-

Soseki
Modern Japan’s Greatest Novelist

JOHN NATHAN
 Sōseki

A SI A P ER SP EC TI VES
W E AT H E RHEA D EA ST A SI A N I NSTI TUTE, COLU MBIA U N IVERSITY
ASIA PERS P E CT IVE S : HIS T O RY, S O CIE T Y , A ND C UL T UR E

A series of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

For a list of titles in this series, see page 328.

OTHER WORKS BY JOHN NATHAN

Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere (memoir)

Sony: The Private Life
Japan Unbound
Mishima: A Biography

TRANSLATIONS

Light and Dark (Natsume Sōseki)

Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age! (Ōe Kenzaburō)
Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (Ōe Kenzaburō)
A Personal Matter (Ōe Kenzaburō)
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (Mishima Yukio)

FICTION

Dragon Gate
A Bintel Brief
 Sōseki
+
Modern Japan’s Greatest Novelist

John Nathan

C OLU M B I A U N I V E R S I TY P RE SS
New York
 Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup​­.columbia​­.edu
Copyright © 2018 John Nathan
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Nathan, John, 1940– author.
Title: Soseki : modern Japan’s greatest novelist / John Nathan.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2018. | Series: Asia perspectives: history,
society, and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017037948 | ISBN 9780231171427 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780231546973 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Natsume, Soseki, 1867–1916. | Novelists, Japanese—20th century—Biography.
Classification: LCC PL812.A8 Z82548 2018 | DDC 895.63/42—dc23
LC record available at https:​­//lccn​­.loc​­.gov​­/2017037948

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America

Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee

Cover image: Designed by Natsume Sōseki for the cover of his novel Kokoro (1914),
the pattern is based on a rubbing of an ancient Chinese inscription on stone,
done in the style of calligraphy known as seal script.

Cover inset photo: Natsume Sōseki, on the occasion of Emperor Meiji’s funeral.
Tokyo, September 13, 1912. (Photo by Ogawa Kazumasa;
courtesy of the Museum of Modern Japanese Literature)
 :
For baby grandson Noah,

And in memory of our Jeremiah

 Inhalt

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii

1 Beginnings 1

2 School Days 10

3 Words 20

4 The Provinces 34

5 London 48

6 Home Again 74

7 I Am a Cat 90

8 Smaller Gems 107

9 The Thursday Salon 117

10 A Professional Novelist 135

11 Sanshirō 154

12 A Pair of Novels 167

  vii
 13 Crisis at Shuzenji 181

14 A Death in the Family 199

15 Einsamkeit 211

16 Grass on the Wayside 232

17 The Final Year 248

Notes 275
Selected Bibliography 305
Index 309

viii   C ontents
 Preface

In the panorama of modern Japanese literature, Natsume Sōseki (1867–

1916) stands alone, an unflaggingly original pioneer. He was thirty-eight,
a scholar of English literature with serious doubts about himself, when
he finally turned to writing fiction. Between 1905 and his death in 1916,
he produced fourteen largely grim novels that revealed characters with
a depth and exactitude that had no precedent in Japan. He is properly
viewed as Japan’s first modern novelist, certainly in the Western sense
of that notion.
The interest and significance of Sōseki’s life extend beyond his liter-
ary achievement. He was born on the cusp of a social revolution; his
struggle to synthesize Japanese sensibilities and Western approaches to
the novel mirrored the national effort to build a “modern” state by fus-
ing traditional and Western elements. His life reveals lucidly and poi-
gnantly the pain and paralyzing cost of, as he put it, “incurring a foreign
culture.”
Sōseki’s accomplishment appears the more remarkable considering
that he had no predecessors. His contemporaries in England—George
Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James—were
inspired and nourished by a tradition that began in the early eighteenth
century and extended beyond them to the modernism of Virginia Woolf
and James Joyce. Sōseki’s realism, in contrast, appeared out of the blue:
no survey of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese fiction, lam-
poons and parodies, morality tales, and melodramas populated by
improbable characters prepares the reader for his ability to create indi-
viduals who are true to life.
Inasmuch as his complete oeuvre, including novellas and short sto-
ries, was written in the scant space of eleven years—an astonishing feat
enabled by his vast talent and desperate energy—it is hard to speak of

  ix
early, middle, and late Sōseki. In fact, his grasp of narrative strategy,
including multiple points of view and irony, possibly acquired from his
reading of Lawrence Sterne and Jane Austen, among others, is already
strikingly evident in his first novel, I Am a Cat (1905), and in his shorter
comic masterpiece, Botchan (1905). Not that he does not evolve: rapid
as it was, the attentive reader can track his stylistic progress from one
novel to the next as he increasingly bent the Japanese language to his
will, transforming it into the precision instrument he needed while pre-
serving its genius for the indefinite.
Sōseki achieved critical acclaim and immense popularity during his
lifetime. Today, one hundred years after his death, he abides in the Jap-
anese imagination with a luminosity that recalls the Jane Austen phe-
nomenon in England and America. There is abundant evidence of his
lionization: from 1984 through 2004, his portrait was engraved on the
face of the 1,000-yen note (roughly equivalent to a ten-dollar bill); gen-
erations of high school students have been expected to memorize pas-
sages from his novels; he is cited as a source in large dictionaries more
often than any other modern Japanese writer; and to this day, he is voted
“the most representative Japanese author” in national polls, ahead of
Murasaki Shikibu, the author of The Tale of Genji.
Between April and September 2014, the Asahi shinbun commemorated
the centennial of its first appearance in that newspaper with a serial
republication of Kokoro, Sōseki’s most popular novel, in the original 1914
format. Readers responded with such enthusiasm—as of August 2014,
sales of Kokoro in just one paperback edition had surged to seven mil-
lion copies—that the Asahi followed with Sanshirō (1908), And Then (1909),
and The Gate (1910) and is currently midway through the perennial best
seller, I Am a Cat (1905). On December 9, 2016, the hundredth anniver-
sary of his death, a Sōseki android was unveiled. Dressed in an English
suit and choker collar and wearing kid shoes, with its features modeled
on the death mask owned by the Asahi shinbun, the seated four-foot fig-
ure (the size of a puppet-theater doll) recites selections from Sōseki’s
Ten Nights of Dreams in his grandson’s voice, said to resemble his own.
On display at university gatherings, the android draws crowds.
Considering the darkness that pervades his work, it is not easy to
account for Sōseki’s enduring appeal. Perhaps he continues to awaken
in Japanese readers recognition, if not familiarity, with his representation

x   P reface
of life as a travail in which integrity and pride are hard to sustain and
happiness lies mainly beyond reach.
Since the 1980s, Japanese scholars have produced dozens of books
and hundreds of articles about Sōseki every year. A number of Western
scholars have also contributed to this corpus of criticism. In the main,
the new work is linguistic, structuralist, and narratological, examining
Sōseki’s fiction in the light of gender studies, feminism, queer theory, and
a heightened sensitivity to imperialism that detects its implicit presence
in the darkest corners. Overall, the purpose of the endeavor has been to
liberate Sōseki from the limitations of an exceptionalist characterization
as a Japanese novelist and to install him alongside other great writers of
global literature where he belongs.
I have chosen not to canvass this extensive body of academic writing
about Sōseki. My goal has been to create a portrait of Sōseki as a man
and an artist that will be accessible, and sympathetic, to general read-
ers. To that end, I have been conscious of avoiding abstract, academic
criticism. Nonetheless, I have tried to develop and reinforce my inter-
pretations with sufficient rigor to engage even those readers who know
Sōseki well. Here and there, where relevant and useful, I have cited work
by others and have deployed arguments other than my own. Readers
with an appetite for more theoretical approaches will find relevant titles
in both Japanese and English in the selected bibliography.
Rendering the work and life of Sōseki accessible to English readers
requires translation, which I have elected to do myself. In the case of
previously untranslated material, essays by Sōseki, his letters and dia-
ries, and memoirs by others who knew him, I had no choice. But with
one or two exceptions, his novels have been translated, sometimes more
than once. Nonetheless, I resolved to retranslate the texts myself because
a translation is unavoidably an interpretation, and I wanted English
readers to refer to my versions of the passages I would be examining as
a critic.
The portrait of Sōseki that coalesced in my imagination as I pored
over him for three years is disturbing. Like another of his contempo-
raries, Marcel Proust, he appears to have been un infant nerveux all his
life: finicky with extreme likes and dislikes, demanding, superior, gregari-
ous or withdrawn by unpredictable turns. Proust was sickly from child-
hood; Sōseki suffered all his adult life from severe physical and mental

P reface   xi
illness, recurrent attacks of which often assailed him at the same time.
Though he was capable of warmth and, certainly in his writing, compas-
sion, in the grips of his compound sickness he could be cold, sardonic,
irascible, and even violent. A word master with a gift for impossible
puns, he could be charming on good days at the lecture podium or at
home with friends and followers. Generally, however, the pattern of his
behavior, especially toward his wife and children, is rebarbative.
In the end, Sōseki was a novelist: the beauty he achieved in his nov-
els and the truth of the human condition as he perceived it are a legacy
that transcends his personal limitations. Indeed, in his indefatigable pur-
suit of his art despite terrible afflictions, we may even glimpse nobility.

xii   P reface
 Acknowledgments

For help in deciphering obscure passages, I thank Yamauchi Yōkō, my

friend and colleague at the University of California, Santa Barbara;
Professor Nakajima Kunihiko at Waseda University; Professor Maezawa
Hiroko at Dokkyo University; and Mizumura Minae, the most creative
Sōseki reader I know.
My lifelong friends Ellen and John Newell read the manuscript closely
and, as always, offered valuable suggestions.

  xiii
Sōseki
 +
1

Beginnings

Surely, the emotional buffeting that Natsume Sōseki suffered at the hands
of his family as a child contributed to the misanthropy that darkens his
writing. The youngest of eight children, including two stepsisters he
scarcely knew, he had been put up for adoption twice by the time he
was four.1 His first foster parents may have been related to a maid who
worked for the Natsume family. In a memoir written a year before his
death, Inside My Glass Doors, Sōseki wrote that he learned after he had
grown up that they were a couple who eked out a living buying and sell-
ing used pots and pans:

Every evening, I was parked in a small bamboo basket along with the
used junk and left unattended on the main street of Yotsuya in front
of a nighttime bazaar. On one such night, one of my elder sisters hap-
pened by and picked me up and carried me home wrapped in her
kimono—I suppose she felt sorry for me. I am told that I was unable
to sleep and my sister received a scolding from my father because I
lay awake crying all night.2

Sources, such as they are, agree that Sōseki was returned to his own
family before he was three, but only briefly: in 1870, at the age of four,
he was adopted by a family known to his father and lived with them
until he returned to his parents’ home at the age of nine.
Why did Sōseki’s parents choose not to raise him at home as their
own child? Scholars have expended barrels of ink on conjecture but have
not offered a conclusive explanation. One possibility is that they already
had five young mouths to feed and the family fortunes were in decline.
Until the year Sōseki was born, his father, Naokatsu, had held the rank
of nanushi (neighborhood magistrate), an administrative position in the

   1
feudal government that had been passed down in his family for seven
generations beginning in 1702. Nanushi were at once ombudsmen, dis-
trict judges, and policemen responsible for adjudicating local business
and family disputes and keeping the peace in one or more districts. The
neighborhood at the center of Natsume jurisdiction, Sōseki’s birthplace,
was Waseda Minami-chō, in today’s Shinjuku-ku, north central Tokyo
along the Yamanote line (the “upper” city), down the hill from Takada
no baba where the imperial horses had once been quartered and just
blocks away from Waseda University. The Natsumes seem to have been
powerful nanushi: as of 1842, Sōseki’s grandfather was at the top of a
list of Edo’s “major nanushi,” in control of eleven contiguous neighbor-
hoods (chō).3 Sōseki’s father would have inherited an urban domain of
the same size. The position was well remunerated in rice and money and
conferred considerable prestige and authority. During his tenure, Sōseki’s
father named a district adjoining his home neighborhood Kikui-chō
(Kiku-i) by conflating the two elements in the family crest, the chrysan-
themum (kiku) and an abstract symbol for a well, i.4 Kikui-chō survives,
as does Natsume Hill (Natsume-zaka) near the house where Sōseki was
born.
But just prior to Sōseki’s birth, the position of nanushi had been abol-
ished. This was a time of volcanic social upheaval. In 1867, the year
Sōseki was born, the last of the Tokugawa shoguns had resigned; the
following year, imperial rule was restored and, not long after, a consti-
tutional monarchy was created. The feudal government, which had been
in power for 250 years, had toppled in just ten. The men in control of the
country’s new destiny, young samurai loyalists, were committed to
uprooting the old order and replacing it with social institutions borrowed
from the West. Sōseki’s father was caught in the giant gears of change
that powered the creation of a modern state. Even so, it is not clear that
he could not afford to feed a new child, since shortly after his youngest
was born, he was appointed kuchō, the mayor of the newly designated
Shinjuku ward. Moreover, the family owned rice paddies in Yotsuya (an
upscale residential district today), that produced, according to Sōseki,
“enough rice to feed the family.”5
There are other indications that the Natsumes were far from destitute.
Sōseki recalled, or remembered being told, about his two stepsisters (his
father’s daughters by his first wife) rising before dawn to make their prep-
arations for a day at the theater in distant Asakusa. Their journey began

2   B eginnings
on foot, accompanied by a male servant because some of the neighbor-
hoods along the way were dangerous, and then east to a covered boat
that took them north upstream on the Sumida River to Imado. From
there, they walked to a “theater teahouse” where they took refreshment
before being ushered to the theater in Saruwaka-chō, a district in which
the government had required all small theaters to locate, the better to
oversee them. They sat in the loges, seats that were prized by theatergo-
ers, who dressed for the occasion and wished to be seen and admired by
others in the house. When the play was over, a young man in a crepe de
chine kimono and hakama6 would appear and usher them backstage to
meet actors they admired and have them sketch something on their fans.
“This must have been satisfying to their vanity,” Sōseki observed, “but
this variety of satisfaction was obtainable only with the power of money.”7
Inside My Glass Doors contains another account that seems relevant,
about eight masked men who broke into the house with drawn swords
one night when he was an infant and demanded money of his father
“to fund a military action.” Naokatsu, a frugal man who had restored
the family to solvency after his spendthrift father had dissipated the
Natsumes’ wealth, produced a few bills that failed to satisfy the bur-
glars. They apparently had already dropped in on the saké shop at the
corner, the Kokura-ya,8 and had been advised by the proprietor to leave
a poor man alone and call on Master Natsume, who had substantial
money on hand. At just that moment, Sōseki’s mother appeared and
counseled her husband to give the marauders what he had in his purse.
This turned out to be 50 ryō, gold coins, a substantial sum. When the
intruders had left with their plunder, Naokatsu scolded his wife for
speaking out of turn and costing him dearly. Sōseki claimed to have
heard the story from his wife, who had heard it from his eldest brother
over tea.9 So it seems unlikely, even considering that he had lost money
in the new stock market, that straitened circumstances compelled Nat-
sume Naokatsu to put his son out for adoption.
Another explanation is that his parents were embarrassed to have pro-
duced another child at an age that would have been viewed by their
contemporaries as unseemly, fifty-one and forty-one, respectively. “I was
the last of my parents’ children, born late in their lives,” Sōseki wrote,
“I’ve been told repeatedly, and am still told even today, that my mother
was ashamed when she became pregnant with me because of her
advanced age.”10

B eginnings   3
 The record shows that Natsume Kinnosuke11—Sōseki was a pen
name—was adopted in 1870 by a childless couple, Shiobara Shōnosuke
and his wife, Yasu, both thirty-one. Until the Imperial (Meiji) Restora-
tion of 1868, Shiobara seems to have been a nanushi himself, with juris-
diction in the Yotsuya District, but early in 1872, possibly through the
good offices of Sōseki’s father, he was appointed as a local functionary
(kochō), a newly created position in the Meiji government generally filled
by former nanushi, and moved his family “downtown,” east of the Sum-
ida River to Suwa-chō in proletarian Asakusa. Sōseki lived with the Shio-
baras there for between six and seven years, in a small house connected
by a long corridor to what would later be called a “ward office.”
By his own account, the Shiobaras, Shōnosuke in particular, who was
otherwise tight with his money, lavished toys and goldfish on him, bought
him books and shiny new boots, took him to a tailor to be fitted for a
Little Lord Fauntleroy suit and a felt hat, and in other ways spoiled him.
Some biographers have suggested that Shiobara’s uncharacteristic lar-
gesse was a conscious investment with an eye to being repaid by the
child’s father at some time in the future, but there is no knowing if such
cynicism is justified. What does seem to be the case is that the Shio-
baras were intent on inculcating the child with the certainty that they
were his true parents and that he owed his loyalty to them. In Sōseki’s
next-to-last novel, Grass on the Wayside (Michikusa),12 the protagonist
recalls both a catechism he had to rehearse with his adoptive parents
and the emotions it triggered in him. The details of this young writer’s
life accord in large measure with what is known about Sōseki’s own, and
his memories are recorded with a scrupulosity that gives them the appear-
ance of autobiography. This is, of course, not to say that everything found
in the pages of this dark fiction actually happened to its author. (Charles
Dickens wrote that he could see every brick in every wall he ever imag-
ined.) Nonetheless, the following exchange, or something like it, may
well have occurred, and the feelings it produced in the child seem accu-
rately recalled rather than invented:

As an only child they had taken in from elsewhere, Kenzō received

special treatment from the penny-pinching Shimadas. But sometimes,
on a chilly night, they sat together facing him next to the long brazier
and asked questions like this:

4   B eginnings
 “Who’s your papa?”
Turning toward Shimada, Kenzō pointed at him.
“How about your mama?”
Looking at O-Tsune, Kenzō pointed again.
When they had satisfied their need, they asked the same thing in a
different way.
“And who are your real papa and mama?”
Though he felt resentful, he had no choice but to repeat the same
reply. He couldn’t say why, but that seemed to please them. They
looked at each other and smiled.
At times, this scene was repeated among them almost every day.
At other times, the exchange didn’t end so simply. O-Tsune was espe-
cially persistent.
“Where were you born?”
“Little Ken, whose child are you really? Don’t be afraid to say!”
He felt as if he were being tormented. Sometimes he felt anger more
than pain. He wanted to remain silent instead of giving her the answer
she expected.
“So whom do you love more? Papa? Mama?”13

When he was six, Sōseki contracted smallpox. In 1872, the govern-

ment had mandated inoculations for all children, and the vaccine may
have infected him. A popular prescription for the pain was to cover the
face with “willow-bugs” (yanagi-mushi) whose sting was numbing, and
to wrap the hands in burlap to prevent scratching. Sōseki tore the wrap-
ping from his hands and scratched furiously, permanently scarring his
nose and cheeks. This disfigurement, as he saw it, seems to have wounded
his vanity deeply and contributed to the self-contempt that haunted him
despite his otherwise elevated vision of himself. Sōseki’s personal writ-
ing contains several references to his “pockmarked mug” (abata-zura),
but none as self-lacerating as the feline narrator’s comments on his
appearance in chapter 9 of I Am a Cat:

My master’s face is pockmarked. I am told that pockmarks were com-

mon enough before the great Restoration [in 1868], but in these days
of the Anglo-Japanese alliance [1902], a face this scarred feels a bit
behind the times. . . . I couldn’t say how many humans with pitted

B eginnings   5
 faces inhabit this world of ours today, but judging from the circle of
my own acquaintance, there is not a single cat. And only one human
being. To wit, my master. How singularly unfortunate for him!14

