Assertion against external reality : Kunikida Doppo [compiled analyses ]
Reading irl Kunikida Doppo’s “Death” story again and thinking about he perceived death, when he saw the distance between grasping the actuality of death and how his mind tried to defend its gruesome morbidity through an illusory veil. He couldn't accept it as if. He wondered if his friend was even happy, there's an interesting line where he says his friend never said something pessimistic but never optimistic either. The concept of death being foreign yet logically being so obvious distraughted his psyche. The narrator realised how he natural continuity does not generate meaning at all, instead it starkly highlights meaning’s absence. The sun rises, birds continue to sing, and life persists without pause. This continuity estranges rather than comforts. Nature refuses to participate in mourning, thereby revealing its emotional neutrality.
Yet the damn line of his friend not being much pessimistic but not being much optimistic either kills me (it suddenly reminds me of dazai, or it makes me wonder how backstory) was emotional neutrality a mask for despair? Did his death reveal something the living had failed to see? The corpse exposes the limits of intersubjective understanding. What was inaccessible in life becomes permanently sealed in death, transforming the friend into an emblem of epistemic uncertainty. In psychoanalytic terms, this produces melancholia rather than mourning, the psyche cannot relinquish the lost other because the loss is conceptually unresolved. Death destabilizes the ego by confronting it with the impossibility of fully knowing another consciousness.
This psychological disturbance is inseparable from the cultural context of Meiji modernity even, Traditional Buddhist frameworks that once structured the meaning of death were losing normative authority, while Western individualism intensified the interior life without providing metaphysical support. Doppo intellectually recognizes death’s inevitability yet emotionally felt a distance from the happening of death, the acceptance of death, revealing a split between cognition and affect produced by secular modern consciousness The self is aware enough to question, but too freezed up to accept or to believe
Now we have another Kunikida Doppo’s short storie called “Self-Help” (which I'm sure became the inspo for his ideal notebook) and this story with “Death” present two sharply contrasting but interconnected visions of how a human being lived within a world that refuses to offer guarantees of meaning. In “Self-Help,” Doppo embraced this Meiji-era ethic of disciplined self-improvement, being resourceful, shaped by the ideas of Samuel Smiles , that a self must justify its existence through productive action and usefulness to society, and diligence is a pursuit which will guarantee results. He rejects the romantic fantasy of becoming a world-historical figure like Napoleon but idealizes the ordinary individual who achieves ethical distinction through effort. "An extraordinary ordinary man" "an uncommon common man" This valorization of the “ideal ordinary man” is grounded in a belief that meaning is something one builds through determination, patience, practicality and responsibility, it's not something inherited or passively experienced. To be alive is implicitly to be accountable.
However, this ethical framework already contains a flaw or perhaps a vulnerability. If self-worth depends entirely on usefulness, then existence becomes conditional. Failure does not merely disappoint but it does confines the point of existence and threatens the very justification for living. Productivity becomes a metaphysical duty. In “Self-Help,” the narrative voice radiates confidence in this project that the self is presented as capable of shaping its own dignity through action. Yet beneath that confidence lies a terror of purposelessness, which doesn't grows when a person is a kid, or a curious individual, it hits when something tragic or morbid arrives on the doorstep as a fatality. One that Doppo does not explicitly acknowledge— at least, not until “Death.”
“Death” confronts what “Self-Help” tries to deny -> that meaning constructed through action may shatter instantly when mortality enters the scene. The narrator’s encounter with a deceased friend introduces a crisis that rational self-discipline cannot resolve. Death becomes the ultimate interruption, a void, or an event that halts all striving and strips the world of teleological coherence. The friend’s life offers no narrative closure, no final message. Even more unsettling is the friend’s emotional neutrality when he was alive, he was neither optimistic nor pessimistic, revealing that the internal truth of a person might remain fundamentally unknowable. Death transforms that uncertainty into a permanent void. The corpse refuses interpretation, it only insists on finality.
This realization destabilizes the worldview built in “Self-Help.” If a person may live an “ideal” life yet still vanish into silence without confirmation that their effort mattered, then usefulness is not a safeguard against meaninglessness. The narrator reacts with cognitive dissonance, the mind struggles to intellectually accept death while emotionally refusing to believe it. It's almost like a dialectical pair. This man is a walking timebomb. A central contradiction. He's his own prisoner and the one who has the damn keys to the jail.
