Love Takes Without Stint

“Love gives without stint,” wrote Saint Paul. Arishima Takeo, the novelist who had once been a fervent Christian and had broken with the church, answered with a paradox: true love does not give, it takes. In this long confessional essay of 1920, written in twenty-nine numbered sections, he begins from the one thing he says he can know, that he exists and that his life is his own, and builds from it a philosophy of individuality, instinct and love.

Moving between argument, self-accusation, dramatized dialogue and aphorism, Arishima confronts his own hypocrisy, weighs habit against intellect and instinct, and argues that love draws everything it loves into the self and grows by doing so. He turns then to art, society, the family, marriage and the social upheavals of his time, quoting Whitman, Nietzsche, Bergson and the Gospels along the way. Ten-odd lines were struck out at the Home Ministry’s insistence, and the text still says so.

This complete, unabridged translation is made directly from the Japanese, with a translator’s note, endnotes and source information. Arishima’s own Whitman epigraphs are printed in English as he gave them.