Sōseki lived with his adoptive parents until he was nine, when, in his
own words, “a strange disturbance in the household resulted in my abrupt
return to the house of my birth.”15 He is referring to the discovery by
Shiobara’s wife, Yasu, that her husband had taken a mistress, Hineno
Katsu, a twenty-seven-year-old widow with a beautiful daughter, Ren,
one year older than Sōseki. The strife this created was deeply troubling
to him, and he later recalled waking up to the sound of quarreling, a
slap to the face, his foster mother weeping hysterically. When she had
him alone, Yasu would vent her spite on him, referring to “that wanton
slut” and gnashing her teeth. In fact, Sōseki had always preferred his
adoptive father to Yasu but did not dare defend him and could only
endure her vituperations in silence. Eventually—though the dates are
uncertain—Shiobara left the house and moved to the place he had rented
for his mistress and her daughter. Sōseki lived alone with Yasu until 1876
when his real father took him back. He was moved to reclaim his son
when he learned that Shiobara was planning to put him to work in a
restaurant to help meet his expenses.
Sōseki had been duped into believing that his parents were his grand-
parents. He called them “Grandfather” and “Grandmother,” and they
said nothing to disabuse him. As Naokatsu was sixty when his son
returned and his wife, Chie, was forty-none, they might in fact have
passed for his grandparents. Inevitably, Sōseki learned the truth. By his
own account in Inside My Glass Doors, the family maid came to him
where he lay sleeping one night and whispered into his ear that the
grown-ups in the house were in fact his real parents. She seems to have
overheard them discussing how to break the news without upsetting
the child and had acted on a sympathetic impulse. Sōseki’s reaction to
this revelation, if we can credit his memoir, was bizarre and poignant:

I said only that I would keep this a secret as she bid me to, but in my
heart I was very happy. It wasn’t that she had told me the truth; my
happiness was due merely to the fact that the maid had been kind to
me. Curiously, given how grateful I felt, I can no longer remember her
name or face. All I remember is her kindness.16

6   B eginnings
It is as if the child has been left so forlorn by his circumstances that this
act of kindness displaced, at least for the moment, the sense of betrayal
he might have been expected to feel.
Shiobara maintained contact long after Sōseki had returned to the
Natsume house, and he continued to call himself Shiobara Kinnosuke.
Assuming the protagonist’s account of these conflicted years in Grass on
the Wayside is trustworthy, Sōseki may have felt alienated from both his
fathers:

To the father who sired him, he was a small object in the way. With
an expression that seemed to say, “Why has this misfit come pranc-
ing back to us?” he gave him to feel almost no sense of welcome as
his own child. His attitude, so different from what [he] had experi-
enced until now, tore up his affection for this real father by the roots
and dried it into weeds. In confusion, he wondered how the father who
had been all smiles in the presence of his foster parents could have
turned cold and unsympathetic the minute he had taken him back. He
felt no love for him.
“Since I have no choice, I’ll feed him. But I can’t handle anything
else. It’s only proper that they should care for him in other ways.”
His father reasoned thus. And his [foster father], being who he was,
was interested only in how the situation might benefit him.
“If I park him with his parents, they’ll have to manage somehow.
And when he grows up and can work a little, I’ll make a fuss and yank
him back to me.”
He couldn’t live by the sea. And he couldn’t be in the mountains.17

Can a child of ten have experienced the bitterness and cynicism this
passage conveys? Perhaps not, but it is hard to overlook the fact that
Grass on the Wayside, Sōseki’s only fiction to draw on his childhood in
Dickensian detail, is perhaps his darkest novel. In any event, his bio-
logical father and Shiobara appear to have engaged in a tug-of-war for
control of him for years until they finally reached a formal agreement in
1888, when Sōseki was twenty-one.
How to account for Naokatsu’s attitude toward his youngest son? Why
did he take him back if he felt that he was such a burden? Possibly he
loved him in his own way; possibly he was motivated by guilt; and almost
certainly there was a more venal consideration. It was not unusual for a

B eginnings   7
father to look upon his sons as marketable goods, investments in his own
future when he had become too old to take care of himself. Because
Sōseki had already demonstrated at age nine an uncommon intelligence
and an aptitude for academics, it was a reasonable assumption that
he would succeed in a refashioned society that highly valued such gifts.
At the time, all three of his elder brothers were alive, two in college and
requiring support from their father. Still, Naokatsu must have recognized
that his youngest son was his most promising child. A problem, and a
source of his frustration and coldness, was that Sōseki “belonged” to the
Shiobara family as a result of legal adoption.
Shiobara had his own eye on Sōseki as a hedge against the future and
had taken steps to help ensure that the child would not be pried away
from him. The census of 1872 showed that he had registered him as his
“real son and heir,” and in the 1874 census, the seven-year-old appears
as “the head of the Shiobara household.”18 Shiobara and his wife are
designated merely the householder’s mother and father, with the loan for
their house in Sōseki’s (Kinnosuke’s) name.
In 1887, when he was twenty, both Sōseki’s eldest brother, Daiichi,
and middle brother, Einosuke, died of tuberculosis within three months
of each other. Two years later, he mourned Daiichi’s death in an essay
he delivered at an English-speaking competition at Tokyo First Higher
School:

I observed a slight tinge of rosiness, sometimes revealed on his hol-

low cheeks, some faint luster rekindled in his sunken eyes; and his
smile, though it might appear ghastly enough to others, seemed to me
as lovely as that of an angel. But my heart would heave ominously
when I heard him say that he would not live long and that if he died,
I should take care of myself for his sake. “Oh brother! For heaven’s
sake, don’t say so” was all that I could say on those occasions, for
any further utterance was always choked by the saddest emotions, too
great for expressing. He was, however, right in his prediction, and the
last words on his dying lips were “be studious,” which I ever keep as
a sort of legacy.19

Sōseki’s father also was stricken by the loss of his firstborn son. At
just this time, he began negotiating with the Shiobaras for Sōseki’s legal
return to the family, insisting that this had been Daiichi’s dying wish.

8   B eginnings
(This may or may not have been true.) A contract was signed in January
1888: Naokatsu agreed to pay Shiobara Shōnosuke 240 yen in compen-
sation for “seven years of care and education” for Kinnosuke, 170 yen
due on signing, and the balance of 70 yen to be paid in monthly install-
ments of 3 yen with no interest. In return, Kinnosuke would be reregis-
tered as Naokatsu’s fourth son, and Shiobara would agree to release any
claim on him that he may have had.
The same month, while Naokatsu was away in Kyoto, Sōseki infuri-
ated his father by sending an addendum to Shiobara recapitulating that
money had been paid and permission granted to return to the Natsume
household and ending with the hope that “in future, no heartlessness or
inhumanity will occur between the parties.”20 In Naokatsu’s view, the
effect of this would be to give the Shiobaras purchase to make trouble
in the future, and he wrote angrily to Shiobara to say that notwithstand-
ing any invalid addenda, there was to be no further contact between
the parties. His note implied that Sōseki had been coerced into writing
by his foster mother, Yasu.
In fact, Shiobara resurfaced in Sōseki’s life in 1909, after he had
become a famous novelist, and importuned him for money, reminding
him of the love and care he had received from his adoptive father for
more than seven years. Shiobara went so far as to urge Kinnosuke to
become his foster son once again. It was this incident, deeply disturbing
to Sōseki, that he used as the animating drama in Grass on the Wayside.

B eginnings   9
 +
2

School Days

Like other social institutions, public education in Sōseki’s day was under
construction. The Ministry of Education was established in 1871, and a
national school system was created the following year. The blueprint
called for eight national universities and eight attached special higher
schools, feeder schools for the very best students. Two hundred and fifty-
six middle schools were planned, and one primary school for every six
hundred citizens. Primary schools were divided into upper and lower
schools, with eight grades in each, and each grade took six months to
complete. Students began at age six and completed the eighth grade of
upper school at fourteen, assuming they stayed in school (the four years
of compulsory education were later expanded to six). The ministry did
not issue standardized textbooks for elementary schools until 1902: until
then, the curriculum was a hodgepodge of traditional Confucian ele-
ments, including rote memorization of the Chinese Analects, as well as
new courses such as world geography, mathematics, and civics.
Sōseki and the newly emerging society grew up together. His first pri-
mary school, Toda Elementary in Asakusa, was founded in 1872, the
year he entered. In the summer or fall of 1876, he transferred to Ichigaya
Elementary near his parents’ home. Ichigaya appears to have been an
inferior school with fewer students and a smaller government subsidy.
In a collection of recollections he serialized in 1909, Spring Miscellany,1
Sōseki described watching a teacher writing on the blackboard the title
for an assignment in which he used an incorrect Chinese character and,
when he left the room, walking to the blackboard from his desk and add-
ing the correct character next to it. When the teacher returned, he
glanced at the blackboard and declared, mistakenly, that the character
he had chosen could also be used. Sōseki wrote, “That shocking display

10  
 of illiteracy makes me wince even when I recall it today, in 1909.”2 This
early indication of erudition was predictive: for his entire school career
and throughout his adult life, he would be, simply put, smarter than any-
one else around, certain to know more, and likely to be arrogant about
his superior knowledge.
In everything Sōseki subsequently wrote about his school years, he
invariably described himself as “an indolent student who studied little if
at all,” but that seems unlikely, given that three certificates of monetary
prizes for academic excellence as an elementary school student survive.
His diplomas also indicate that more than once, he completed two grades
instead of one in six months. By the time he transferred from Ichigaya
to Kinka Elementary School at age twelve, he was two years ahead of
himself.
That same year, 1879, Sōseki entered Tokyo Metropolitan First
­Middle School, the only middle school in Tokyo. The school was divided
into a lower and an upper school; students entered at age fourteen and
graduated at age nineteen. There were two tracks, one taught in English
using English textbooks, the other in Japanese with no English whatso-
ever. Sōseki chose the Japanese program. This may have been the choice
that his father insisted on, and it may have partly reflected what seems
to have been Sōseki’s aversion to English, surprising in view of his sub-
sequent mastery.
Sōseki’s progress from middle school to Tokyo Imperial University,
which he entered in September 1890 at the age of twenty-three, was
meandering and poorly documented. After just two years in middle
school, he dropped out in the spring of 1881 without telling his parents—
his father would certainly have disapproved—leaving home each morn-
ing with his lunch box as if he were going to school. He had realized
that he wanted to attend the university and would need a command of
English, no matter how much he disliked it. In view of his goal, his next
decision was bewildering: he enrolled in a strictly traditional academy
of classical Chinese studies, Nishō gakusha (academy) and remained
there for a year reading the Chinese dynastic histories, the Analects of
Confucius and Mencius and Tang and Song poetry. Nishō was in every
respect an anachronism. Classes began at 6 or 7 a.m. and were “con-
ducted with strictness that recalled a terakoya school.”3 Sōseki’s com-
mand of classical Chinese was already formidable: at age eleven, in

S chool D ays   11
1878, he wrote a brief essay in kanbun, a Chinese and Japanese hybrid
that was very different from vernacular Japanese.4 Entitled “About
Masashige,” it was an apostrophe to the righteousness and bravery of a
fourteenth-century warrior, Kusunoki Masashige, a loyalist who fought
on the side of Emperor Go-Daigo and helped him wrest power from the
military government in Kamakura. There was nothing original about
Sōseki’s treatment of the subject. At a time when it was deemed impor-
tant to reinforce reverence for the new Meiji emperor in elementary school
textbooks, the Education Ministry lionized Masashige as a paragon of
samurai behavior. But Sōseki’s proficiency in kanbun was extraordinary.
During his year at Nishō, he deepened his understanding of the Chinese
canon and became a young scholar of classical Chinese studies, a com-
mand he continued to augment throughout his life. Classical Chinese
would become an underground river in Sōseki’s writing, not simply in
his Chinese poetry, but also in his Japanese prose, enriching his lan-
guage much as Greek and Latin nourished the language of eighteenth-
century writers like Samuel Johnson.
Sōseki could not have chosen a course of study more decidedly against
the tide of the times than classical Chinese. In the 1870s and 1880s, the
national project was building a modern (that is, Western) state, a goal
that required study of Western institutions and culture. Among the books
that were the focus of debate on college campuses was Herbert Spen-
cer’s Principles of Biology (1864), a study of evolutionism in a universe
separate from that of the Confucian Analects. A physical monument to
Japan’s preoccupation with Western behavior was the Hall of the Cry-
ing Deer (Rokumei-kan), a two-story party hall and guesthouse for for-
eign dignitaries designed by a British architect resident in Japan and
completed in 1883. In this unintentional parody of Victorian elegance,
the government staged lavish balls designed to persuade Westerners that
Japan had achieved the status of world citizen and to promote the revi-
sion of unequal trade treaties.
Meanwhile, Sōseki buried his nose in Chinese books and learned “a
goodly ten thousand Tang- and Song-dynasty poems.” Whatever his rea-
sons for enrolling may have been, by the end of his first year at Nishō
Academy, he seems to have realized that classical Chinese studies would
not equip him to be a useful citizen in the age of Japan’s Enlightenment,
and he withdrew from school in January 1881. The next two years are a
blank. The earliest of Sōseki’s surviving letters are dated 1889, and he

12   S chool D ays

did not begin keeping a diary until 1900. There is no record of his where-
abouts or what he was doing until September 1883, when he moved out
of his father’s house into a room in a Buddhist temple and, after selling
his Chinese books, enrolled in an English cram school, the Seiritsu gaku-
sha. Sōseki entered the school knowing little English. Although his
eldest brother had tutored him at home, they had managed to get through
only the second book of the elementary national reader, and “given the
short temper of the teacher and the student’s distaste for the subject,
little progress had been made.”5 Nonetheless, before the year was over,
Sōseki had jumped to an upper class and was reading William Swinton’s
World History.
In September 1884, at age seventeen, three years younger than his
classmates, Sōseki passed the notoriously difficult entrance exams to
the First Special Higher School. As the feeder school for Tokyo Imperial
University—which was designed to be, and still is, the country’s flagship
national university—the First Special Higher School, popularly known as
“Ichikō,” was the most prestigious of the national university prep schools.
The student body, the brightest in the land, was an arrogant lot. They
were distinguished stylistically by a slovenliness they flaunted: they
lived in irredeemably filthy rooms, clomped around in wooden clogs,
dressed in threadbare kimonos, and wore their hair long and matted.
Notwithstanding their appearance, this was a student elite, acutely
aware that they had been selected to play a role in shaping the country’s
future.
For his first three years—the system had recently been changed to five
years of higher school and three years of university—Sōseki lived in
Kanda in what he described as a squalid boarding house called the
Suetomi-ya. Among his fellow boarders was Nakamura Zekō, a brash,
irreverent student who became his lifelong friend and stalwart advocate.
Born in Hiroshima in 1867, the same year as Sōseki, Zekō, the fifth son
of a saké brewer, entered the Finance Ministry after graduating from
Tokyo Imperial’s law department and subsequently traveled to the Japa-
nese colony of Taiwan, where he became a disciple of Gotō Shinpei, the
governor-­general. In 1908, at forty-one, Zekō was named the governor
of the South Manchuria Railway, an administrative position with great
power. The railway ran the length of Manchuria from Port Arthur in the
south to Changchun in the north and branched southeast at Fushun all
the way down the Korean peninsula to Pusan. Throughout the 1920s

S chool D ays   13
and thereafter, Japan used the railroad as a spinal column around which
to consolidate its political and cultural control of Manchuria.6 Zekō was
frequently out of the country, but he never failed to show up at moments
of crisis in Sōseki’s life, with support in the form of encouragement and
advice and, frequently, money. Even though they were best friends for
life, it is hard to imagine two more different people. Zekō, known in later
years as “the wily badger in a frock coat,” was generous to a fault to the
people he admired—and in his gruff way, he admired Sōseki more than
anyone—and he was pragmatic and decisive. Sōseki, in contrast, was a
dreamer. “I had no idea what the governor of the Mantetsu Railroad
did,” he wrote, “and I doubt he has ever read a single line of mine.”7
Classes at First Special Higher School were conducted mainly in Eng-
lish using English textbooks in all subjects, including biology, mathe-
matics, zoology, and botany, and students were required to present and
answer questions in English. According to Sōseki, he and Zekō and their
friends, to whom he referred as the “brat pack,” were indolent students
who had contempt for those who worked hard at their studies. They
played cards, drank, ogled pretty women in the street, and enjoyed tor-
menting their teachers. “Stove torture” involved stoking the wood-­
burning stove at the front of the room and watching the teacher flush red
as he became overheated.8
Sōseki’s insistence on his dereliction as a student is suspicious. It is
true that he was demoted at the end of his second year, but that was the
result of his inability to take the year-end exam owing to illness. Two
drafts of a letter in English survive, and although they are not dated, it
is likely they were written in July 1886. The “stomach disease” to which
Sōseki refers was peritonitis caused by a ruptured appendix (note that
Sōseki is still using his adoptive father’s name):
Draft 1:

To: Nakagawa Esq.

