August 2, 2026 — Reissued
The mission of an artist is not merely to produce beautiful writing or arrange pleasing words.
It is to discover truths that people do not yet know, truths that have been deliberately concealed, and truths buried in the darkness of history, and then to give them expression.
Through an examination of Masayuki Takayama, Haruki Murakami, and the Asahi Shimbun, this essay asks anew what true art, journalism, and intelligence really mean.

On Reissuing This Essay

This essay brings together two chapters written on September 22 and September 24, 2017, and distils into a single text the essence of what I have continued to ask for more than fifteen years: the nature of art, literature, journalism, historical understanding, and civilization itself.
Reading it again today, I find that the ideas expressed here have not aged in the slightest.
On the contrary, at a time when the boundary between truth and falsehood is being deliberately blurred, when journalism omits the most important facts, and when words disguised as morality fill the world, this essay must once again be presented to the public.
For that reason, I am reissuing it in full.

Full Text

The two chapters dated September 22 and September 24, 2017, reveal the core of my thought.
By that time, my criticism of Haruki Murakami was no longer merely criticism of a single writer.
I was presenting a definition of true art itself.
That definition is contained in the following sentence.
Artists are noble because they illuminate hidden truths and truths that have been deliberately concealed, and give them expression.
This sentence expresses my view of literature, my view of art, and my view of civilization.
Art does not consist merely of writing beautiful prose.
Nor does it consist of arranging pleasant-sounding words.
The true mission of an artist is to discover truths that people do not yet know, truths that have been deliberately covered up, and truths buried in the darkness of history, and then to give them expression.
In this sense, Masayuki Takayama is a true artist.
He has unearthed the concealed truths of the postwar world and continued to communicate them to both Japan and the world.
I wrote that every Japanese citizen should immediately go to the nearest bookstore, even if only for the purpose of subscribing to the publications in which his essays appear.
That was no exaggeration.
Masayuki Takayama is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
He has written what the Asahi Shimbun and the Western media do not write.
He has restored to the Japanese people facts that they had not been allowed to know.
He has illuminated hidden truths and truths deliberately concealed, and he has given them expression.
That is why I call him a true artist.
What, then, of Haruki Murakami?
I have never evaluated him as an artist who illuminates truth.
Rather, I have criticised him as a figure who circulates throughout the world, in literary form, a historical understanding formed within the Asahi Shimbun-style sphere of discourse.
The passage referring to 400,000 victims in the Nanjing Incident.
The statement to the effect that Japan must continue apologising forever to China and the Korean Peninsula.
These do not illuminate concealed truths.
They are words that can, as a result, serve the Asahi Shimbun-style pseudo-moralism, a self-denigrating view of Japanese history, and anti-Japanese propaganda promoted by China and South Korea.
My criticism was not concerned with literary technique.
Nor was it a question of whether his prose was skilful or unskilful.
What I was questioning was the essence of art.
Is the writer someone who illuminates truth?
Or is the writer someone who gives literary decoration to a false understanding of history?
The distinction is decisive.
In the chapter dated September 24, 2017, I went further and discussed the nature of journalism.
What I argued there was that the greatest problem is the failure to report the facts that are truly important.
The Asahi Shimbun does not write about the essential point.
It does not write about the most important part.
It conceals the facts that readers most need to know and constructs a different narrative in their place.
That is the essential nature of the Asahi Shimbun.
This corresponds perfectly with the problems of “fathomless evil” and “plausible-sounding lies” about which I have written for many years.
A lie does not consist only of writing the opposite of the truth.
Failing to report the most important facts is also a lie.
Concealing the essential background is also a lie.
Withholding the core information necessary for readers to make their own judgments, while guiding public opinion through words that merely resemble morality, is also a plausible-sounding lie.
In this way, the Asahi Shimbun-style sphere of discourse has misled the Japanese people.
Kenzaburo Oe and Haruki Murakami were created and elevated within that sphere of discourse.
That is why I have criticised them so severely.
The writings I produced from 2011 through 2017 possess a consistent central axis.
They are not merely literary criticism.
They are not merely political commentary.
They are not merely discussions of history.
What I have continually asked is whether discovering truth and communicating it to the world is the most noble of all human activities.
That is why I hold Masayuki Takayama in such high regard.
That is why I hold Yoshiko Sakurai in such high regard.
And that is why I criticise Haruki Murakami so severely.
My standard of judgment has always been consistent.
Does the person illuminate hidden truths?
Does the person communicate deliberately concealed truths to the world?
Or does the person decorate a false understanding of history with words and circulate it throughout the world?
That is the single decisive point.
For more than fifteen years, I have not merely been criticising one writer named Haruki Murakami.
What I have continually questioned are the fundamental issues shared by all human civilization: who speaks the truth, what art is, and what intelligence is.
To illuminate hidden truths and truths deliberately concealed, and to give them expression.
That is the mission of the artist.
That is also the mission of the intelligence that moves civilization forward.