“assertion against external reality” reminded me immediately of Kunikida. (I was reading this paper which talked about surrealism being a primary agent towards people dreaming about having a revolt for freedom, in the psychoanalysis category)
His lifelong aversion to authority isn’t impulsive at all, it is shaped by years of watching how dogma, rigid rules, and institutional ideals cage human freedom— it reminds me severely of ethics (principle of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice— what is genuinely deontological and what he was fed in the name of it, or what he thought it was before) For him, idealism is not a vague dream but a self-crafted philosophy grounded in strict normative( yes that's the word i feel suits it more?) ethics i feel, something he writes, rewrites, and binds himself to as if it were a personal constitution. Yet an individual who attempts to construct and live out such an all-encompassing system alone inevitably encounters cognitive dissonance! the world churns out neat categories, and reality pushes back with a weight that the body eventually feels. Death, corruption, again and again the cycle repeats. The constant collision between “what should be” and “what is” becomes exhausting, and even the ideal itself begins to feel threatening—what if it comes true, or worse, what if it never does? In this tension between aspiration and the impossibility of achieving the complete ideal, the idealist risks being consumed by the very vision that once gave him purpose.
So reading Kunikida’s Meat and Potatoes which is rooted in his journey to Hokkaido and I want to rant because why not,
There's a usage of shifting narration to stage an internal dialogue, i cannot always be sure if this was an actual conversation that happened, or is it a multitudnal self, or perhaps everything— that is, either it reflects competing parts of the self rather than simple conversational realism. So maybe he multiple voices function as these ethical positions—between order and freedom, reality and ideality which end up revealing a cognitive imbalance that is not confusion but method. An ontological debriefing as if, through personification, frivolity and symbolism.
This tension is crystallised in the symbolic opposition between meat and potatoes, meat signifies a dense, socially sanctioned reality associated with comfort, wealth, and moral compromise, while the potato represents this food which gets tasteless after a while— a food which doesn't feels sometimes to be worth striving for yet somehow it is a struggle which may provide some sort of an imaginative openness? Ig. There's an up and down comprise or perhaps a collaborative scheme to which should we make a side dish? Potatoes can be dish, can't they?
So With this northern lyricism, with Hokkaido described as the “heart of potato country” and thus the heart of idealism itself and through this geography kunikida imagines a space where rigid ontological structures—what one should desire, consume, or pursue—can be loosened, allowing free expression and surprise, which makes it sensiblef or asagiri to also give him a notebook (a notebook for extraordinary-ordibary man, for order, for expression, for free verses. I would like to see his notebook so badly because my heart says he has free verses poetry there) most clearly realised in writing as the only site of liberty.
Yet, this alienation emerges through figures who abandon striving toward ideals, suggesting a critique of forced realism that reminds me of Viktor Frankl’s insistence on the necessity of idealism for meaningful movement forward. Along with all of this, the narrative’s undertones of boredom, unrequited love, and quiet dissatisfaction further articulate an ontological fatigue with a world already decided, aligning Kunikida’s ethical romanticism with Wordsworthian concerns found in The Idiot Boy and Gray’s Elegy, where ordinary life becomes a site of unrealised moral and imaginative potential.
Reading more papers mainly on psychoanalysis and poetics and, i just thought that— kunikida is a poet, doppo poet. The matchless poet— his wound is not merely moral but ontological, he is horrified by the fact that people can die without ideals, imagine you are a writer— imagine dying without a narrative, without any poetics attracted to your essence of living, and I realised that I feel haunted too by the realisation of knowing the actuality of people dying without meaning, without narrative, without any principle to hold their existence together— and kunikida had witnessed that. This meaninglessness feels to him more cruel and merciless, because the constant poking of collective unconscious and survivors guilt suffocates him. His entire worldview is built around a rigid ego ideal, a belief that life must be lived with purpose, integrity, and value, and when deaths occur that have no moral architecture around them, it shatters the very framework through which he interprets reality— he lives in the dissonance of ideal ego and the ego which is lonely, harsh and self critical. Psychoanalytically, this confronts him with the collapse of his ego ideal—hermeneutically, it becomes a crisis of interpretation where the world refuses to supply meaning, and through the lens of speculative realism, the indifferent universe reveals itself as utterly non-human, unconcerned with the ideals he tries to impose. What tortures him is precisely this collision between his anthropocentric moral system and a cosmos that allows lives to be extinguished for nothing, “just like that,” exposing the terrifying gap between how the world should function according to his ideals and how it actually does. Fuck this bro I'm going to cry bye.