Sir: Suffering from stomach disease, I have been confined to my bed
for some thirty days past. I am still far from well and have no enjoy-
ment excepting such as my few books afforded me. I write to beg the
loan of Lord Lytton’s novels of which I know you have a complete set.
Pray look in for an hour now and then and give comfort to
Yours ever truly
Shiohara

14   S chool D ays

 Draft 2:

Sir: Suffering from stomach disease, I have been confined to my bed

for some thirty days past. I am still far from well and cannot attend
the school, though the final examination is at hand. I proposed, there-
fore, to the office, to examine me just at the beginning of next term. I
was, however, told that it is the regulation of the school that the office
does not take such a trouble as to examine a pupil in the next term in
case of his absence during the examination of that term, unless he has
got the marks above sixty in every lesson. The officer also added that
I should [incomplete]9

Should this be read as implying that as he claimed, Sōseki was not a

serious student and had failed to earn “marks above sixty in every les-
son”? In any event, the school refused to give him a makeup exam, and
he was required to repeat the second year. The record shows that he
nonetheless completed his five years at First Special Higher School at
the head of his class, a position he maintained throughout his univer-
sity years. Sōseki’s classmates agreed that his ability to read and write
Chinese and English was frightening.
In their third year at First Special Higher, Sōseki and Nakamura Zekō,
both twenty, moved out of their shabby boarding house into an equally
rundown dormitory belonging to a private teaching academy, Etō gijuku,
where they had accepted part-time teaching jobs in order to lessen their
reliance on their families. Sōseki taught geography and geometry in
English, using English textbooks. The boys taught for two hours a day
after their own classes. In the morning, they walked across Ryōgoku
Bridge to First Special Higher and back again in the afternoon. They
lived together on the second floor in a cramped tatami room—two mats!—
into which two desks had been wedged side by side. When the room
became too dim to read, they opened the window, in spite of the cold.
Sōseki remembered looking out and seeing a young woman standing
vacantly beside the tenement next door and thinking how beautiful her
face and figure were in the evening light. He never mentioned the girl to
Zekō. Downstairs lived ten or so students and the school administrator.
The food served in the drafty dining room was miserable, except for a
bowl of beef broth every other day: the fat that floated to the surface
imparted to chopsticks an enticing aroma of beef.10

S chool D ays   15
 Sōseki and Zekō were paid 5 yen a month, a paltry sum but adequate
to their needs. Room and board at the school was 2 yen a month, tuition
at First Special Higher School was a mere 25 sen, and most of the books
they needed were available at the school library. Subtracting from the
remainder of their pooled funds what they needed for the public bath
usually left some “spending money” that allowed them to walk the streets,
stopping along the way for soba noodles, sweet bean paste soup (shiruko),
and sushi. Zekō won a race for First Special Higher in the Imperial Uni-
versity Regatta of 1889 and was awarded a small sum of money, which
he spent on two books for Sōseki, Literature and Dogma (a bible study by
Matthew Arnold) and Hamlet. After reading Hamlet for the first time,
Sōseki claimed he did not understand it.
In September 1890, Sōseki, aged twenty-three, passed the entrance
examination to Tokyo Imperial University and enrolled in the Depart-
ment of English, joining the second class to graduate in English litera-
ture. He had been conflicted about what to study. Since childhood, he
had loved reading above all else, and by the time he got to middle school,
he was intending to study literature. He was discouraged by a conver-
sation with his eldest brother, Daiichi, a university chemistry student at
the time whom he admired and who tried hard to look after him. Accord-
ing to Sōseki, Daiichi had disapproved of his enthusiasm for literature:
“Literature is not an occupation, it is an accomplishment!” (he is credited
with having used the English word).11 In those days, the importance
assigned in Confucianism to being of use to society was still very much
in the air and Sōseki seems to have been shaken by the implication in
his brother’s remark, that literature did not qualify as “useful.” In his
third year of higher school, when it was time to declare a study empha-
sis, he therefore chose French and science, specifically architecture. In
an interview entitled “Flunking,” Sōseki explained his choice somewhat
facetiously:

I was always essentially a misfit, and pretty sure I wouldn’t be admit-

ted to the world as I was. Unless I chose an occupation so essential to
society that people would solicit my services, bowing their heads to me,
misfit or not. And I knew that architects needn’t worry about where
their next meal was coming from. There was also the fact that I had
always loved the fine arts and thought I might discover in architecture
both the practical and the artistic.12

16   S chool D ays

Fortunately (for all of us who have feasted on his fiction), he heeded the
advice of a classmate and friend who was studying philosophy and was
critical of Sōseki’s choice:

At the time, I was planning on creating something grand like the Pyr-
amids, but Yoneyama [Yosasaburō], who was in philosophy and
ended up a doctor of literature, disabused me: “Given the state of
Japan today, there’s no way you’ll be able to build a legacy to future
generations with the kind of buildings you’re thinking of. Literature is
a different matter. If you study literature hard enough, there’s always
the possibility that you’ll create a masterpiece that will survive you
as a legacy for hundreds of years or even thousands of years!” When
I chose architecture, I was calculating personal gain for myself, but
Yoneyama was talking about serving the world. And I could see that
he was right, so I revised my goal and decided to study literature. I
had the feeling I didn’t need more study of Japanese and Chinese lit-
erature and chose to major in English.13

It would be an oversimplification to conclude that Sōseki was princi-

pally motivated to pursue a career as a scholar, and subsequently as a
novelist, by a desire to leave a legacy to the world. Nonetheless, there is
evidence that living on in his work was on his mind. An example is a
letter he wrote to the Yomiuri newspaper in November 1906 declining an
invitation to write a daily column:

Even if the Yomiuri were to pay me 800 yen (annually), articles I wrote
for a daily newspaper would hardly be likely to remain in the world
as a legacy after I am gone. . . . Losing precious time writing some-
thing that will be read and discarded in a single day is little different
from wasting time as a university teacher.14

Tokyo Imperial University prided itself on attracting to its faculty

only “foreign hires” who were substantial scholars. The year that Sōseki
enrolled, 1890, Ernest Fenellosa, an aesthetician, art historian, and
painter left the faculty to become the curator of oriental art at the Bos-
ton Museum of Arts (regrettable timing, since Sōseki would have been
an ideal Fenellosa student). The famous storyteller Lafcadio Hearn did
not join the faculty until 1896, three years after Sōseki had graduated.

S chool D ays   17
His principal foreign teachers during his three years at the university
were a Russian-German philosopher, Raphael von Koeber (1848–1923),
and a Scottish professor of English, James Main Dixon (1856–1933).
Von Koeber had grown up uncomfortably in Russia as an ethnic Ger-
man. A piano prodigy, he entered a music conservatory in Moscow at
nineteen, becoming friends with Tchaikovsky and Anton Rubinstein, but
decided against a career in music and went to Germany to study phi-
losophy at Jena with Rudolf Christoph Eucken, a hugely influential fig-
ure in Japan. Von Koeber arrived in Tokyo with his doctorate in 1893
and spent twenty-one years at Tokyo Imperial University teaching Greek,
medieval philosophy, and aesthetics. He also taught Greek and Latin
and, at the same time, piano at the Tokyo National Music School (later
the National University of Fine Arts and Music).
Sōseki’s lifelong appetite for philosophy was doubtless sharpened
under Von Koeber’s influence. Later, he became an avid reader of Von
Koeber’s mentor, Eucken, of Henri Bergson and, perhaps most impor-
tant, of William James. Although there is no record of how much time
Sōseki spent in Von Koeber’s classroom, there is no question that he
admired this eccentric, fiercely individualistic, and deeply serious teacher.
Following a visit to his solitary home where he observed that “not a
single volume on his bookshelves was brightened with any color,” he
wrote, “If you go to our university and ask who is the professor with the
most integrity, ninety out of one hundred students, before they begin list-
ing our numerous Japanese faculty, will probably reply, Von Koeber.”15
James Dixon, author of Dictionary of Idiomatic English Phrases, Specially
Designed for the Use of Japanese Students, was not an inspiring teacher. In
one of his most widely quoted lectures, “My Individualism,” delivered
on November 25, 1914, to students at the Peers’ School, Sōseki included
a caustic assessment of Dixon’s approach to English literature:

At the university, I majored in something called English literature. You

may ask what is meant by English literature; all I can tell you is that
I spent three years as a student obsessed with finding an answer to
that very question. My instructor in those days was a man named
Dixon. He had us read prose and poetry aloud and write essays, and he
would scold us for leaving out definite and indefinite articles and cor-
rect us angrily when our pronunciation was wrong. The questions on his
tests were always the same sort of thing: the dates of Wordsworth’s

18   S chool D ays

 birth and death, the number of Shakespeare folios, Scott’s novels in
chronological order. Young as you are, you probably have a fair idea
about how much that had to do with English literature. Putting aside
English literature for the moment, how was any of that supposed to
help us understand literature in general? Trying to get to the bottom of
that on your own was a bit like a blind man peering through a fence.
I’d spend days wandering frantically around the library and come
away without even a hint. It wasn’t simply that I wasn’t up to the task,
there seemed to be a paucity of decent books on the subject. I studied
for three years and ended up with no idea of what literature was. I
think it’s fair to say that this was the source of my agony.16

Sōseki may have been confused about where he was heading, but it
is doubtful that he was as ignorant of literature as he claimed. In Octo-
ber 1892, he published in a university magazine his first substantial criti-
cal essay, “On the Poetry of Walt Whitman: Literary Champion of
Equality.”17 As Whitman had died earlier that year and was scarcely
known in Japan, Sōseki may have been introduced to his work by Pro-
fessor Dixon. The essay created a stir.18
In subsequent issues of the magazine, Sōseki serialized “The English
Poets’ Concept of Nature,” a critical investigation focused on the imag-
ery used by Pope, Addison, and Wordsworth. This was read and ful-
somely admired by everyone on the campus, including Tonoyama
Masakazu, the president of the university. It is hard to imagine an under-
graduate’s essay (at twenty-six, Sōseki was in every respect more like a
graduate student in the American system) on a subject as esoteric as this
attracting so much attention. But it is important to remember that in
1893, Japan was dedicated to elucidating the darkest corners of the West-
ern mystery. In any event, by the time Sōseki left Tokyo Imperial Uni-
versity that year for a teaching job at another college, he was on his way
to establishing a reputation as a superior critic of Western letters.

S chool D ays   19
 +
3

Words

Sōseki’s earliest passionate literary friendship, certainly his most forma-

tive, was with Masaoka Shiki, a young poet exactly his age who is ven-
erated in Japan as the father of the modern haiku. They knew each other
for just twelve years, from 1889 to 1901, and their relationship was con-
ducted principally thorough long, ornamented, self-consciously literary
letters written in sōrōbun, an epistolary style no longer used, a variation
of kanbun difficult to read today. Much of their correspondence was
focused on haiku, which they exchanged and evaluated with intense seri-
ousness. Most of the time, Shiki was the teacher, Sōseki the student. The
tutelage and inspiration he received from Shiki was instrumental in his
evolution into a haiku poet, and Sōseki turned to haiku as a compressed
means of self-expression at difficult moments throughout his life. News
of Shiki’s early death at age thirty-one of caries spinal tuberculosis,
reaching Sōseki in London, may have been the blow that pushed him
over the edge of despondency into clinical depression.
Shiki was born Masaoka Tokoronosuke in 1867 in the provincial city
of Matsuyama in the northwest of Shikoku. Until 1871, when the feudal
domains (han) were abolished, the castle town of Matsuyama was the
seat of the Matsuyama domain, where for generations Shiki’s samurai
family had served the Matsudaira clan, lords of the domain. With the
abolition of fiefs, the stipend in rice provided to the vassal in return for
service also disappeared. Consequently, following his father’s death in
1872, Shiki’s mother, the daughter of a Confucian scholar, had been
obliged to support him and his younger sister as a seamstress.
When he was four, Shiki began his education studying calligraphy
with his grandfather. At five, in 1872, the year of his father’s death, he
began attending a newly founded primary school whose students were
exclusively male children from samurai (warrior-aristocrat) families.

20  
He continued studying at home, reading Chinese texts with his grand­
father, and was fluent in kanbun by the time he reached the upper grades
of primary school. When he was eleven and still in grade school, Shiki
edited a literary magazine in which he published his first kanshi, a poem
written in classical Chinese.
Shiki entered middle school in 1880 but was determined to leave the
provinces for Tokyo. “You won’t find a whale swimming in shallow water,”
he wrote grandiosely, and withdrew in 1883, arriving in Tokyo on June 10
at age sixteen. He briefly stayed with an uncle and then enrolled in a cram
school, the Kyōritsu Academy, where he read Herbert Spencer, resolved to
become a philosopher, and began studying English in earnest.
At the same time, Sōseki was enrolling in a similar cram school, the
Seiritsu Academy, preparing to take the entrance examination to the First
Special Higher School, with its heavy emphasis on English. Unknown
to each other, they both took and passed the same exam in September
1884 and both enrolled in First Special Higher. Oddly, each later recalled
an identical incident that occurred during the examination. In those
days, cheating on exams was commonplace; even Sōseki, the unbend-
ing moralist, seemed to have had no compunctions. In an interview about
his student days, he remembered asking another student surreptitiously
while taking the exam for definitions to English vocabulary he did not
understand and concluded, “Strangely, I passed the exam, but the fellow
who gave me the answers failed.” Shiki related the same anecdote with
the identical punch line. Could the same student have been supplying
both of them with answers?
Coincidentally, Shiki moved into the boardinghouse where Sōseki
and Nakamura Zekō were living. They seem to have been aware of each
other, possibly because of their mutual friend, Yoneyama Yosasaburō,
the mathematician who had advised Sōseki to give up architecture and
go back to literature. But they did not become friends until after they
had competed in an English-speaking competition held on February 5,
1889, during their last days at First Special Higher. Shiki’s title was
“Self-Reliance,” a subject in vogue at the time, partly due to a slim
best seller in Japanese translation, Self-Help, by an English utilitarian
named Samuel Smiles. Sōseki described his grief at the death of his elder
brother.
There is no record of how either Sōseki or Shiki fared in the competi-
tion, but each apparently identified in the other’s speech something

W ords   21
that appealed to him, almost certainly originality expressed with an
impressive command of English. Thenceforth, until Shiki failed his finals
at the end of the second year and dropped out of Tokyo Imperial Univer-
sity, which they had entered together in September 1890, they were often
in each other’s company. Sōseki’s recollection of Shiki as a university
student is not flattering:

Masaoka never went to class. And he wasn’t one to go to the trouble of

borrowing notes and copying them. So just before an exam, he’d ask
me to come over and I’d summarize my notes for him. Being who he
was, he’d listen with one ear and announce that he understood when
in fact he didn’t have the vaguest idea and then go off half-cocked. . . . ​
He was more precocious than I and spouted a lot of philosophy that
cowed me. I had very little sense of philosophy, and he’d come in
waving a book by Hartmann. It was a thick volume in German, and I
doubt he could read it much, but he brandished it and put me to shame.
If he was still a child, I was an infant. . . . In those days [late 1888],
he was staying in the dormitory maintained by the former lord of his
domain in Tokyo for the children of former vassals, and when it was
time for meals, we’d eat in the dining room. . . . It was winter, and
when the General1 went to the toilet, he took a brazier into the privy
with him. “How can you take care of business carrying a brazier?” I
asked him. “I back in and hold it on my lap.” he said. The villain grilled
his sukiyaki meat on that same brazier; it was disgusting.2

Later in this 1908 interview, Sōseki described his sense of the dynamic
between them:

He was an oddly arrogant fellow, and I suppose, in my way, I was just

as arrogant. We agreed that our teachers were ridiculous and so were
our classmates. Shiki’s likes and dislikes were pronounced, and he
had little truck with anyone. For whatever reason, he associated with
me only. One reason was that I was able to adapt to him, to suit his
needs, with little effort on my part. He wasn’t the sort of fellow you
could get along with if you had to assert yourself. There was also the
fact that our temperaments to some extent were well matched, and so
were our tastes. And our egos didn’t collide.3

22   W ords
 A picture emerges of two young men smarter and certainly more cre-
ative than their classmates, misfits each in his own way, voracious read-
ers, and already broadly literate, aware of their own superiority and
unused to according admiration to others. It was appropriate that their
relationship originated in an oratorical competition, for the substance of
their bond was always words. They discovered at once that they shared,
for example, a passion for rakugo (fallen words), the comic routines per-
formed by masters of the art at vaudeville theaters known as yose. As in
all aspects of their friendship, an element of competition was apparent
even here. Sōseki recalled, “The sensei4 considered himself a connoisseur,
but when it came to rakugo, I was something of an aficionado myself—I
suppose he decided I was a worthy conversation partner on the subject,
and that was a bond between us.”5 Another shared passion was reading
difficult works from the Chinese canon as well as Japanese popular fic-
tion written in the mid- and late nineteenth century, melodramas about
star-crossed romance in the pleasure quarters and bawdy comic scenes
from the public bath and the barber shop.
But it was poetry that drew them together. Initially, they focused on
kanshi, poems written in pure classical Chinese, seven or five characters
in each of the stanza’s five lines, composed according to strict rules of
Chinese prosody that chiefly had to do with placing characters with des-
ignated tones—the standard classical language has four tones—in desig-
nated places in the line.6 According to Sōseki,

Masaoka had already been composing kanshi, and he was practicing

calligraphy as well. I was writing kanshi and kanbun myself, and I
dared to show him a lot of my work. That’s how he first got to know
me. . . . ​The General’s kanbun was pathetic, as though he had clipped
phrases out of a newspaper editorial. When it came to [Chinese]
poetry, he had written far more than I and knew more about prosody.
My kanshi didn’t cohere, but his did. When it came to kanbun, I was
sure of myself, but his poetry was superior to mine.7

In the summer of 1889, Sōseki and four of his classmates traveled by

steamboat to Shimonoseki, a historically important port in the extreme
west of Japan, and spent a month exploring the countryside in what is
today Yamaguchi Prefecture. While his comrades played shōgi (a board

W ords   23
game) or cards, Sōseki sat apart composing kanshi. The travel journal
he completed in September, Sawdust Chronicle (Bokusetsu-roku) over-
whelmed Shiki when he saw it. The Chinese poems it included were
“flawlessly composed,” and he could scarcely believe that Sōseki’s kan-
bun was so fluent, as though he were writing in a living language, that
he was able to personify thunder and lightning and waves, a feat that
had never occurred to him might be possible. In his casual paraphrase,
Sōseki does not let on how flattered he must have felt: “Somewhere in his
comments he said something about those who read books in English not
understanding Chinese, and those who understand Chinese not manag-
ing English but that his big brother Sōseki was the rare bird who excelled
at both—something like that.”8
Shiki was capable of extravagant admiration. Sōseki knew how to
praise and could even be effusive, but he generally tended to be severe. His
letter to Shiki on New Year’s Eve 1890 was critical but passionately con-
cerned (at the time, Shiki was experimenting unsuccessfully with fiction):

How are you since your return to the country? How goes it with your
reading? How goes it with the writing? What are you doing to make
the long days pass quickly? On this last day of the year, every house
is bustling, but I, reaping the rewards of poverty, have no business to
wind up and am free to read all day and burrow under my covers at
night to listen to the stillness. To put it crudely, unburdened by money,
I have no choice but to slouch through this imperfect world with noth-
ing in hand but my own balls. During the break, I’ve been reading
essays and have begun a book by Matthew Arnold, Literature and
Dogma. [A gift from Zekō.]
Have you begun writing your novel? What style do you intend to
use? I’ll reserve my comments until I’ve read it, but I have to say that
your writing is slender, willowy as if written by a woman. It lacks sin-
cerity and frankness and consequently rarely has the power to move
your readers. Language achieves beauty when it conveys your think-
ing artlessly and directly. Today we have a gang of novelists with no
original ideas who account themselves masters because they can
polish their prose—this is like dressing aboriginals from Hokkaido in
modern Tokyo suits. . . . Contriving pleasing language should be the
second, the third, the fourth thing on a writer’s mind; what matters is
the idea itself. I know you are sensible of this, but I worry that you

24   W ords
 spend the day writing from morning till night and leave yourself no
time to nourish your ideas . . .
What I beg you on bended knee to do (I’m not speaking idly) is to
stop practicing so much and devote the time you will save to reading.
You are ill; and to torment an invalid with things that are disagree-
able to him seems cruel, but the truth is you won’t achieve anything
splendid by devoting your life to practice. Is it not much better to die
having achieved knowledge?. . . If, however, you feel that practice is
more interesting than formulating an idea, then so be it, I haven’t a
word to say. I hope you will accept my heartfelt adjuration in place of
a New Year’s greeting.
(I wonder if reading this won’t bring a sardonic smile to your lips
and a muttered “what a fool!”? In any event, your coldness amazes me.)9

In his next letter, in early January 1890, Sōseki invalidated the argu-
ment against reading that Shiki must have proposed in a letter that has
been lost:

a. If you don’t know which books to read, why not ask someone!
b. If you don’t have books to read, why not buy or borrow them!
c. If you can’t read English, why not study harder or, if that’s not
an option, why not read Japanese and Chinese books!
Your three quibbles are truly flimsy.10

Although many of the letters that Sōseki wrote to his friend have an
intensity that feels vaguely homoerotic,11 there is no evidence to suggest
that they were physically intimate nor is that likely, particularly in view
of Shiki’s rapidly declining health. In Shiki’s case, we have nothing to
suggest that he ever experienced physical love. But there are moments,
even in the scoldings they exchanged, the commands and condescen-
sion and intemperate rudeness, in which the reader senses that the
boundaries of bosom buddyhood have been exceeded and may even
glimpse a fantasy that was more than platonic.
In the summer of 1889, still at the shore with his friends, Sōseki wrote
Shiki a highly embellished letter in which he reported having struggled
and finally succeeded in persuading their professor not to fail Shiki in his
class. The letter is informed by an extended metaphor in which Sōseki is
a knight doing valiant battle for a damsel in distress: Sōseki addressed the

