At one point in this study of the thought of the major Japanese literary critic of the twentieth century, Kobayashi Hideo, 1902–1983, Ninomiya Masayuki describes Kobayashi's conviction that being born a Japanese was an inescapable destiny that included specifically for the writer an obligation to work within the traditions of the Japanese language. Ninomiya then confesses: ‘Le fait que le Japonais que je suis écrit cet ouvrage en français contredit … l’idée de Kobayashi sur ce point’ (p. 85). Indeed it does, and we may all be thankful that Ninomiya has dared to defy his linguistic destiny – and his intellectual hero – by writing this first major study of Kobayashi in any Western language. Furthermore, the fact that it is written in French by someone intimate with French culture is an equally fortunate circumstance because, as Ninomiya abundantly shows, French literature and philosophy loomed large in the background of Kobayashi's thought – although it must be added that, as often with Japanese writers, this ‘influence’ seemed mostly to reinforce tendencies already present (for instance, his emphasis on vital forces and on intuition seems as much traditionally Japanese as Bergsonian).

Finally, a more subtle but equally significant advantage is suggested by Ninomiya himself when he poses this rhetorical question:

To which I can only answer with an emphatic ‘oui, oui!’ and ‘bravo, Monsieur Ninomiya!’

The work is divided into three parts, each dealing with a different phase of Kobayashi's response to one of the great ‘turning points’ of modern Japanese history, those few hectic years in the 1940s during which the country went from the apex of military and imperial power to a catastrophic defeat and then to a new postwar ‘liberal democratic’ order imposed by the Allied Occupation. For the normally rather apolitical Kobayashi, this was the period of his life when his relation to his own country was, as Ninomiya puts it, most ‘aiguë’.