Suzuki Youi 鈴木結生. Goethe wa subete o itta ゲーテはすべてを言った. Asahi Shinbun Shuppan, 2025.
Shared the 172nd Akutagawa Prize, for late 2024, with Andō Jose. It was published in Shōsetsu Tripper 小説トリッパー in late 2024 and in book form in January 2025. It’s the author’s first published book, although one previous story was published in the same magazine in early 2024. Conventionally, we’d romanize the author’s name as “Yūi,” but “Youi” is the way it’s romanized on the copyright page. He was born in 2001.
Often when two works share the Akutagawa Prize, one is experimental or challenging while the other comports itself more in keeping with traditional literary norms – whatever any of that means at any given time. In this instance, Andō Jose’s work, and its recognition by the A-Prize machinery, seems clearly intended to push against social norms surrounding gender, race, and nationality while pushing against literary norms in terms of plot and narrative. DTOPIA strives for the legitimacy of the street. Suzuki Youi’s work, on the other hand, not only fits comfortably within established literary and social norms, it positively embraces them – celebrates them to an almost otaku-like degree. Its legitimacy is that of the academy.
The story centers on a family of Japanese scholars of German literature. The main character, Hiroba Tōichi, is a middle-aged professor of German lit in Tokyo specializing in Goethe; his now retired father-in-law was his doctoral advisor, meaning Tōichi married into a sort of dynasty of Germanists. His wife Akiko is not a scholar, but in other respects is to the manner born, while his daughter Norika is now a college student studying English. By the end of the book we learn how Norika and her boyfriend have embraced the scholarly life in unexpected and creative ways.
The plot revolves around literature – sort of. Tōichi, Akiko, and Norika order tea after dinner one evening. The tea bags they’re served have famous quotations on the tags. Tōichi, by chance, gets one attributed to Goethe: written in English, it says, “Love does not confuse everything, but mixes.” Tōichi, the Goethe expert, does not recognize the quote. He tries back-translating it into German as well as into Japanese, but can’t place it. This sends him on a quest through Goethe’s works, which he has both edited and translated, and when this doesn’t work he begins casting about among fellow scholars and acquaintances. He even has a dream in which he meets Goethe himself. Tōichi’s self-doubts mount as the novel progresses – doesn’t his failure to identify the quotation undermine his entire career? It all comes to a head during the filming of a four-part educational TV show in which he is leading a small group of celebrity students through a light study of Faust (these things actually happen on Japanese TV); during the final episode, in a moment of desperation, he presents the tea-bag quote as an authentic piece of Goethe, despite his inability to confirm it. Immediately this worries him, since a colleague of his has just been exposed for fabricating convenient quotes, even inventing whole sources, in his scholarly writing.
These materials, stated baldly like that, have the makings of a classic parody of academics. The narrative shows us how thoroughly Tōichi, and his father-in-law before him, have adopted European ways while living in Japan; one so inclined could find something to laugh at here in how easily academics assimilate themselves into their subject of study, or how pretentiously they try to embody it. The plagiarism scandal, meanwhile, seems poised at least to reinforce the old saw that in academics the fights are so bitter because the stakes are so low. And Tōichi’s inability to identify the supposed Goethe quote cuts at the intellectual’s anxiety about their own inadequacy or even hypocrisy, suggesting a parody at an existential level.
But the key is that there’s no indication that Suzuki feels anything but love for his characters. And so while we may smile wryly from time to time at Tōichi’s dilemmas, we’re not encouraged to feel anything but delight in how seriously he and the other characters take the life of the mind, and how – contrary to every expectation – this in fact serves to strengthen their emotional and familial bonds with each other.
Consider the way the quote is finally identified. After failing to find it through traditional academic routes, he brings it up in conversation with his daughter, who makes the stupendously obvious suggestion that they ask the tea manufacturer where they got it. Norika calls them and is directed to a website that collects famous quotations, in English but curated by a Chinese person; this turns out to be in Norika’s wheelhouse, because unbeknownst to her father she curates a similar site herself in Japanese. The website in question in turn directs them to a German gardener, who featured the quote on her website; it turns out that Akiko is a follower of the gardener’s YouTube channel, and so off to Germany they go. The gardener got the quote from a letter handed down in her family for generations; the letter was supposedly written by Goethe himself to a distant ancestor, who the family believes was one of Goethe’s lovers…
Does this mean that the mystery has been solved? At the deepest level, no, because the letter has not been and may never be authenticated. And even if it is authenticated, is it really the quote? The letter, in the original German, is specifically speaking of God’s love: that’s what mixes but does not confuse. But what Tōichi encountered – the lesson he’s been ruminating on from the start – is about love in general. So what’s the “original” here? In fact a running theme in the novel is how quotations like this take on a life of their own – always subject to partial quotation, out-of-context usage, translation, rewording, and all manner of refractions, not to mention misattribution. This in turn leads to the suggestion that our understanding of literature itself is always a matter of fragmentary misreadings rather than deep contemplation.
But what could be a dark and depressing conclusion is, as presented by the novel, something of an affirmation, since along the way the reader sees how this quest has brought Tōichi closer to his wife and his daughter, and has brought the daughter’s boyfriend into the family fold (when we reach the end we realize that the boyfriend, now son-in-law, has been narrating the book all along). Misquotations and misreadings don’t matter, in the end; what matters is the meaning we take or make from them. Literature is not (only) about the long slog of translation and editing complete works; it’s also about the database-like interface with bits and pieces, phrases that we treasure because they work for us, beyond any question of authenticity. Even the plagiarism scandal turns out to have been engineered by the ”victim” himself as a kind of postmodern joke.
This shoulder-shrugging attitude toward accuracy is where the title comes from. “Goethe said everything” is a saying that Tōichi learned as a young man while conducting research in Germany. A German friend had a habit of attributing every clever or insightful remark to Goethe, but joked about it, saying that was what all Germans did; so if you don’t know who said something, just say Goethe said it, since Goethe said everything. Tōichi repeats this in his lectures as a German joke, although (characteristically for this novel) he privately wonders if it really is a joke in Germany or if his friend was just pulling his leg.
I find I’ve used the word “postmodern” now. These themes, this narrative, would have felt cutting-edge forty years ago: they fit perfectly into the postmodern views of literature that were roiling the literary world in the 1980s. Suzuki even namechecks Borges and Eco near the end; he knows what game he’s playing. What’s startling, at least to a middle-aged reader, is how thoroughly these ideas have become incorporated into the capital-L literary system. I don’t think I’m being negative about Suzuki in observing that this novel with all its themes fits comfortably within what we now think of as literature. In fact it’s almost nostalgic, and I suspect it’s meant to be; but it’s worth keeping in mind that the author was only 23 when he wrote it. So if it’s nostalgia, it’s not for his own youth. He’s not Tōichi. He’s Norika’s fiancee, who has found his own internet-age, pop-culture saturated way of accessing and valuing literariness.