W ords   25
letter to his “mistress” and signed it “from your lord.” Anticipating Shiki’s
response to his gallantry, he mimics him gushing with girlish delight,
“Goodness me! There must be more to this Kin-san than meets the
eye!”12 Sōseki appends an imperious postscript: “I presume you’ll be on
your way back to Tokyo when this reaches you. If you should still be
dawdling, ­tarrying in the country, I expect you to leap up and rush here
to me at once.”13
The American scholar Keith Vincent characterized this sort of exchange
between the two friends as “comic gender-bending.” (Elsewhere, he styles it
“verbal cross-dressing.”) If the letter had been written in contemporary
vernacular Japanese, he asserts, in place of the mock-heroic classical
language that Sōseki affects,

it would come uncomfortably close (for some people) to a love letter

between two men. As it is, however, far from compromising the gen-
der role of the letter writer or its recipient, Sōseki’s language playfully
performs a classically binary gender distinction, the hapless woman
saved by a knight in shining armor. The fact that both parties are bio-
logical men only adds to the human and lighthearted (homo) social-
ity of the exchange.”14

Komori Yōichi’s reading was less abstract: “Sōseki was always in love
with Shiki.” At the very least, it seems clear that Sōseki and Shiki were,
in John Donne’s phrase, “one another’s best.”
Shiki had come to Tokyo from the obscurity of the countryside deter-
mined to foment a revolution in the seventeen-syllable haiku, a form in
which Sōseki was untried, and when it came to haiku, Shiki was the
undisputed teacher. “Lately, he says he’s finally had a revelation about
haiku,” Sōseki wrote,

and there’s not a poet in the world he fears. He urges me to compose

haiku constantly. “There’s a bamboo grove beyond that house, write
a haiku about that!” he commands. I haven’t said a word, he makes
the decision. I suppose I’d say he treats me like a vassal.15

Sōseki’s first surviving effort is included in a letter he wrote on May 13,

1889, shortly after he and Shiki became friends. On May 9, Shiki had vom-
ited blood for the first time and had continued to bring up blood for several

26   W ords
days (He assumed that a lesion in his throat was bleeding, but this proved
to be wishful thinking: the blood was coming from his lungs and indicated
tuberculosis, a death sentence in those days.) Sōseki paid a sick call on
May 13 and wrote the letter that evening from his family home in Waseda,
where he was living at the time. In high-flown kanbun, he expressed his
concern, urging Shiki to dismiss his “inattentive and unsympathetic”
doctor and to check into a nearby hospital for a thorough examination:
“[T]he doors and windows must be closed before the storm arrives.—You
must take good care of yourself, for your mother’s sake at least, and cer-
tainly for your country.” The letter ends with a line in English—to live is the
sole end of man!—followed by two similar haiku. The first:

Thinking to return home (ka-e-r-ō to)

Weep not but rather smile (na-ka-zu ni wa-ra-e)
Cuckoo bird! (ho-to-to-gi-su)16

The poet is addressing the cuckoo, but what is a cuckoo doing here?
There is no intuiting the answer: the reader must know that the cuckoo’s
song has traditionally sounded to Japanese ears like the coughing of
blood (this may have been sensory extrapolation, as the bird’s tongue is
blood-red). We are familiar with the cuckoo call from the cuckoo clock:
can we hear the coughing of blood in that repetitive two-note call that
punctuates the hour? What does coughing blood sound like, a gurgling
perhaps? Whatever we may hear, Sōseki is referring unmistakably to his
stricken friend when he ends his haiku with the five-syllable word for
cuckoo, “ho-to-to-gi-su.”
No crying, thinking to return home, smile, cuckoo bird! Buck up and be
strong, in other words. But there is another allusion buried here. ­Hototogisu
may be written in a variety of ways using different Chinese characters. The
most common version is “time-bird,” 時鳥. Another, relevant to Sōseki’s
haiku, is, imponderably, “not-warranting-a-return-home,” 不如帰, a three-
character Chinese phrase that literate Japanese would also read hototogisu.
Accordingly, the first line, “thinking to return home,” has already evoked
the cuckoo that appears explicitly in the third line, implicitly coughing up
blood, and yields in its variant form the notion of “returning home” or,
more precisely, not worth a return home. Possibly, Sōseki, who seems to
have sensed the dire implications of Shiki’s illness, was intimating a return
to the other world of death and entreating his friend not to travel there.

W ords   27
 Shortly after receiving Sōseki’s cuckoo poems and writing a batch of
them himself, Shiki officially took the pen name Shiki (his given name
was Noboru). His choice was yet another variation of hototogisu, in this
case the Chinese term for the cuckoo that appears in the animal sutra and
is read shiki (子規) or, in Japanese, hototogisu. Until then, he had signed
his writing and letters using a variety of comic names, one of which was
“Sōseki.” Kinnosuke had used his own facetious signatures, like “Mr. Pits
and Peaks,” referring to his pocked face; the “indolent one from Kikui-
chō”; and “recluse in the capital.” He apparently appropriated “Sōseki”
for himself at about this same time, mid-May 1889. He used this for the
rest of his life, making it the most famous sobriquet in modern Japanese
literature.17
Sōseki’s May 1889 letter inaugurated his apprenticeship to Shiki as a
haiku poet. During their years at Tokyo Imperial University and for six
years afterward until he left for England, Sōseki appended occasional
haiku in his letters, forty-six between 1889 and 1894. Not until 1895,
when he moved to Matsuyama, Shiki’s hometown, to take a job teaching
English at the middle school, did Sōseki began to compose in earnest.
In July 1895, back from the front lines of the Sino-Japanese War, where
he had become seriously ill, and following a long convalescence in a
Kobe hospital, Shiki wrote Sōseki to inform him that he was coming to
Matsuyama. “I thought he’d stay with his family or with relatives, but
he declared he would stay with me,” Sōseki recalled,

He decided that arbitrarily, without giving me a chance to agree. At

the time I was renting rooms at the back of a house, two rooms upstairs
and two downstairs. My elderly landlords tried to dissuade me; they’d
heard that Masaoka had tuberculosis and insisted I’d be risking con-
tagion. I was a little uncomfortable myself. But I let him come any-
way. I was upstairs and the General was downstairs. Before long, all
his haiku students in Matsuyama began showing up. Almost every day
there’d be a crowd of them when I got back from school. I couldn’t
read, not that I was reading so much then, but I had no time to myself
so I had nothing to do but compose haiku.18

The passage continues dryly with an account of Shiki’s incorrigible

behavior:

28   W ords
 At lunchtime, he’d order broiled eel from outside and sit there smack-
ing his lips as he ate it. He never consulted me, he just ordered it on
his own and ate it by himself. When he returned to Tokyo, on his way
out the door, he bid me settle his bill. That was a surprise. On top of
that, he asked for a loan, I think he took about 14 yen from me. He
wrote me from Nara on his way back to say he’d spent all the money
there. It probably lasted him one night.19

No sooner had Shiki departed than Sōseki began sending him batches
of haiku to evaluate. Between 1895 and 1990, when he left for England,
Sōseki sent 1,445 verses, excluding one batch that Shiki misplaced.20
Shiki would mark a verse he approved with a small circle above it writ-
ten in cinnabar ink. His emendations included deleted words (often
particle suffixes), substituted words, and comments such as “awkward,”
“hackneyed,” “a lackluster verse,” or “interesting.” Rarely, a poem would
receive his highest praise, a circle with a dot in the center. After he left
for England, Sōseki’s output dwindled, and between 1905 and 1910, his
early years as a novelist, he composed few haiku. Beginning in 1910,
when he survived a massive internal hemorrhage that put him in a coma
and nearly killed him, he began to compose again and remained a pro-
lific haiku poet until his death in 1916. The later poems, many of them
expressing his sadness and frustration when repeated illness had con-
fined him to bed, are considered his best.
The seventeen-syllable haiku, three lines of five, seven, and five syl-
lables, respectively, is a translator’s nightmare. Filled with allusions and
dense as dwarf stars, haiku are rarely amenable to anything better than
a sorry paraphrase that has little to do with poetry. The poet Rilke’s
description of translation as it usually proceeds is unsurpassed: “turn-
ing moonbeams into straw.” Rarely is a haiku’s ineffable perfection such
that it can survive, to some extent, transplanting into another language.
For readers unfamiliar with haiku and in want of some perspective, here
are two verses by the acknowledged master of the form, Matsuo Bashō
(1644–1694):

hatsu-shigure first cloudburst

saru mo komino wo even the monkey seems to want
hoshige nari a little raincoat.

W ords   29
 This is a stunning example of Bashō’s capacity for empathy. The open-
ing line, one word, connotes a sudden chilly rain in late autumn that
signals the approach of winter. Drenched in the rain, the poet glances
up and sees a monkey shivering on a tree branch; in his eyes, the ani-
mal appears to be longing for a raincoat. The (small) mino in the second
line is a poncho of straw with an opening at the top for the head. A mon-
key clad in such a garment in the rain is a sympathetically imagined
and irresistibly appealing image.
In 1694, on one of his frequent journeys through the countryside,
Bashō fell seriously ill, and when his disciples saw that he was dying, they
asked him for a death poem. He fell asleep and, waking in the morning,
summoned them to his bedside and delivered a haiku that had come to
him during the fitful night:

tabi ni yande Stricken on a journey

yume wa kareno wo dreams careen and wheel through
kake-meguru withered fields.

Has the frantic, hopelessness of dying, that is, the sinking into the
void overwhelmed and dizzy, ever been evoked so vividly and movingly?
Never in just seventeen syllables, surely.
Sōseki was by no means as great a haiku poet as Bashō. Nonethe-
less, the two thousand haiku he composed during his lifetime included
a number of evocative and moving verses. As early as 1896, Shiki
observed that he had “already made progress toward a style distinctly
his own. Many of his ideas are strikingly new and seem to come out of
nowhere.” The following example, included in a batch of poems sent to
Shiki for his evaluation that year, illustrates the “distinctive touch” that
Sōseki was beginning to develop:

karasu tonde The raven is in flight

yūhi ni ugoku tossing in the twilight
fuyuki ka na21 a wintry tree.

Appreciating the wit and originality in this verse, and even its
evocativeness, requires knowledge of a haiku composed by Bashō in
1689:

30   W ords
 On a withered branch
a raven rests
autumn twilight

Sōseki assumes the reader’s familiarity with the image of a raven

perched on the branch of a withered tree used to evoke the forlorn emp-
tiness of a late autumn landscape. In his verse, the raven flies across the
evening sky high above the tree; in the space created by its absence, the
reader’s eye is drawn to the tree alone, and the sense of desolation is
intensified (to be sure, there is also a touch of Sōseki’s characteristic irrev-
erence, as if he is suggesting that he will not be constrained by the
authority of time-honored images to make his poetic point). The verse
thus manages to parody the somber effect it achieves.
Since Sōseki’s verses were mainly subjective—attempts to distill the
quiddity of a feeling about a particular moment—it is better to encoun-
ter them in context. Following is an amuse-bouche of verses particularly
admired by his disciples:

wakaruruya Parting!
yume hito-suji no a wisp of my dream
ama no kawa the Milky Way

This is reminiscent of Basho’s “careening dreams.” Near death, the

poet lies in his hospital bed, drifting in and out of consciousness. In a
reverie, he pictures parting from this world, from friends; waking, he per-
ceives the Milky Way as a remnant, a strand, of his dream. The ethereal
quality of the Milky Way is evoked more clearly by the Japanese term
“Heaven’s River.”

harawata ni Bathing my innards

haru shitataru ya in the flavor of spring
kayu no aji the taste of porridge

This is an apostrophe to the first comfort food the doctor allows the
poet after his brush with death. Harawata means “guts,” a literally vis-
ceral rather than poetic substitute for stomach. The verb is key; shitataru
is “to drip,” possibly “to drizzle,” as in drizzling oil on a salad. The taste

W ords   31
of porridge suffuses the poet with the warm glow of spring, a foretaste
of recovery.

Kata ni kite Alighting on my shoulder

hitonatsukashiya craving human company?
aka-tonbo red dragonfly

The poet is gratified, exultant to be alive and out in nature. A drag-

onfly drops from the pellucid autumn sky (“dragonfly” is a seasonal word
for autumn), alights, and seems to share, or allows him to project, what
he is feeling so keenly, a hunger for human company.
One reason that haiku may have attracted Sōseki so powerfully dur-
ing these years was the refuge they offered from his confusion about who
he was and what he should be doing. As early as August 1890, as he
was about to enter Tokyo Imperial University, less than a year since he
had become close to Shiki, he confided his distress to his new friend in
a long cri de coeur:

Of late, I have been sick of living in this ephemeral world and sickened
by my failure to disengage, no matter how I wrack my brain. And yet
I lack the courage for suicide, and I suppose my cowardice means
there is, after all, something human or close to human in me. I recall
Goethe’s Faust in which the Doctor prepares a poison potion and
brings it to his lips but is finally unable to drink, and I smile bitterly at
myself. I’ve come this far in my life without catastrophes or much of a
struggle. . . . Here I am just halfway down the fifty-year road of my
life and already quite out of breath. . . . I try but am unable to resign
myself to the fact that life is a point between two infinities [English].
We are such stuff / as dreams are made of; [sic] and our little life / Is
rounded by [sic] a sleep.
I have known this for a long time: before life is sleep, and after life
is sleep, and our actions during life are but a dream. It is when I am
unable to understand this that I feel devastated. . . .
Signed, Sōseki22

Years later in 1911, in a lecture he delivered at the Peers’ School, “My

Individualism,” Sōseki described these unmoored years without the elab-
oration that overnourished his letters to Shiki:

32   W ords
With my head still a muddle, I emerged from school into the real world
and became—more precisely was turned into—a teacher. Fortunately,
despite my uncertain English, I was able to mask my insufficient com-
mand and make it through each day without being exposed, but in
my heart there was always an emptiness. I might have resigned myself
to emptiness alone, but there was something else lurking inside me, a
vague, unresolved, unpleasant something that was unbearable. To
make matters worse, I was unable to feel any interest at all in the
teaching I had chosen as my profession. I had suspected all along that
I was not cut out for teaching, but the truth of that became clear when
I found that simply teaching English classes felt like a burden and an
annoyance. I was constantly crouched and ready to leap into my true
calling whenever an opening should appear, but that true calling
eluded me, now apparently visible and then gone, and no matter where
I turned I found nothing that beckoned me to embrace it.23

W ords   33
 +
4

The Provinces

Graduating from Tokyo Imperial University in 1893, Sōseki received

teaching offers from several schools and ended up holding down three
jobs but was unhappy at all three. At the School of Special Studies (later
Waseda University), he inherited a class on Milton’s “Aereopagitica” and
found it dismayingly difficult: “I couldn’t understand it,” he said in an
interview (italics indicate English words in the original),

[S]ometimes it seemed I was getting it, but I wasn’t. But I was teach-
ing it nevertheless, so I imagine my students must have been bewil-
dered. Recalling it now I feel horribly embarrassed, but it wasn’t just
that I was young, I doubt that any Japanese instructor could have
managed to get it across to students. . . . Milton’s prose is full of trans-
lations from Latin, his style has a Latinate heaviness and majesty, a
solemnity, which is confusing to us. What’s more, his sentences extend
for five or ten lines and are full of dependent clauses; it’s like entering a
maze; it’s impossible to locate the subject or the predicate. I suppose
Westerners must find it wonderful. It’s similar to what we experience
when we read The Genji or The Tale of the Heike, not understanding
necessarily but relishing the sensibility they convey. But to us, it [“Aere-
opagitica”] is an ordeal to read. And trying to teach it is too painful
for words.1

Everything Sōseki later wrote about his early years as a teacher sug-
gests that he was feeling like a fraud, increasingly less confident about
his understanding of English and English literature and increasingly dis-
tressed about it (those foolish enough to have chosen to pit themselves
against literature in a foreign tongue will understand his despair):

34  
 My goal as a student was vague; I knew only that I wanted to master
English and English literature and to write important literary works
that would astound Westerners. But in the course of three years of
study, I developed serious doubts about my plan, and when I gradu-
ated, I discovered that my hard work had produced an imbecile
unlikely to have earned a degree in literature. Even so, because my
grades were excellent, people unexpectedly believed in me. I myself
experienced a degree of pride, of self-satisfaction even, when I faced
outward. Inside, however, for myself, I was miserable. As I dawdled
along, my dissatisfaction with myself began to crystallize into resig-
nation. To put it unsparingly, I came to accept my own inadequacy.2

Between December 23, 1894, and January 7, 1895, Sōseki spent two
weeks meditating at the Enkaku-ji Zen temple in Kamakura and receiv-
ing instruction from a Zen monk, Shaku Sōen, who later became the
abbot (and the first Zen master to teach in the United States). The Rinzai
school of Zen emphasizes the study of the riddles known as kōan in addi-
tion to hours of meditation. Sōseki was assigned the kōan “your inherent
face before the birth of your parents.”3 If the description of his experi-
ence at the Enkaku-ji that appears in his 1908 novel, The Gate, is accu-
rate, he was unable to solve the riddle and received for his pains a
scolding from the monk for being shallow. He said as much in a note
written two days after he returned to Tokyo to congratulate Saitō Agu, a
former classmate and later his landlord, on his wedding: “ I am just back
from several days eating gruel from a pot at a Zen temple. It seems that
even after being reborn five hundred times, I am a simpleton ignorant of
The Law who was unable to perceive the original state of things.”4
If Sōseki hoped the Zen experience would help him see through the
fog that was enfolding him, he was disappointed. Just weeks later, while
still teaching, he applied for a job as a journalist at the Japan Mail, an
English-language newspaper published in Yokohama. Asked to submit
a sample of his writing, he sent an essay in English, “Zen Buddhism in
Japan.” The essay was returned to him without an editorial mark or a
word of explanation for why it had been rejected. Sōseki’s friend Suga
Torao, who had facilitated the contact and hand-delivered the rejected
essay, recalled that Sōseki was furious, cursing the paper for its rudeness
and tearing the pages to shreds.

