Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
By the mid-1930s, Kobayashi was well established as a literary critic. His aversion to abstract ideas, and conceptualizing in general, was widely known, as was his preference for spontaneity and intuition. In literature, he reserved his highest praise for the works of Kan Kikuchi and Naoya Shiga, whereas he expressed a low opinion of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa for being too cerebral.