perspective in Meiji with its turbulent conflict of manners and values once more reveals Ogai's talent.
    Kazuji Ninomiya
    Niigata University
    Sanford Goldstein
    Purdue University
Niigata, Japan & Lafayette, Indiana

  Acknowledgments
    The translators acknowledge, with gratitude, the kind assistance of Professor Seishi Shinoda, Chairman of the Department of English, and Akira Ikari, Professor of Japanese Literature, at Niigata University, Niigata, Japan, in helping to clarify some of the complexities of language and literature in Ogai's Vita Sexualis.

Vita Sexualis
    Mr. Shizuka Kanai is a philosopher by profession.
    The notion a man is a philosopher is accompanied by the thought that he is writing a book. Philosopher by profession though he be, Mr. Kanai is not writing anything. They say that when he graduated from the College of Literature, his thesis was on the unusual topic of a comparative study of non-Buddhist Indian philosophy and pre-Socratic Greek philosophy. He hasn't written anything since.
    However, because of his occupation he gives lectures. Having received a professorship in the history of philosophy, he offers lectures that deal with the history of modern philosophy. Students claim Kanai Sensei's lectures are more interesting than those of his colleagues who have written a great many books. His lectures are based on immediate perception, at times strongly illuminating some particular topic. At such moments his students gain indelible impressions. Often his listeners are startled into comprehension when he explains a certain phenomenon by applying something utterly foreign to it, something that has nothing to do with the problem under consideration. They say Schopenhauer kept in his notebooks ordinary topics, like those items of general interest found in newspapers, and used them to illustrate his philosophy, but Mr. Kanai employs everything and anything as material for explaining the history of philosophy. At times his students are surprised when in the middle of a serious lecture, he clarifies his point by quoting from some current novel popular among the younger generation.
    He reads a good many novels. When he picks up a newspaper or magazine, he doesn't look at any of the controversial articles, only at the fiction. Still, if the authors of these stories knew why he was reading them, they'd be quite angry. He doesn't read them as works of art. Since he demands a very high standard for anything to qualify as a work of art, such commonplace newspaper stories fail to meet his requirements. What interests him in these stories is the psychological condition under which the authors wrote. And that is why when he discovers an author has written with the intention of creating something sad or pathetic, it strikes him as quite funny, and when the intention of the author is to be humorous, he feels instead quite sad about it.
    Every once in a while it occurs to him to write something himself. Though a philosopher by profession, he has no intention of establishing his own system of