T he P rovinces   35
 Early in March, Sōseki abruptly resigned his position at all three Tokyo
schools and left the city for rural Matsuyama, Shiki’s hometown, where
he had accepted an offer to teach English at the local middle school.
Once again, Suga Torao had a hand in the invitation. The secretary to
Ehime Prefecture had asked him to find a foreign teacher to replace the
American who had just left; unable to find an acceptable replacement,
Suga had recommended his friend for the job. Sōseki accepted on con-
dition that his salary would match the American’s. The middle school
agreed: a man who had graduated at the head of his class with a degree
in literature from Tokyo Imperial University was a rare catch for a pro-
vincial school (we can easily imagine Sōseki smiling grimly to himself). In
those days, faculty hires at public schools were controlled by the Educa-
tion Ministry, and employment came with a civil servant’s rank. Sōseki
went to Matsuyama with a rank equivalent to a captain or a lieutenant
junior grade in the Imperial army and a salary of 80 yen a month, 20
yen more than the principal received. At Tokyo Normal School, he had
been earning 37 yen.
What prompted Sōseki to leave Tokyo for the cultural backwater of
Matsuyama in the distant, isolated countryside of Shikoku? It seems
unlikely that a doubled salary would have been sufficient motivation
for such a drastic move, although given his humiliation and sense of fail-
ure, the promise of elevated status doubtless counted for something. Even
so, leaving Tokyo, a place to which Sōseki was culturally attached, and
quitting three secure jobs to go to Matsuyama was a surprising decision.
An explanation that has been repeatedly proposed is that Sōseki was
driven to remove himself from Tokyo by a broken heart. Evidence of this
is flimsy but intriguing. At the end of a letter to Shiki dated July 18,
1891, he transitions clumsily, all at once a stuttering adolescent, to a non
sequitur about a girl:

Hmm—I wonder if I have anything more to write—oh, yes—at the eye

doctor’s yesterday, I happened to see that beautiful girl I mentioned
to you once. With her hair in a butterfly chignon. There was no weather
forecast; it was as sudden as it was unexpected and caught me off
guard, my face colored like an autumn maple. Imagine a bonfire on
Mount Arashiyama in the glow of evening light. The only problem was,
I was so flustered I misplaced the fancy Western umbrella that you

36   T he P rovinces
 coveted. So today I’ll brave the blistering sun without it—Signed,
“Peaks and Valleys”5

Scholars have searched fruitlessly for this mystery woman. Sōseki’s

wife, Kyōko, begins her memoir with a lengthy account of this episode
based on details she has heard, probably from Sōseki’s surviving brother,
Wasaburō.6 The story she pieces together is odd, not to mention improb-
able, and reads in part like a paranoid delusion, possibly the earliest
instance of the mental illness that resurfaced throughout Sōseki’s adult
life to torment him and his family. According to Kyōko, Sōseki met the
“beautiful girl at the eye doctor’s office” when he was living in the Hōzō-in
temple following his graduation. This in itself appears to be a chrono-
logical incongruity that casts doubt on the account that follows: Sōseki
was commuting to the eye doctor from home when he wrote Shiki in July
1891; he moved into a room in the temple fully three years later, in Sep-
tember 1894. It is unlikely he was still commuting to the ophthalmologist.
According to what Kyōko heard from Wasaburō, Sōseki was uncomfort-
able at the temple because he was certain that the nuns in residence
there had been put up to spying on him night and day by the girl’s mother,
“a vain and spiteful former geisha” who was determined he should marry
her daughter. As the story goes, Sōseki told Wasaburō that this girl was
“someone [I] could definitely marry,” until he learned that her mother
was expecting him to appear before her and beg for her daughter’s hand,
at which point he angrily terminated the relationship.
In Kyōko’s view, Sōseki had no reason to exile himself to the country-
side other than the turmoil in his heart and mind that made it unbear-
able for him to remain near the girl in Tokyo. Apparently, even after his
arrival in Matsuyama, he was convinced that her mother had dispatched
agents to spy on him there. Kyōko concluded that Sōseki must have been
feeling “strange in the head” during this episode, one year before she
came into his life.
Did the girl with the butterfly chignon exist, or was she a delusion?
Etō Jun asserts that Sōseki created her to deflect attention from the
woman who actually broke his heart, his sister-in-law, Tose. Wasaburō
had brought his second wife home to live with the family while Sōseki
was still a university student, in and out of the house. Twenty-four-years-
old and a beautiful and charming young woman, Tose was three months

T he P rovinces   37
younger than Sōseki. It is not hard to imagine Sōseki, living in such
proximity, developing an unexpressed, and taboo, attachment to his new
relative, nor is it unlikely that she may have been similarly drawn to him.
Wasaburō, thirty-two at the time, was a man of dissolute habits that
included late-night returns from visits to the pleasure quarter. Sōseki, a
student at the elite Tokyo Imperial University, seemed destined for a bril-
liant career. There is nothing to suggest they were having an affair, but
there is evidence of Sōseki’s passionate feelings. On July 28, 1891, just
weeks after he claimed to have met the beautiful girl in the eye doctor’s
office, Tose died, five months pregnant. On August 3, Sōseki wrote a grief-
stricken letter to Shiki in which he likened her to a living saint full of
patience, compassion, and wisdom, a person “such as has no peer among
women or men either—how are we to bear the fact that a person such as
this seems destined to die an early death!”7 At the end of the letter, he
appended thirty mournful haiku, including

Kimi yukite You have departed

ukiyo ni hana wa in this floating world
nakarikeri no flowers remain

The best-known verse in the series refers to love explicitly:

Waga koi wa As for my love

yamiya ni nitaru a moonlit night
tsukiya ka na resembling a dark night

In a trialogue serialized between 1922 and 1923, three of Sōseki’s clos-

est disciples—Komiya Toyotaka, the haiku poet Matsune Toyojirō, and
Terada Torahiko—there was a disagreement about the intended meaning
of this verse that turned on a minute distinction. According to Komiya,
the poem was about a moonlit night: “The moon is bright but not unob-
scured; perhaps clouds dim the perfection of the night. The moon is vis-
ible through something darkening the sky. And this state of darkened
brightness is like the poet’s love. Hence, my love: a moonlit night like a
dark night.” The haiku poet Matsune disagreed: “This is a perfect moon-
lit night, but despite the bright moon, the poet’s heart is darkened by
some kind of anguish, his love.”8

38   T he P rovinces
 While this appears to open a small window on Sōseki’s emotional life,
it hardly seems a persuasive explanation for his move away from Tokyo
four years later, in 1895. In December of that year, when wedding talk
between his own and his soon-to-be wife’s family was under way, Sōseki,
chagrined by his brother’s attempt to enlist Shiki’s help in the negotia-
tion, wrote to Shiki from Matsuyama to apologize for his family’s pre-
sumption and, en passant, denied that his truculence about the
engagement plans was due, as Wasaburō seems to have implied to Shiki,
to the presence of another woman whom he wanted to marry:

I understand that my brother has been talking to you, and I apologize

if you have felt imposed upon. As a result of my education and what
I must call my nature, I have been out of tune with my own family for
a very long while. Since I was a small child, I have never expected that
“domestic happiness” would be within my reach. . . . ​Because conver-
sations with them have been difficult, my family’s mistaken conclusion
that I am acting perversely because there is another woman whom I
wanted for my wife but was unable to marry, is extremely awkward
for me.9

For reasons that remain unclear, Sōseki moved to Matsuyama early

in April 1895 and remained there for just under a year. Accounts by his
students at the time agree that the whole school, the faculty included,
felt honored by his presence at their rural school but also intimidated
by his credentials and superior learning. He was immensely popular in
the classroom. He taught English conversation and English literature,
and as a text for the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds in his fourth- and
fifth-year literature classes, he chose Washington Irving’s The Sketchbook
(of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.), a collection of short stories and essays serial-
ized between 1819 and 1820 that included “The Legend of Sleepy Hol-
low” and “Rip Van Winkle.” Sōseki expected his students to analyze the
grammar and syntax in every line and drilled them so hard in prefixes
and suffixes that they began to refer to him as “Master Prefix and Suffix.”
Some students thought him arrogant and complained that a “great sen-
sei” had no business teaching in Matsuyama. But those who were seri-
ous about English literature praised him for his “intensity and precision
and richly nuanced explanations.”10 But even they were afraid of the

T he P rovinces   39
“gentle sarcasm” they could expect from him when they made a mis-
take he considered foolish. One student observed that during exams or
while they were working on compositions, he would read collections
of haiku. His principal diversion seems to have been an almost daily
trip after classes to the nearby Dōgo Onsen, a hot spring resort that has
become a national landmark since 1905 when Sōseki incorporated it
into Botchan. In addition, students were impressed when he attended a
celebration of Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War dressed in a
frock coat and high hat, not the last time he would express his patrio-
tism in a similar way.
Sōseki was not able to enjoy his popularity or the esteem in which he
was held. “People here are fussy about trivial matters and that distresses
me,” he complained to Shiki on May 26, shortly after arriving,

[I]n this wilderness, I have no friends at school; if you come across

any interesting books in Tokyo, please send them along. I imagine
most people couldn’t endure living in the country without choosing
either marriage, dissipation, or reading. The locals, despite the fact that
they seem to be dullards, manage to be unfriendly—forgive me for
speaking ill of your native place.11

Of the three antidotes to boredom that he listed, Sōseki chose mar-

riage. In a letter to a former classmate dated July 25, he wrote, “ I’ve
been thinking of getting married lately and intend to trap me a well-made
country bride in her natural habitat.”12 Given his status and large sal-
ary, he was perhaps Matsuyama’s most eligible bachelor, and had no
lack of marriage proposals from local families promoting their daugh-
ters. One candidate turned out to have tuberculosis. Another he found
“too forward, marching into a room and laughing unrestrainedly when
she was amused.”
It was Sōseki’s brother who brought from Tokyo an overture to mar-
riage from the family of eighteen-year-old Nakane Kyōko. Her father,
Nakane Jūichi, a career bureaucrat, was head secretary to the House of
Peers, a job that came with prestige and handsome benefits. Looking into
the background of Professor Natsume Kinnosuke, he was duly impressed,
and Wasaburō was asked to inform his brother that the family was inter-
ested in pursuing a match. Early in December, Sōseki received a photo-
graph of Kyōko in formal kimono and found her appealing. He sent a

40   T he P rovinces
photo of himself in a frock coat and high collar. Kyōko later recalled that
he appeared “respectable and solid with strong, quiet features. Having
received a number of other such photos, I was surprised at how attractive
I found this one.”13
Having written to Shiki that he was prepared to terminate the con-
versation if the young woman was a disappointment, Sōseki traveled to
Tokyo at the end of December 1895 in order to lay eyes on the candi-
date. The following day, he called on the family alone and dressed up in
his frock coat. Normally a representative of his family would have accom-
panied him, but his relationship with his brother was uneasy. Kyōko’s
family was living in a grand residence in Toranomon reserved for the
head secretary, a mixture of Japanese and Western rooms with electric
lights and even, a rarity in those days, a telephone. It was a large house-
hold, the senior Nakanes and six daughters, of whom Kyōko was the
eldest; three private secretaries; three maids; and a rickshaw man on
call. The mi-ai (arranged marriage) dinner was served in the twenty-mat
Western room on the second floor that Jūichi used as his study. Kyōko’s
principal memory of the evening was her “surprise” on noticing that
Sōseki’s cheeks and nose were “bumpy” with pocks, since in the photo-
graph he had sent, his complexion looked clear. Her sister, Tokiko, was
waiting on table that night and also noticed. Later she brought it up, and
the girls laughed together, but if Kyōko was dismayed, she did not say
so. At the table, Sōseki directed his attention to her father. While listen-
ing to their conversation, Kyōko was impressed with the fluency and tact
with which Sōseki handled himself. In her memoir, she acknowledged
that she would have accepted without demur any man that her father
ordered to her marry—this degree of compliance was expected of any
respectable young woman of the day—but that she was attracted to
Sōseki and needed no urging.
Sōseki went home to his family’s house in Waseda and was asked for
his impression. The comment that made its way back to Kyōko was that
he quite liked her and was especially pleased that she had made no
attempt to conceal her irregular and yellowed teeth. There is no way to
know whether Sōseki was quoted accurately, but such a remark would
not have been out of character. Later, Kyōko’s teeth became a sore point
between them.
At home with his family for New Year’s, Sōseki accepted an invita-
tion to play cards—matching verses—with the Nakanes at the residence

T he P rovinces   41
and fared badly.14 The sisters laughed at him, but Kyōko’s father approved,
declaring that this young man was a serious scholar who had no time to
waste on mastering frivolous entertainments.
Nakane wanted his daughter to be married at home and hoped that
her husband would return to Tokyo and begin married life there, but
Sōseki felt unable to guarantee that he would be able to arrange a relo-
cation in the immediate future. Back in Matsuyama, he wrote on Febru-
ary 7 to congratulate Saitō Agu on the birth of his son and added, “And
here I am, good for nothing, turning thirty, an embarrassment to my
ancestors. I want to leave this place in the near future, but if I dash back
to Tokyo recklessly, I fear that starvation awaits me.”15
While the Nakane family fretted and Sōseki berated himself and won-
dered what to do, he received a job offer from the Fifth Special Higher
School in Kumamoto, a former castle town in the south of Kyushu, even
farther away from Tokyo. The invitation was passed on to him by his
ubiquitous friend Suga Torao, who was currently teaching German
there.16 In another league from Matsuyama Middle School, Fifth Special
Higher was a magnet for the most accomplished students from all over
western Japan and was fiercely competitive. Sōseki was offered an even
higher salary, 100 yen a month. He accepted the offer and then wrote to
Kyōko’s father, telling him of his decision, explaining that he would have
to remain in Kumamoto for at least a year, and offering to withdraw from
the marriage agreement if Kyōko were unwilling to travel so far. Father
and daughter agreed to go forward in the hope that an opportunity to
return to Tokyo would present itself.
After a farewell party in Matsuyama that included Takahama Kyo-
shi, Shiki’s principal disciple and the head of school who became the
model for “red-shirt” in Botchan, Sōseki traveled south to Kumamoto on
April 9, 1896. On June 4, Nakane left Tokyo with Kyōko and one elderly
maid and arrived in Kumamoto by steamship on June 8. Sōseki was there
to meet them at the dock, dressed up once again in his frock coat. Kyōko
spent the following day shopping in Kumamoto for a summer kimono;
she had not expected the suffocating heat and found it hard to bear. The
wedding on June 10, a far cry from the extravaganza Nakane had wanted
for his daughter in Tokyo, was a sorry affair. The ceremony was held in
the small house adjacent to the Kōrin-ji temple that Sōseki was renting
for 8 yen a month; Kyōko was dismayed to learn, though she said noth-
ing, that the house was said to have belonged to the mistress of the lord

42   T he P rovinces
of the Hosokawa domain. The heat was stifling, and when it came time
to exchange the traditional “nine-cup toast,” the elderly maid assisting,
the third cup used in the ritual was missing. Recalling this years later,
Sōseki remarked to Kyōko, “No wonder we’ve never been able to get
along.”17
It is fair to say that Sōseki’s marriage, which lasted until his death in
1916 and was rarely happy, got off to a bad start. Money was not a prob-
lem, not in these early years. Out of his 100-yen salary, Sōseki paid a 10
percent utility tax for use in building new ships for the Imperial navy, 7
yen toward the Education Ministry loan he had received while at the
university, 10 yen to his father, and 3 yen to his surviving elder stepsis-
ter. Kyōko calculated that he spent an additional 20 yen or so each month
on books. This left 50 yen to spend on the household at a time when
a teacher’s average wage was 24 yen and a policeman earned 16 yen a
month.
The problem was that Kyōko, who had led a cosseted childhood in a
house full of maids, had no idea how to run a household. She had never
shopped for food and other necessities and did not know how to cook.
Now she had to fulfill her housewifely duties in a strange city. While the
Nakane family maid remained in Kumamoto, she relied on her, but soon
the maid returned to Tokyo, leaving Kyōko on her own and helpless.
Sōseki would have nothing to do with running the house. When Kyōko
went out on errands, she went alone; her husband felt it was improper
for his students to see him in public with her. Shortly after the wedding,
he declared, “I am a scholar and must study. I can’t be spending time
looking after you.”18
But he did have expectations and became abusive when she did not
meet them. The feeling that Kyōko conveys in her memoir is that she
spent these early years in a state of panic close to desperation. New
Year’s 1897, her first New Year as a married woman, was a nightmare.
The house was full of students and faculty colleagues, and Kyōko was
expected to provide saké and traditional New Year’s food. Early on, she
ran out of kinton, a sweetened mash of yams and chestnuts, and was
obliged to stay up most of the night in the kitchen in her apron, franti-
cally preparing more for the visitors expected the following day. Sōseki
yelled at her angrily, calling her addle headed and a lame brain.
The discord between them was inflamed by Kyōko’s habit, ingrained
since childhood, of sleeping late. At her residence in Tokyo, it had

T he P rovinces   43
mattered little when she got up in the morning. But as Sōseki’s wife, she
was expected to be out of bed before him to have his breakfast ready
and see him on his way to school. Time and again, she overslept, even
when she placed a small clock by her pillow. When Sōseki complained
about “unseemly” behavior, she pleaded that forcing herself to wake up
left her with a lingering dullness that prevented her from functioning all
day, but he was not interested in excuses. Kyōko’s “sleeping in” contin-
ued to agitate Sōseki for the rest of his life.
On June 29, 1897, Sōseki’s father died, at the age of eighty-four, and
he dutifully returned to Tokyo with Kyōko for the first time in two years.
Kyōko had little to say in her memoir about the funeral except to observe
that her husband felt no love for his immediate family and that she felt
sorry for his brother and found her husband’s contempt and antagonism
painful.19 Because her family was away in Kamakura, they had the
Toranomon residence to themselves. While they were there, Kyōko mis-
carried, and joined her younger sisters at the beach to recover. Sōseki
shuttled between Tokyo and Kamakura; alone in his father-in-law’s
house, he read the daily installments of Ozaki Kōyō’s novel The Golden
Demon (Konjiki-yasha) and was not impressed, though the book was cre-
ating a sensation. Sōseki was also making his way through the collected
novellas of Higuchi Ichiyō, who had died of tuberculosis the previous year
at age twenty-five and, according to Kyōko’s younger brother, was over-
come with admiration, declaring, “I can’t think of any man who could
have written anything like this.”20
Kyōko spent a long time recovering; possibly the miscarriage on top
of the stress of her marriage lowered her into depression. The official ver-
sion of what happened, an obfuscation rendered after the fact, was that
she had suffered a bout of what was labeled her chronic “hysteria.” In
any event, she was “too ill” to return to Kumamoto when Sōseki left on
September 6, just as classes were beginning. Because the newspaper
in which The Golden Demon was appearing, the Yomiuri shinbun, was not
available in Kumamoto, he asked her to mail him the daily installments
and scolded her when she was unable to keep up and instead collected
them in weekly batches.
Shortly after he returned to Kumamoto, Sōseki moved again, possibly
in consideration of Kyōko’s fragile condition, to a house in bucolic sur-
roundings outside the city. With his father gone, he had an extra 10 yen
a month to spend, and he used it to engage first one and then a second

44   T he P rovinces
student from Fifth Special Higher to serve the family as houseboys in
return for room and board, a common practice at the time. In March
1898, the owner of the house returned from Tokyo to take up a position
in Kumamoto, and the family had to move again. This time, they settled
for a temporary place in town that had fewer rooms than they needed: the
two live-in students slept on the floor in the parlor and often failed to
put away their mattresses in the morning early enough to suit Sōseki,
who was constantly aggravated. Mediating between the live-in students
and her angry husband took its toll on Kyōko, and her “hysteria” recurred.
She may have thrown herself into the nearby Shirakawa River intending
suicide, but the rumor is unsubstantiated. Kyōko never mentions it, nor
does Sōseki have anything explicit to say. There is a passage, however,
in his novel Grass on the Wayside (1915, chapter 38), in which the narra-
tor recalls bouts of madness that his wife suffered shortly after she had
lost her baby when she would cry aloud, “The dead baby has come back
and I must go! Let me go!” and the narrator, fearful that she might harm
herself when they go to bed at night, ties their obis together with a four-
foot length of cord. But since Sōseki was rarely literally autobiographi-
cal, this sort of episode cannot be read as fact with any certainty.
Unable to bear living in such cramped quarters, the family moved yet
again that July into a modestly sized house with spacious grounds
that included a mulberry orchard, a garden, and a detached storehouse.
It was here that Sōseki received the first visit from a Fifth Special Higher
student who later became a disciple and a steadfast friend for the rest
of his life. This was the remarkable Terada Torahiko, a haiku poet, an
essayist, and eventually a professor of physics at Tokyo Imperial Uni-
versity. Terada wanted to study haiku with Sōseki and asked to be
employed as a student houseboy but was unceremoniously turned away.
Subsequently, he visited regularly with haiku, and Sōseki obliged by
commenting on them.
It was also in this house that Sōseki’s eldest daughter was born on
May 31, 1899. Kyōko requested and received Sōseki’s permission to name
the child Fude (a Japanese writing brush). She had always been ashamed
of her own calligraphy and hoped that the name would function magi-
cally to help her daughter acquire a respectable hand. Sōseki expressed
disappointment with having a girl instead of a boy but doted on his
daughter nonetheless. Later, when in the grip of the demons of his recur-
rent madness, he would be cruel, and Fude grew up no less afraid of her

T he P rovinces   45
father than her five siblings were; but in his maimed way, Sōseki loved
her. The maid, from southern Japan, had a swarthy complexion, and
Sōseki, familiar with the old saw that a baby would resemble whoever
cradled it in her arms, forbade her to hold his daughter. But when Kyōko
was out and the baby cried, he would shout at the maid to hush her up.
Kyōko recalled with a pang Sōseki sitting Fude on his knee, peering into
her face and murmuring, as though to himself, “In seventeen years she’ll
be eighteen and I’ll be fifty.” In fact, Sōseki died at fifty when his daugh-
ter was eighteen (by Japanese reckoning).
Life at home was turbulent and anxious, but Sōseki’s teaching was a
success. Shortly after his arrival, he was promoted to professor at a rank
equivalent to an army major and quickly established himself as one of
the most popular teachers at Fifth Special Higher. To his upperclassmen
in English, he taught Confessions of an Opium Eater and Silas Marner. From
seven to eight in the morning, he delivered extracurricular lectures on
Othello to students who came to the house. Others came later in the day
for English conversation. Kyōko felt sorry for these boys, at whom Sōseki
would shout insults at the top of his voice every time they made a mis-
take. But the students kept coming back for more. In and out of class,
Sōseki was demanding. A portion of the exam he gave his Fifth Higher
students has survived, and its difficulty is remarkable:

Second Year Student Literature. K. Natsume. December 23, 1898.

Take dictation of the following and add a translation [into
Japanese]:
   antidote
   acquiescence
   captiousness
   connivance

He consulted his anger more severely than the occasion seemed to

warrant.

Third Year Literature.

1. Explain the terms [in English]: blank verse, common measure,
heroic couplet, alliteration.
2. Explain: hymenial chorus; to strike home; to look askance;
Cathay; marry (interj.); ignis fatuus; cornucopia.21

46   T he P rovinces
 Notwithstanding his popularity, Sōseki was unhappy about remain-
ing in Kumamoto and had asked his father-in-law within a year of arriv-
ing to help him find other employment in Tokyo. Nakane, who wanted
his daughter closer to home, was happy to oblige and used his influence
to prompt two offers. One was a teaching job at the Tokyo Higher School
of Commerce at 1,000 yen a year, 200 yen less than Sōseki was earning
at Fifth Special Higher, which Nakane offered to supplement from his
own pocket. Sōseki turned down the offer. As he wrote to Shiki, “If I must
teach, I might as well stay where I am and accomplish something before
moving on. Besides, the principal is begging me to stay. If he believes in
me to that extent, I should do what I can; for the time being, I won’t
look for other opportunities.”22
The second option was working for the Foreign Office as a translator.
“I am sick of teaching these days, but I have no confidence that I could
succeed as a government translator or the courage to try,” he told Shiki,
“To begin with, I have scarcely any legal vocabulary and doubt that I
could compose a decent telegram in English.”23 The letter continues:

You asked what I’m intending to do, and much as I’d like to respond
with a clear answer, the truth is I have no idea what I’m doing now or
even who I am. If I had my way, I’d wish to give up teaching and lead
a literary life, to devote myself, that is, every waking hour, to litera-
ture. If I had an income of 50 or 60 yen a month, I’d be ready even
now to return to Tokyo and immerse myself in a life of art according
to my own dictates, but since money doesn’t appear in the pocket
while one amuses oneself, I would have to discover some means of
putting food on my table (other than teaching) and to use whatever
leisure I earned for myself that way to read and to write whatever I
pleased.24

Sōseki’s uncertainty about what ought to be his purpose in life had

traveled with him to Kumamoto, but it appeared he was beginning to
see through the fog to a beacon he wanted to follow. The fog would
descend again soon enough.

T he P rovinces   47
 +
5

London

On June 17, 1900, Sōseki received official notice from the Ministry of Edu-
cation: “You are directed to reside in England for two years as an
exchange student in order to investigate English language pedagogical
methods.”1 As a civil servant technically employed by the government,
he was not given a choice. Since the 1870s, as part of the national proj-
ect to build a modern state, the new government had been sending its
most promising students abroad to learn what they could about the nuts
and bolts of European societies. When students began reporting on their
return that Westerners placed importance on the arts as well as on prac-
tical matters, official interest expanded beyond public health and con-
stitutional monarchy to include painting and literature. Sōseki’s renowned
contemporary, the doctor and novelist Mori Ōgai, had been sent by the
Imperial army to Germany between 1884 and 1888 to study medicine
and public health. (The Chinese government was pursuing a similar pol-
icy: the writer Lu Xun arrived in Japan, also on a government fellow-
ship, in 1902 and remained for seven years.)
The first teacher at a higher school to be chosen, Sōseki was not
inclined to go. Five years earlier, in Matsuyama, he had written a former
classmate of his intention to “save money for a trip abroad.”2 But things
were different now; he had a wife and a two-year-old daughter (and
although he did not know it yet, Kyōko was pregnant with their second
child). He knew, moreover, that given the state of his nerves, travel
abroad and residence in a foreign country was likely to be an ordeal. He
protested to the head of school that he was unqualified and asked that
someone be designated in his stead, but to no avail. The Fifth Higher
School was honored that the ministry had accepted its nomination, and
the decision was final. Resigned, Sōseki went to the Ministry of Education

48  
for clarification of his mission. His assignment appeared to limit him to
studying the English language instead of literature, and that was trou-
bling. He was relieved to hear from the bureaucrat-scholar in charge of
special projects3 that he was free to choose any subject that might be
profitably taught at the higher school or university level. Sōseki departed
for England, however reluctantly, having resolved to master English lit-
erature. He considered this a duty, and as always, once he had accepted
an obligation, he labored to fulfill it with obsessive purpose.4
Sōseki sailed from Yokohama on Saturday, September 8, 1900, on
the Preussen, one of the newly built North German steamships. Kyōko,
who had already moved with Fude into a small annex attached to her
father’s house in Tokyo, saw him off, accompanied by her father. Shiki
and his disciple Takahama Kyoshi composed haiku to commemorate his
departure.
The sea journey to Genoa, Italy, took forty days. Along the way, Sōseki
posted letters and postcards at the ship’s ports of call, which took roughly
three weeks to arrive in Japan. His first, on September 10, was to his
father-in-law to thank him for coming to Yokohama to see him off. Despite
a queasy first day on board, he was still feeling that life at sea was more
luxurious than at home, and he was impressed with the six meals served
daily. Most of the passengers were English and French. Sōseki disem-
barked for one day in Kobe, where he enjoyed a Japanese meal. He sent
regards to his mother-in-law and to Kyōko’s younger brother and sister.
In a postcard from Hong Kong to Takahama Kyoshi on September
19, Sōseki reported that he had been suffering from diarrhea and sea-
sickness and was “already tired of foreigners and Western food and
cramped Western bathtubs and toilets” and “could not wait for some
chazuke (green tea poured over rice) and soba (buckwheat noodles).”
The first of several letters to Kyōko, dated September 27 en route to
Colombo, Sri Lanka, detailed the beauty of the hills and the excitement
of Hong Kong’s nighttime streets, admired the grandeur and bustle of
Shanghai, and moved on to a “delightful day” in Singapore where he
visited in a hired carriage the botanical gardens and a museum and
enjoyed a meal at a Japanese inn. Clearly, he was at pains to paint an
evocative picture for Kyōko to enjoy. But in the concluding lines, his tone
changes. He acknowledges the meagerness of the government stipend
on which Kyōko is living (24 yen per month) but urges her to put aside

L ondon   49
what she can manage to pay her father as rent. Then he gets down to
business:

Your mouth is unsightly. You really ought to pull some teeth and
replace them.
As I have told you repeatedly, your baldness is definitely an ill-
ness and you should see a doctor about it. Ignoring what I say is
unacceptable . . .
Kinnosuke Mdm. Kyōko5

Sōseki had taken note of Kyōko’s unattractive teeth the moment he

met her; and his abhorrence of baldness, an idée fixe, would surface
again, notably in his novel I Am a Cat (1905). In reading his comments
here and in subsequent correspondence, the question is how to interpret
his tone. The condescension and hectoring he habitually employs when
addressing Kyōko is unambiguous. But what should we make of what
sounds to readers today like downright nastiness? Perhaps his exhorta-
tions to his wife were less shocking in the context of the time, when it
was accepted for husbands to behave like tyrants (bōkun 暴君). Perhaps.
In another letter, dated October 8, Sōseki revealed, in one telling line
only, that he has isolated himself from the rest of the passengers: “There
are upwards of fifty passengers in second class, and it is very lively.
There is no one in particular I can talk to, so I remain silent.” This self-
inflicted isolation continued, and deepened, during his stay in London.
By the time Sōseki wrote again, on October, 23, he had been in Paris
for two days and was feeling overwhelmed by the city’s splendor. He
seems to have learned since his last letter that Kyōko was pregnant with
their second child. He alludes to the pregnancy, expresses approval—
“Well and good!”—and offers some advice:: “During the pregnancy, it
would be good to stay away from novels and other reading that stimu-
late your emotions—live a carefree life.”6
Embedded in the letter is a sentiment, magnified into an enveloping
paranoia, that would impel Sōseki to shun the world around him and
withdraw into himself:

I’ll soon be crossing over to England alone, and I can’t help wonder-
ing what odd fate awaits me. I observe over here that men and women
alike have white skin and dress in beautiful clothes. No wonder that

50   L ondon
 we Japanese appear sallow in color. As for the women, even humble
maids, they are surprisingly beautiful. And not a pockmarked crea-
ture like me to be seen!7

After arriving in London on October 28, Sōseki took a room in a bed-

and-breakfast frequented by Japanese at 76 Gower Street, just one
block away from University College. It was “safer,” he wrote to Kyōko,
“than staying at an inn,” but the cost of room and board turned out to
be the equivalent of 180 yen a month, more than his entire stipend. He
stayed for just sixteen days while he looked for another accommodation
and then moved for the first of four times, here and there in London,
seeking a place that suited his pocketbook and his finicky preferences
concerning food, surroundings, and the cultural atmosphere of the
establishment.
After a day of wandering the streets excited but lost, Sōseki paid his
respects to the Japanese legation on October 30, visited the Tower of Lon-
don the following morning—an experience that he transformed into his
first short story in 1905—and, that evening, accompanied by a civil ser-
vant from the legation, went to the Haymarket Theater to see Sheridan’s
satirical comedy, School for Scandal.
On November 1, Sōseki took a train to Cambridge to see Charles
Andrews, the dean of Pembroke College. He had with him a letter of
introduction written by Grace Catherine Nott, a missionary who had
been stationed in Kumamoto and who, by coincidence, had just returned
to her family in England as a fellow passenger on the Preussen. Dean
Andrews introduced him to a Japanese exchange student who showed
him around the campus that afternoon and the following morning. By
the time Sōseki returned to London that evening, he had decided against
Cambridge. The tuition, 400 to 500 yen, would leave him no money to
buy books. Moreover, he had learned that Cambridge University men
spent their afternoons playing sports and their evenings at social events,
and that was not for him. Sōseki conjectured that things at Oxford would
be the same. He had toyed with the idea of going to the University of
Edinburgh, but he was afraid that the Scottish brogue, which he likened
to the “zu-zu” dialect of the Sendai area, would be more than he could
handle. That left London, a tangle of noisy streets “buried under horse
manure.” In its favor, London offered the theaters in the West End and
countless secondhand bookshops.

L ondon   51
 On November 5, Sōseki went to the National Gallery and from there
to the University College of London, where he left a letter petitioning Pro-
fessor William Paton Ker for permission to audit his lectures. A Scots-
man, Ker was an authority on English medieval literature (whose writing
on the knights of the roundtable was admired years later by W. H.
Auden). Professor Ker invited Sōseki to his office the following day, and
beginning on November 7, Sōseki attended his classes.
On November 12, Sōseki moved to a more affordable room at 85 Priory
Road, West Hampstead, in northwest London, a neighborhood popular
among students and faculty of the University of London. The propri-
etress, Miss Milde, was a spinster who had grown up in France and,
following her mother’s death, had moved to England with her stepfa-
ther, a sixty-nine-year-old Prussian named Frederick Milde who owned
two clothing shops in the West End specializing in military uniforms.8
The others at the boarding house were Miss Milde’s stepbrother, who
appeared to be on bad terms with his father, and an overworked house-
maid just fifteen, Agnes Brice.
Sōseki had been attending Professor Ker’s lectures since early Novem-
ber but seems to have stopped after about two months. In a long letter
to four friends dated February 9, 1901,9 he wrote that he had found the
lectures occasionally of interest but not substantially different from what
might be heard in a Japanese classroom and had decided that he would
be better off buying books and studying by himself. Sōseki’s sometimes
frantic concern with conserving money and time became an obsession
that blighted his entire stay in London.
Before Sōseki left, Ker wrote for him a letter of introduction to Wil-
liam James Craig (1843–1906), a Shakespeare scholar who became his
tutor. Craig had been the editor of the Oxford Shakespeare, which he had
completed in 1891, and had just succeeded his friend, Edward Dowden
(whose editions of Shakespeare were used in Tokyo Imperial University
classes), as the general editor of the Arden Shakespeare. When Sōseki
appeared on the scene, Craig was writing his introduction to King Lear,
which is considered his masterpiece. Sōseki wrote later that Craig’s Ham-
let, in particular, had been a great aid to him in his lectures at Tokyo
Imperial University.
On his first visit, on January 18, 1901, Sōseki found Craig “perched like
a swallow” in a tiny flat on the third floor at the back of a building at
55a Gloucester Place, off Baker Street. The door was always opened by

52   L ondon
his housekeeper, Jane, a woman of fifty or so with thick glasses who
invariably “wore an expression of uneasiness” (like Jaggers’s maidser-
vant Molly in Great Expectations). In the drawing room just inside, a room
filled with books and little else, Craig, in a striped flannel shirt and
slippers, his hair and beard unkempt, would greet him and extend a
hairy hand that remained limp when Sōseki clasped it in a handshake,
causing him to wonder at the meaninglessness of the gesture. Craig
had no lesson plan, and Sōseki never knew what to expect. Sometimes
his teacher read aloud from the poets he loved: Keats, Shelley, Swin-
burne, Walt Whitman (who, Craig boasted, had paid him a visit), his
whole body convulsing with emotion. At other times he “lectured” on
the poetry, engulfing his student in a flood of words in his largely incom-
prehensible Irish accent. Sōseki recalled watching his teacher’s face and
entrusting himself to his fate. Disorganized and absentminded, Craig
was often unable to find a book he wanted. “Where’s my Wordsworth?” he
would demand, and Jane would appear out of nowhere, looking appre-
hensive as always, locate the desired volume, and hand it to him with a
quiet “Here you are, sir.”
In the diary he kept throughout 1901, Sōseki dutifully recorded his
weekly visits to Craig. On his way home, he often stopped to purchase
books at secondhand booksellers (beginning in January he frequented
the Elephant and Castle at that famous intersection): Samuel Johnson’s
Lives of the British Poets, Restoration Drama in fourteen volumes, three vol-
umes of McKenzie, MacPherson’s Ossian, a 1789 edition of Cowper, the
Smith Bible Dictionary, Spencer’s Works (1679), Meredith’s Rhoda Fleming,
Miss (Fanny) Burney’s Evelina in three volumes, and the complete Jane
Austen. By the time Sōseki returned to Japan, he had accumulated a
library of some four hundred volumes.
At their first meeting, Sōseki had agreed to pay 7 shillings a lesson,
due at the end of the month. Craig often mentioned that he could use
some money and asked for early payment. Sōseki would give him what
he had in his pocket but never received change. In a disgruntled note in
his diary (February 12, 1901), he wrote: “Visit Craig. Ask him to correct
my writing in English. He wants an extra charge. He’s a venal creature.”10
Just before Christmas 1900, Sōseki moved for the second time, to an
“out-of-the-way place” at 6 Flodden Road, “adjacent to a notoriously
dingy and rundown part of town called Camberwell.”11 The move was
an ordeal: he had to rent a horse and cart to transport his books from

L ondon   53
the northwest to the southeast of London. For 40 shillings a week, he
had his meals, such as they were, and a room on the third floor, freezing
at night and impossible to heat because of the draft that blew through
the windows and the door, with a bookshelf “the size of a toy box” and
a half desk. The cast of characters was as odd as that at Priory Road.
The house had been a girls’ school that had closed following an outbreak
of fever. The school mistress, Mrs. Brett, was now the proprietress of the
boardinghouse; after the school closed, she had married a man fifteen
years her junior, Harold Brett, twenty-five, the holder of a degree in engi-
neering. Mrs. Brett was aided by her sister, Miss Sparrow, at one time a
music teacher who was a tremulous old maid too nervous to practice
her piano in the presence of others. Annie Penn, a twenty-three-year-old
domestic, lived in an attic room above Sōseki and kept him awake at
night clomping around. In the house, she was known as Penn, but Sōseki
nicknamed her “Bedge Pardon” based on how her pronunciation of “Beg
your pardon” sounded to him. In his rendering, “Bedge Pardon” emerged
as a Dickensian character. Asthmatic, her cheeks aflame, she jabbered
at him whenever she had a chance, in her incomprehensible Cockney
dialect, wheezing and spraying his face with saliva and leaving him no
opening in which to question her. But she was a good and kind soul
withal, and Sōseki seemed fond of her in spite of himself.
The day after Christmas, Sōseki wrote Kyōko at length, partly to
inform her that he had moved again and to describe his new lodgings.
As always, the insufficiency of his stipend was on his mind:

What upsets me most is having no money and the thought of getting

sick. I shall refuse to succumb to illness while I am here, but the lack
of money is dismaying. Fifty sen (cents) in Japan is ten or twenty sen
here; 50 yen disappears in three blinks of an eye. My new lodging is
dreary and unclean, but I shall put up with it because it is cheap. I
intend to economize on food and clothing in order to buy as many
books as I can. This is extremely difficult and even painful. There are
few foreign students staying here; most of the boarders are civil ser-
vants or business men with much more money than I have. I don’t
envy them their indulgence in entertainment and luxury items, but if
I had the money they do, I could afford to purchase the books I will
need. I know it must be difficult for you on just 20 yen or so, but think
of my circumstances and make do with what you have. I understand

54   L ondon
 you have borrowed some money from your father. I know it’s not much,
but I want you to use any money that may be left over at the end of
the month, even 1 or 2 yen, to reduce our debt. . . . It was Christmas
yesterday, a big holiday here like our New Year’s. Green holly festoons
all the rooms, and the whole family gathers in the main house for an
evening banquet. At our boardinghouse, we feasted on “duck.”12

After apologizing for being so hard at work that he had forgotten to

send the Christmas card to his daughter that Kyōko requested, Sōseki
reveals his disciplinarian approach to child rearing:

Nothing pleases me more than hearing that Fude is healthy and strong.
I hope you will be careful not to spoil her so that she expects to have
her own way: don’t be charmed into giving her too many sweets, and
don’t allow her to remain constantly seated, which will inhibit the
development of her feet and legs. These things may not appear harm-
ful at the moment, but they can exert a baleful influence in the future
and lead to fearful chronic disease. Nothing is so difficult as raising a
child properly, and I pray you will give this your full attention. . . . I
would like to write to everyone now and again, but I haven’t a minute to
spare and am trying to spend my time as efficiently as possible. . . . ​
There is much more to write, but I just don’t have the time. Happy
New Year to one and all.13

In this Christmas letter, Sōseki was feeling generous about Flodden

Road: “Perhaps to be expected, since this was formerly a school and the
mistress formerly a sensei, there is a refined atmosphere here and I am
treated kindly as though I were family.”14 By the time he wrote to his
friends on February 9, he had either lowered his mask or his assessment
had changed:

Since it had been a school, I assumed there’d be some refinement here,

but I gradually discovered there is no one to talk to. No one reads or
knows anything about books, and although the elder sister was for-
merly some sort of governess, her only topics of conversation are din-
ner and dance parties in the past. . . . Her English isn’t so bad—she
ran a school, after all—but there is nothing elegant about it, and her
vocabulary is limited. When she does reach for an uncommon word,

L ondon   55
 she gets the emphasis or the pronunciation wrong. When I use a dif-
ficult word, she pretends to know it even if she doesn’t, and it’s clear
from her expression that she wouldn’t compromise her dignity as a
British gentlewoman by asking a Japanese—a pathetic creature.
The truth is, we are scholars who are widely read and have no rea-
son to be ashamed of our knowledge of English, superior to that of
many of them. One Westerner didn’t know the meaning of “pillory.”
Another argued whether “such a one” should be “such an one.” An old
woman insisted to me that “benefit” was “a noun of multitude.” They
constantly misplace the emphasis on words they have seen only in
books and never heard. And understand that I’m talking about people
who have received an education, some of them a college education!
The younger sister has little education but at least doesn’t pretend oth-
erwise. The husband is a decent fellow but has probably never read a
book. Recently we went to theater together, a “pantomime” of Robinson
Crusoe, and he asked me if we were watching something from a novel
or a true story!15

As this suggests, Sōseki was cocksure about his command of English

and quick to disparage the ignorance he discovered in native English
speakers. In a lengthy diary entry, dated January 12, he wrote:

There is no basis for supposing that because a man is a native Eng-

lishman, his knowledge of [English] literature is greater than my own.
The majority of them are too busy with their businesses to peruse
books of literature or even to read respectable newspapers. I am aware
that it embarrasses them to lose face to a Japanese, so when I am hold-
ing forth and sense they are uncomfortable, I change the subject. . . . ​
In a university classroom, I have heard female students ask the pro-
fessor how to spell Keats or Landor.16

Scarcely a week passed when Sōseki did not complain to his diary about
a native English speaker who had the effrontery to inquire whether he
knew the meaning of, for example, “evolution,” or “straw,” or, he was flab-
bergasted to record, “tunnel”!17
Sōseki’s insistence on his equal, if not superior, command of English
begins to feel defensive, as though he needs to reassure himself. Not-
withstanding his haughtiness, it is clear that he was deeply insecure

56   L ondon
about his command of the language and increasingly despaired of mas-
tering it (the Cockney dialect, in particular, “spoken by the lower classes,”
disheartened him). In fact, his pessimism about the impossibility of sig-
nificant contact became a justification for his decision to seclude himself
from the outside world. “I can’t have an intimate conversation of any
interest,” he wrote his friends,

and if there was a possibility that my language would improve over

the next two years, I could endure. But that’s not going to happen for
a variety of reasons, and if I must lose time and spend money for no
reward, then I’m better off cutting my losses now. So I’ve resolved to
hole up in the fortress of my room.18

There was a second Japanese boarder at Flodden Road, Tanaka

Kōtarō, a twenty-seven-year-old business man working for the M. Sam-
uel Company. During his six months with the Brett family, Sōseki was
often in Tanaka’s company, walking with him in Vauxhall Park and
through the Clapham Common to Brixton and to nearby Denmark Hill,
and going out to the theater in the evenings. Sōseki had an appetite for
the theater and took pleasure in nearly every play he saw. His only res-
ervation, apart from the expense, was the need to dress up in a frock
coat and silk hat when going out at night. The image of this quintessen-
tially Japanese man stepping out in his tails and high collar, silk hat,
and walking stick, is comic and somehow poignant, but not unique to
Sōseki. Every Meiji gentleman—and Sōseki was the very model of a mod-
ern Meiji gentleman—lived his life astride two worlds, one grounded in
national history and the other adopted and frequently uncomfortable.
In Tanaka’s company, Sōseki saw Patricia Bray’s comedy Wrong Mr.
Wright, “endlessly hilarious,” he noted, a foreign play entitled Christian
that he did not enjoy and, at Her Majesty’s Theater in Charing Cross on
February 23, Twelfth Night. Sōseki wrote in his diary that Malvolio was
played by the actor-impressario Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, but he did
not comment on his performance. He did note that “the beauty of the
sets and the elegant costumes were dizzying. The orchestra was sold out,
and we had to watch from the gallery.”19 On March 7, at the Drury Lane
Theater, they saw a pantomime production of Sleeping Beauty, which
Sōseki pronounced ecstatically “the most gorgeous spectacle” he had
ever seen.

L ondon   57
 Less than a month after he had moved in, on January 22, 1901, Queen
Victoria died. The next day, he wrote, in English: “Flags are hoisted at
half mast. All the town is in mourning. I, a foreign subject, also wear a
black necktie to show my respectful sympathy. ‘The new century has
opened rather inauspiciously,’ said the shopman from whom I bought a
pair of black gloves this morning.”20 On February 21, he set out eagerly
for Hyde Park with his landlord to watch the queen’s funeral proces-
sion, but when they arrived, he found that he was too short to see over
the heads of the huge crowd, so Mr. Brett obligingly hoisted him onto
his shoulders.21
On January 22, 1901, not having heard from Kyōko in the interim,
Sōseki wrote again wondering whether the baby had been born and
reminding her how especially important it was that she take good care
of herself before and after the birth. He complained a little about the
inconvenience of taking care of himself “in a foreign country where cus-
toms and practices are entirely different: just washing and shaving and
combing my hair every morning with cold water takes a damnable
amount of time, not to mention changing my dress shirt and undoing the
buttons!”
As always, time and money were an issue:

There are hoards of Japanese in London, but associating with them

robs me of time and costs money, so I mostly stay alone and lose
myself in my reading . . . I don’t have much opportunity to associate
with foreigners and don’t make much of an effort because of time and
a shortage of money. . . . Walking in town, I see many things I’d like
to buy and bring home as presents, but as I cannot afford them, I pre-
fer to walk by myself in parks or rural areas. . . . Living in an unfamil-
iar place is in itself somehow unpleasant and, on top of that, not having
money makes me feel trapped. I have no choice but to seclude myself
in my room and study; venturing out always puts me at risk of spend-
ing money I don’t have.

The letter concludes with a flabbergasting return to two fixations:

When you have fully recovered from the birth, please see about some
false teeth. If you can’t pay for them, borrow from your father; I’ll pay
him back when I return. Not putting your hair up is better for the hair

58   L ondon
 itself and for your head. There is something called eau de quinine. This
is to prevent dandruff, but you should try it; it may stop your balding.
Writing longer would waste too much time, so I’ll stop here.22

Just two days later, Sōseki writes again in response to a letter from
Kyōko, dated December 21, that has just arrived. The subject is a name
for the baby on the way. The series of names that Sōseki proposes if the
child is a boy is playful, a display of cleverness and humor very differ-
ent from the despair that often darkened his letters. The playfulness is
hard to translate, since it involves puns or other kinds of wordplay; but
the following seems renderable and is, in its way, telling:

Since this will be a child born to you and me, he’s certain to be a taci-
turn chappie, so something like Natsume “Moku” [“Silence”—as odd
as that would be as an English name] might be stylish. If, on the other
hand, you’re hoping the name alone will make him a rich man, then
Natsume Tomu [“Wealth”] would be good. The trouble with that is, his
father is named Kinnosuke,23 and look at him, poor as a church mouse.24

There is no humor in Sōseki’s next letter on February 20:

Half a year has passed since I left, and I’m feeling a little sickened
and want to come home. I’ve received only two letters from you and
no news since your last. I assume things are all right; I assume that if
you or the baby had died, I would have received at least a cable, and
accordingly I’m not so worried. But I am very lonely. . . . You must
have had the baby—are you both well, I wonder—that’s what worries
me a bit, so I’m waiting for a letter but it doesn’t come. . . . As the
days pass, I think about home. Heartless and unfeeling as I am, I am
ardently missing you. I feel that’s commendable and deserves to be
praised . . .
There are things I don’t like about my lodging, but I intend to put
up with it for the foreseeable future. The younger sister here handles
my washing and cleans the room and does a thorough job. My shirts
and trousers get mended without my saying a word. It would be nice
if you were equally attentive. . . . There is more to say, but I must go
for a walk now, so I’ll stop here. When you recover your health, you
might send a short letter.25

L ondon   59
 The next day, Sōseki’s disinclination to socialize was challenged when
he received an invitation to an “at home” from a Mrs. Edghill, a friend
of the solicitous Mrs. Nott, that he felt obliged to accept. His descrip-
tion of the experience, an ordeal, dated February 21, 1901, conveys the
cynicism that sours his London diaries (English words in the original
are in italics):

Snow is powdering down. My watch says 3:00 p.m. Reluctantly, I must

go to Dulwich. I set out in the snow. I glanced at my watch when I
arrived at my destination and saw that I was thirty minutes early. The
snowfall was heavier. Having no choice, I resolved to have a look at
the snowscape and wandered the streets until it was time to go in.
“This way, please”—I obeyed and had a surprise. Half a dozen ladies
were awaiting me in the cramped drawing room. I had no choice but
to take a seat. On my left and right were women I didn’t know. Nor
did I know the lady of the house. It struck me as uncivilized of her to
invite a foreigner she had never met, a Japanese foreigner at that, to
an at home, but I suppose she had invited me unavoidably, out of some
sense of obligation, and I had accepted for the same reason. Tea was
served. We exchanged a few predictable remarks. Presently, her hus-
band appeared. A priest with gray hair. He didn’t seem very pleasant.
His wife has a nice face and uses good English. I left as quickly as I
could. A complete waste of time. Western society is a laughable busi-
ness. Who could have fashioned a society so constrained! What’s
interesting about that! It was still snowing. I went home and played
cards and dominos with the people in the house. I returned to my room
but didn’t feel like reading. I spent thirty minutes or so face-to-face
with the stove. Then I went to bed. A foolish business!26

On April 9, the Reverend P. Nott showed up with another invitation to

tea at Mrs. Edghill’s. That evening, Sōseki wrote a note accepting, feeling
once again that he had no choice. On April 17, he returned to affluent
Dulwich. Mrs. Nott was also there. This time, the ladies had an agenda:

Mrs. Edghill delivered a lecture on Jesus. I was obliged to speak my

mind on the subject. She inquired, was I never moved to pray. I replied
I had no idea to whom I should pray. Mrs. E exclaimed it was a pity

60   L ondon
 not to know that great comfort and began to cry. I felt sorry for her.
Mrs. E. said “I shall pray for you, then.” “Thank you kindly,” I said, and
she asked if I would promise her one thing. When I replied, “Of course,
since you are so kind as to think of me,” she bid me read the Gospels in
the Bible. By all means, I replied, feeling badly for her. As I was leaving,
she reminded me what I had promised. I reassured her. Now I must
read the Gospels.27

On March 9, Sōseki wrote to Kyōko again:

I’ve been waiting for a letter, but not a word. On February 2, the Rio
Janeiro out of Yokohama sank in San Francisco Bay, and I’ve been wor-
ried that a letter to me may have been aboard.
Was the baby born; was it a boy or a girl? I have no idea! Here, in a
foreign country, this is very worrisome to me. If you are unable to write,
you should ask your father or someone else. . . . As I am busy as ever,
I don’t have time for a long letter. Please convey my regards to all.28

On March 18, Sōseki finally learned, in a letter from his father-in-law,

that a baby girl—to be named Tsuneko—had been born on January 26.
Why did Kyōko not write? How could she have neglected to write? A
partial explanation may have to do with her own nervous condition. If
Sōseki was subject to depression and fits of paranoid delusions, Kyōko
exhibited her own form of erratic behavior. Her spells, which seem to
have recurred periodically, were diagnosed as “hysteria.” Although
Sōseki never addressed this explicitly, when he asked her to send a let-
ter “when she has recovered,” he may have been referring not only to
postpartum weakness but also to her emotional health.
In response to Sōseki’s repeated scoldings about the infrequency of
her letters, Kyōko began sending reports on their daughter’s daily activ-
ities that she called “Fudeko’s diary.”

It was a silly record of things, where the maid took her when she woke
up, when she laughed or cried, how her teeth were doing, or when she
had a cold—no one else would have thought it worth reading, but Nat-
sume seemed to enjoy it and thanked me when I sent it to him every
month.29

L ondon   61
 Sōseki noted in his diary a number of times that he enjoyed reading
the diary, but it was not long until he was carping again:

I gather from your letter that you go to sleep after midnight and remain
abed until 9 or 10 in the morning. Never mind about bedtime, I want
to urge you to get up a little earlier. You must know that we even have
a proverb: “Late to bed and late to rise bodes ill.” Women who sleep
until 9 or 10 are either mistresses or courtesans or ladies from the
lower classes. Among women from respectable families who have
received a proper education, you won’t find many examples of this sort
of lax behavior. Look around you at the homes in your father’s neigh-
borhood [Yarai-chō] and see if you aren’t the only exception. I men-
tioned this to you before I went abroad, but it appears you weren’t
affected. It would be awkward and unpleasant if the word got out that
Natsume’s wife remained in bed until 9 or 10. Don’t you agree? . . . As
it seems to me, your habit is also bad for the children. If Fudeko were
to sleep until 9 or 10 when she grows up and gets married, what could
I say to my future son-in-law! This may matter little to your parents,
but to me, it matters greatly! To labor to cure our own shortcomings
is our principal duty as human beings. Moreover, rising early is essen-
tial to good health. . . . You wrote that you were sending a photograph
of Tsuneko but no photo was enclosed.30

Easter came and went. On Good Friday, alone in the house, Sōseki
stayed in all day and read Kidnapped.
In the third week of April, the Brett family, in arrears on their rent,
fled the premises at Flodden Road in the middle of the night and dragged
Sōseki with them to Stella Road in Tooting, a “desolate place.” Sōseki
noted in his diary: “Moved to Tooting. Worse than I had been told. A
terrible house in a terrible place. I don’t intend to stay long.”31
Sōseki stayed for less than three months. On July 11, he placed an ad
in the Daily Telegraph:

BOARD-RESIDENCE WANTED, by a Japanese gentleman, in a strictly

private English family, with literary taste. Quiet and convenient quar-
ters in N., NW., or 8.W. preferred. Address ZV., care of Barker, 2, Castle-­
Court, Birchin-lane, E.C.32

62   L ondon
 He received a number of responses the next day. As Mrs. Brett had
explained, Japanese were considered ideal boarders because they paid
their rent on time, did not complain about the food, and did not intrude
in family business. On July 13, Sōseki wrote to one of the respondents,
“Miss Leale.” On July 16, following an interview, he decided to move in
to her home at 81 The Chase, Clapham Common, London SW 4.
The move from Tooting on July 20 was once again an ordeal. Sōseki’s
books arrived in boxes packed in outsize leather trunks at 4 p.m.; the
boxes were too large to fit through the gate and the books had to be
unpacked and hauled up three flights of stairs to his room. It was a blis-
tering day: Sōseki imagined he dripped a liter of sweat. Crammed into
the room, the books left scarcely any place to sit.33
The boarding house in Clapham Common was run by Priscilla Leale,
fifty-eight, and her sister Elizabeth, ten years younger, who had lived for
a time in the Channel Islands and, like many residents there, spoke flu-
ent French. The other resident was a retired army colonel. Here at last,
Sōseki found an atmosphere he considered congenial, and he stayed in
this house until he left England seventeen months later. He was charmed
in particular by the younger sister, Elizabeth. In a letter to Shiki dated
December 18, he expressed his admiration:

Can you believe I’ve moved again! This makes the fifth time since I
arrived in England. This time I’m with two aging gals and an old cod-
ger who’s a retired professional soldier. It’s as if it’s my good fortune
to have been exiled to the land of the aged. One of the ladies reads
Milton and Shakespeare and speaks fluent French to boot—it’s intimi-
dating. She says things like “Mr. Natsume, do you know the origin of
this word?” And she flatters me: “Mr. Natsume, your English is so won-
derful, you must have been studying it since you were a child.” [In the
words of the Chinese sage,] “Should not a man know whereof he
excels?” Over here, you’ll be making a terrible mistake if you take flat-
tery seriously. It’s not the men so much, but the women often use
words like “wonderful” when it’s just foolishness.34

Toward the end of his first year in London, Sōseki shifted the focus of
his interest. He had been devouring eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
English poetry and prose and, under Craig, Shakespeare. Now he paused

L ondon   63
and took stock. What struck him was how little progress he had made:
he realized that he could continue reading for the rest of his life, and
certainly consume the year in England that remained, and never come
close to reading all the important works on his list. It was time to distill
his experience into a theoretical formulation that would address a fun-
damental question: what is literature? He believed the project would
take as long as ten years and was prepared to “withhold it from the
eyes of the world” until it was complete. In the preface to his volumi-
nous A Theory of Literature (Bungaku-ron), he recalled his newfound
resolve:

Secluding myself in my room, I stowed all my books of literature in a

wicker trunk. I believed that seeking to understand literature by read-
ing literature was like washing blood away with blood. I vowed to
determine the psychological necessity that engendered literature,
developed it, and allowed its decline. . . .
Believing that the investigation I was proposing was too large and
too new for anyone to resolve in the space of one or two years, I
devoted every minute of my time to it and tried to assemble materi-
als from all relevant fields, spending every penny I could put aside on
purchasing books. Never in my life have I pursued my research so
intently and with such genuine interest as during the next six or seven
months.35

Once he had begun, Sōseki referred to his new project in his diary
entries and letters, rarely neglecting to disparage himself. On February
16, 1902, in a despondent postcard to his Kumamoto colleague and close
friend Suga Torao, now a professor of German at the Tokyo First Higher
School, he wrote,

My time here is running out, but I’ve made no progress in my scholar-

ship and feel very out of sorts. I can’t bear the thought of returning to
become a teacher. Returning to Kumamoto is even more awful. I’d
much rather spend the rest of my life in England if it came to that.
These days, I’m not reading literature. I’m plowing through books on
psychology and evolution and so forth. I’m thinking of writing some-
thing, but knowing myself, I’m likely to let it slide.36

64   L ondon
 On April 17 he wrote to Kyōko,

I’ve clarified a bit what I want to write about, and I’m studying day
and night in pursuit of my subject. When I return to Japan, this sort
of careful, dedicated reading and thinking will be impossible. That
luxury is the only benefit provided by traveling abroad. Otherwise,
there’s nothing to be gained from a journey to the West.37

There is no ready explanation for what inspired Sōseki to change

course. Almost certainly one powerful influence was his association at
just this time with a remarkable man, the Japanese chemist Ikeda Kiku-
nae, who was in London from May through October 1901 and who was
staying temporarily in Sōseki’s boardinghouse in Tooting.38 Sōseki’s
diary indicates that when he was not closeted in his room, he was apt
to be in conversation with Ikeda on a wide variety of subjects, English
and Chinese literature, education, Zen and other philosophy, and the
ideal beauty (they agreed that neither of their wives qualified). Ikeda was
a cultured man and also a scientist: it seems reasonable to assume that
during their conversations, Sōseki’s inchoate interest in scientific method
may have been ignited, leading him to resolve to think “objectively”
about literature instead of becoming submerged in it. At this same time, he
was also corresponding with his other scientist-humanist friend, Terada
Torahiko. In a letter to Terada, he mentioned Ikeda:

We spoke of many things; he is an exceptionally fine scholar. His eru-

dition where science is concerned was beyond me, but I have no
doubt that he is a big thinker. Certainly he numbers among my friends
who must be respected. Since I spoke of you often, I hope you’ll look
him up when you have time. I’m sure you’ll find a conversation with
him beneficial, not only as a scientist, but in manifold ways.39

Sōseki’s shift away from literature per se to an abstract consideration

of the “vital force of literature” may explain, at least partially, his deci-
sion to terminate his studies with Craig. Although he mentioned several
times that he saw his tutor “for about a year,” precisely when he stopped
is unclear. On October 7, Sōseki noted in his diary that he “wrote Craig
a letter.” On October 15, he went to see him, but he was out, so he

L ondon   65
“[returned] the books and [left].” His name does not appear again, and
Sōseki’s diary ends on November 13 and does not resume. Possibly the
termination of both his tutor and his diary reflected his mounting inabil-
ity to manage in the outside world.
Another reason for leaving Craig may have been his tutor’s lack of
interest in the modern fiction that Sōseki had vowed to master. On Feb-
ruary 20, 1901, he noted in his diary: “I ask Craig about George Mere-
dith, and he knows nothing. Gives me a number of excuses. There is no
law that says one must read every piece of English literature; it is nothing
to be ashamed of.”40 Though Sōseki minimizes this in his diary, Craig’s
ignorance of modern fiction may have been a disappointment. According
to Kamei Shunsuke—and Komori Yōichi echoes his argument—Sōseki
was compelled to “hole up in the fortress of his room” because he was
unable to find a course of study in nineteenth-century and contemporary
English fiction. Kamei’s revisionist explanation for Sōseki’s decision not to
attend Cambridge or Oxford was not tuition or student attitudes but the
fact that neither school had a department of modern English literature.
(Komori comments that this was to be expected, observing that Meiji-
and Taishō-period Japanese literature did not exist as an academic dis-
cipline in Japan until after World War II.) The University of Edinburgh
and Trinity College in Dublin did offer courses on contemporary fiction—
Hardy, Conrad, Meredith, James—but Sōseki feared he would have dif-
ficulty following Scottish and Irish accents, which led him to choose a
much inferior school, the University of London. As Kamei reminds us,
however, Professor Ker was a medievalist, and texts in medieval English
were an insurmountable challenge to read. Craig, as we have seen, had
little knowledge of or interest in modern fiction. Sōseki was therefore left
with no choice but to teach himself what he was committed to learning.
According to Kamei, he had no idea how to go about this, and the anxi-
ety that his effort produced and the loss of self-esteem drove him toward
madness.41
Ironically, London at this time was home to a number of the great
novelists that Sōseki wanted to study: Joseph Conrad was in town, finish-
ing Lord Jim, as were George Meredith, H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Som-
erset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling, Conan Doyle, and, of course, Henry
James, who was beginning work on Wings of the Dove and shuttling
between Lamb House in Rye and Grosvenor House where he stayed
in London. Sōseki knew about all these writers and was reading, in

66   L ondon
particular, Meredith and James, whose difficult language exasperated
him—“Henry James has the gift of saying something simple in the most
incomprehensible way!” he complained in his notebook—but as an
exchange student from Japan in straitened circumstances, he had no
access to any of them. Increasingly, he was spending his time shut up in
his room worrying about money, reading feverishly, and entering metic-
ulous notes “in characters the size of fly-heads” in his notebook.
During the years that remained to him, his entire life as a writer, Sōseki
suffered intermittently from two pernicious illnesses, one gastrointesti-
nal and the other mental. They seemed to attack in tandem, one trig-
gered by the other, a recurrence of his stomach trouble usually coming
first. As early as January 22, 1901, he wrote in a letter to Kyōko, “My
stomach has been troubling me a bit recently, but it’s not so bad” and
adds, poignantly in light of his impending decline, “I just pray I won’t
be sick while I’m away.”42 On February 21, he bought a bottle of “Carls-
bad” [sic] water, a salt solution from the Carlsbad hot springs in Czecho-
slovakia thought to aid digestion and soothe the stomach, and he noted
the purchase of another bottle on March 29. In a letter to Kyōko on Sep-
tember 22, Sōseki indicates that his stomach continued to bother him:
“Lately my stomach has been feeling weak; the condition seems worse
than when I was in Japan. It may have to with the appalling quantity of
meat I consume here.”43
In a portentous diary entry dated July 1, 1901, Sōseki referred to his
mental state for the first time: “Feeling miserable. Trivial things disturb
me. I suspect this may be a nervous condition.”44
In “London Tidings,” serialized in April and May 1901, primarily to
amuse and distract the failing Shiki, who begged for more, Sōseki painted
a picture of himself during his months at Flodden Road that evokes a
man overwhelmed by his surroundings:

When I step outside, every man Jack that comes along is mortifyingly
tall. What’s more, they all appear sullen, utterly without charm. It
occurs to me that if they levied a tax on height in a place like this, it
might lead to shorter, less costly creatures, but that was just sour
grapes, false pride. In fairness, they were the splendid ones. Just then,
a fellow far shorter than the average came toward me; “about time!” I
thought, but as he passed, I saw he was two inches taller than I. Then
I thought I spied an oddly sallow Tom Thumb, but this turned out to

L ondon   67
 be a reflection of myself in a mirror. I couldn’t help smiling bitterly,
and the reflection smiled bitterly too. . . . When I was in Japan, while
I didn’t consider myself exactly white, I did feel certain I was a color
more or less human, but living in this country over time has made me
realize that my complexion doesn’t come within a country mile of
human—a yellow man mingling with the crowd as he slouches along
to theater and other festivities.45

Sōseki doesn’t mention his anxiety specifically until just months before
he is scheduled to leave England the following year, but the Leale sisters
were disturbed to notice that he was spending more and more time in
his room. In September 1902, he finally disclosed to Kyōko the degree of
his suffering. After opening with his usual “request” that she pay careful
attention to raising the girls properly, he admitted,

Lately, my nerves are shot. My mood is clouded, and I feel extreme dis-
tress. But there is no need to worry as this is not so very serious. . . . ​
I am feeling logy and full of gloom and cannot read well. This is
alarming. I worry that my brain is becoming useless and will oblige
me to spend the rest of my life in idleness, unable to accomplish any-
thing. But this is nothing for you to worry about. Please take good care
of yourself and the girls.46

In fact, Sōseki was in a very bad way. The Education Ministry had
written repeatedly to request the “research progress report” that he was
supposed to file once a year. He was already a year delinquent, and now
he felt more than ever, despite the stack of notebooks on his desk six
inches high, that he had accomplished nothing worth reporting. The min-
istry became more insistent. “A progress report must be filed,” it cabled.
Sōseki dug in his heels and finally, in early September, returned a blank
form. This angered and alarmed the ministry and deepened Sōseki’s
depression.
On September 9, Doi Bansui, an English literature scholar who became
a well-known writer and translator of English poetry, stopped in Lon-
don and visited him. The Leale sisters reported that their boarder stayed
in his room for days on end, weeping in the darkness, and begged him
to move in for a time. According to Doi, Sōseki also asked him to stay,

68   L ondon
saying that he would be glad of his company.47 Doi took a room at
Clapham Common for ten days, until September 18, but was unable to
penetrate Sōseki’s gloom. While he was there, one of the two exchange
students to Germany stopped in London on his way home, and together
they worried about what to do. Sōseki wouldn’t discuss his plight; he
refused to go out drinking, and he was overworking, driving himself with
a quiet desperation that was disturbing to observe. His friends agreed
that he should be sent home, and Doi wondered whether he should
inform the ministry.
In the end, he decided that it was not his place to say anything,
since he was not even an exchange student. But someone else did, prob-
ably another English scholar who was a friend of Sōseki’s, Okakura
Yoshisaburō (the younger brother of the author of the Book of Tea, Okakura
Tenshin). Late in September, the ministry received a telegram from Lon-
don: “Natsume has gone mad.” This alarming observation traveled to
friends and colleagues and even to Kyōko’s younger sister and brother-
in-law in Osaka, but they all agreed to keep Kyōko in the dark until Sōseki
was safely home.
In mid-October, Sōseki had a brief respite: a retired solicitor and art
collector named John Henry Dixon invited him to come along on a jour-
ney to Pitlochry in the Scottish highlands. Given his condition at the
time, it is surprising that he accepted, but it turned out to be a good thing
he did. Years later, in Short Pieces for Long Days, he recalled the Pitlochry
valley deep in autumn rapturously, serene, mellow, dyed warm colors
by the autumn sun and overhung by clouds “that seem ancient.”
Sōseki tarried in Scotland as long as he could, relieved to be released
from the prison of dirty, crowded London streets for the first time since
he had arrived in England. He returned in late October or early Novem-
ber, refreshed but still in fragile condition and behaving erratically. He
had booked passage on November 7 on the Tanba-maru, a Japanese
freighter sailing between London and Yokohama. A Japanese acquain-
tance who happened to be in London, observing that Sōseki was pur-
chasing books at a rate that would consume his entire stipend and leave
him without funds to purchase his return ticket, extracted the ticket
money from him and bought his ticket in advance. He also taught Sōseki
how to ride a bicycle. Elizabeth Leale had urged him to take up bicycling,
popular in England at the time as a means of reducing stress. Sōseki

L ondon   69
tried briefly to learn, with mixed success, and later produced a comic, if
self-lacerative, “Journal of a Bicyclist,” in which he described his humili-
ation at careening down Lavender Hill out of control while the young
English boys lining the streets shouted and jeered.
The Education Ministry cabled the other exchange student in Ger-
many, Fujishiro Teinosuke, later acknowledged as the founder of Ger-
man literature studies in Japan, that he was to accompany Sōseki on the
Tanba-maru. Fujishiro arrived in London and was shocked to learn that
Sōseki had canceled his booking. At the boardinghouse, Fujishiro found
Sōseki sitting vacantly among the books he had accumulated, largely
uncommunicative and refusing to sail with him on the seventh. Sōseki
explained that he had delayed his departure because he had stayed in
Scotland longer than planned and had not had time to pack his belong-
ings. Fujishiro recalled,

I proposed repeatedly that he should leave the packing to someone

else and come ahead with me, but he wouldn’t budge. To be sure,
he had more book boxes in his room than I could imagine an ordi-
nary student affording. If those books had been mine, I don’t think I’d
have been able to leave them to someone else, either. Besides, what
I’d seen today didn’t lead me to feel there was that much to worry
about—it seemed to me that the news that he was mad might have
been an exaggeration. . . . The next day he showed me around the
Kensington Museum and the library and we had a steak and drank
some ale in the library grill room. His last words to me were “I won’t
be seeing you off at the dock.”48

Later that month, Sōseki was felled by devastating news that may
have pushed him over the edge into a total breakdown: a letter arrived
from Takahama Kyoshi informing him that Masaoka Shiki had died at
1 a.m. on September 19. In his grief-stricken letter, Takahama included a
request that Sōseki write something for publication in his magazine,
Hototogisu.49 Sōseki replied on December 1:

Greetings. I’ve been following the course of Shiki’s illness in the cop-
ies of the magazine you’ve kindly sent me every month, and I thank
you now for this notice of his demise. I thought at the time I left Japan
that I would not be seeing him alive again; I believe we shared that

70   L ondon
 certainty, so this news doesn’t come as a surprise. But oh! How grieved I
am, what else is there to say! I do wonder, given the agony of his ill-
ness, if he mightn’t be better off this way. While he was alive, I sent
in my “London Tidings” in hopes of consoling him, the consolation of
the pen, trivial, unnecessary words, and little else. Even so, I did want
to write more, but I kept saying I had no time or I had to study, shame-
less excuses on top of my habitual dereliction, and before I could
resume, our friend had ascended to the palace of the white pearl. I
am deeply remorseful about this, apologetic both to you and to him.50

Four years later, in his preface to the second volume of I Am a Cat,

Sōseki punished himself publicly for what he saw as his failure to
attend to his friend’s dying need. He quoted Shiki from a letter written
in 1901, less than a year before his death, “There is much more I want
to write about but I am in pain and hope you’ll understand . . .” and
continued,

It’s impossible to imagine from his unfaltering cursive hand that

this is a man on the brink of death. Every time I look at his letter I
feel like bowing to the deceased and asking his forgiveness. “There
is much more I want to write about but I am in pain and hope you’ll
understand. . . .” There is an unimpeachable honesty in this, whereas
my reply, “I’d like to write more, but I am so very busy I hope you’ll
forgive me” feels like an evasion. Poor Shiki waited daily for commu-
nication from me and drew his last breath still waiting in vain.”51

Sōseki’s letter to Takahama continued:

I accept your request that I write about him as he was in life, but I
have no idea what I should write and am in a daze, unable to orga-
nize my thoughts. . . . I struggled to compose a few verses in memo-
rium, but sitting here in my high English collar and eating nothing but
steak, haiku don’t come easily to mind. . . . These days I am become
a bizarre creature, half Westerner and half Japanese. When I write in
Japanese, English spills crazily onto the page. When I use English, I
am quickly stymied and long to switch to Japanese. I am like a moon-
calf beyond succor. I shall return to Japan an English dandy, a flower
in my lapel, astride a bicycle.52

L ondon   71
 The closing lines come as a surprise: everything else Sōseki wrote dur-
ing his stay abroad suggests that he had insulated himself against any
but the most superficial sorts of English influence—for example, his silk
hat and walking stick—and here he emerges as a deformed hybrid trapped
between two disparate cultures and comfortable in neither. Was this
merely a literary flourish, or was he serious? More to the point, since
there is no knowing his intention, what does his life, as we perceive it,
suggest? In a letter to Kyōko dated April 17, 1902, he expressed an aes-
thetic displeasure with England and a longing for Japan:

There are no cherry blossoms here and that makes spring feel incom-
plete. Moreover, things here, no less than the people themselves, lack
flavor, subtlety, elegance. . . . What I look forward to with the most
pleasure on returning to Japan are eating soba and Japanese rice,
wearing Japanese clothing, and lounging on the engawa53 gazing at
the garden. Oh yes, and watching butterflies in a grassy field.54

Sōseki’s life on his return was, after all, profoundly “Japanese” in

sensibility: what he chose to eat when his stomach allowed him to
choose, his preference for kimono, the pleasure he took in practicing nō
recitation, calligraphy, brush and sumi-ink painting, and rakugo perfor-
mances. His morality and sense of propriety were, moreover, intracta-
bly Confucian; in that sense he was the very model of a Meiji gentleman.
But his writing, as we shall see, increasingly incorporated elements of
storytelling adapted from his encyclopedic reading of Western literature.
No Japanese writer elevated the Japanese novel to the level of aware-
ness that Sōseki achieved. So perhaps it can be said that he was not
entirely wrong, whether he knew it or not, when he claimed that he was
part Westerner and part Japanese. Certainly, the pain that this cultural
bifurcation caused him in his creative life reflected Japan’s confusion at
this confounding moment of transformation.
On December 5, 1902, having spent weeks boxing his books for travel,
Sōseki finally sailed from the Albert Embankment aboard the Japanese
mail ship Hakuta-maru. Although a number of interesting Japanese pas-
sengers were aboard, Sōseki kept to himself, submerged in his personal
darkness. In his preface to A Theory of Literature (1907), he summed up
his English experience:

72   L ondon
 The two years I spent in London was the most miserable time of my
life. Among the English gentlemen, like a stray dog mixing with a pack
of wolves, I eked out a pathetic existence. I am told there are five
million English. I was one drop of water among those five million drops
of oil, barely managing to survive.55

From Port Said, he sent Elizabeth Leale a postcard in which he thanked

her for her hospitality and declared his intention “never again to visit” a
place like England.

L ondon   73
 +
6

Home Again

Perhaps the earliest indication that Sōseki had brought his mental ill-
ness home from England was his failure to inform Kyōko of his arrival
date. Awaiting word, she learned from a newspaper clipping dated Jan-
uary 24, 1903, probably sent by her architect brother-in-law, Suzuki Teiji,
who was living in Osaka with her sister, that “Professor Natsume of the
Fifth Special Higher School” [in Kumamoto] had arrived in Kobe from
Europe via Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Nagasaki aboard the Japanese
ship Hakata-maru on January 23. When a cable from Sōseki finally
arrived, it informed her that he was taking the next express train from
Kobe to Tokyo, a twenty-hour trip. Using money borrowed from Sōseki’s
surviving brother, Wasaburō, Kyōko mended his kimono and night shirt
and, accompanied by her ailing father, traveled to Kōzu Station, 50 miles
west of Tokyo, to meet him. He appeared in a worsted suit and high col-
lar and sporting a Kaiser moustache heavily waxed and turned up at
both ends, and together they traveled to Shinbashi Station in Tokyo, cur-
rently in the grip of an outbreak of bubonic plague. Terada Torahiko
was waiting to greet him, surrounded by his relatives, and recalled that
on alighting from the train, Sōseki cupped his five-year-old daughter
Fudeko’s chin in his hand, turned her face up, and stared into it, then
released her with a “strange smile on his face.”1
During his two years and four months away, Kyōko and their two
daughters, Fude and Tsuneko, had been living in an annex attached to
her father’s house in Yarai-chō, a fashionable neighborhood and former
geisha quarter northeast of Shinjuku (the publisher Shinchō-sha now
stands on the site). Kyōko had had to make do on the meager 22 yen, 50
sen, a month that was Sōseki’s leave pay from Kumamoto with no help
from her father, who had fallen steeply from on high and now was in
financial straits himself.2 The annex was not only cramped but also

74  
rundown, the tatami worn bare and holes in the paper shoji. Having to
begin his new life in Tokyo in this sorry space doubtless exacerbated
Sōseki’s already unstable condition.
Kyōko recalled that the first three days passed calmly. On the fourth
day, the family was sitting together when Sōseki noticed a single 5-sen
coin, a halfpenny, on the rim of the charcoal brazier. With a glance at
Fude across from him, he muttered, “This brat is full of tricks,” and
slapped her in the face. The child began to cry hysterically, and Kyōko
was beside herself. Later, Sōseki offered a horrifying explanation. One
day in London, he had given a beggar a coin. Later, going into the bath-
room in his boardinghouse, he noticed the same coin on the window
sill. He had been feeling that his landlady was trailing him with evil in
mind, and he assumed that she was using the coin to provoke him. See-
ing a similar coin on the brazier, he had supposed that Fude was up to
the same malicious trick and had struck her in anger.3
From this deranged moment, Sōseki’s condition deteriorated as the
year wore on.4 His friend Suga Torao would find him sitting in a daze
amid his boxes of books, unable to handle unpacking and placing them
on shelves. Sōseki also developed a morbid hypersensitivity to noise,
flying into a rage when Tsuneko cried at night and railing at the two
maids for their loud voices or, worse, for plotting against him behind his
back. At other times, frequently in the middle of the night, he would
explode with anger and hurl pillows or anything near at hand across
the room for no reason that Kyōko could perceive. As spring merged into
the rainy season in early June, his condition worsened, and Kyōko was
at her wits’ end. By this time, she was pregnant with their third child,
suffering again from severe morning sickness; and a bad cold early in
the year had turned into pleurisy that kept her in and out of bed. Bewil-
dered by her husband’s rages, a side of him she had not seen before he
left for England, she asked her own doctor to examine him if he would
agree. An occasion presented itself, and the doctor concluded that his
illness was not a simple matter of neurasthenia5 and urged Kyōko to con-
sult a psychiatrist, Kure Shūzō, a man Sōseki had met once in England
and respected. Completing his examination, Kure told Kyōko, “The illness
is incurable. When it appears to be cured, it’s merely dormant and will
recur throughout his life.”6 There is no record of what Sōseki was told
directly, but in view of the rules of engagement that obtained in Japan
until recently—according to which a terminal or serious diagnosis is

H ome A gain   75
disclosed to relatives but not the patient—it is likely that Dr. Kure’s prog-
nosis was not disclosed to him.7
In July, fearing for the children’s safety and deciding that the family’s
continued presence was likely to aggravate her husband’s condition,
Kyōko allowed him to bully her into moving out of their new residence
in Sendagi and returning with the children to her father’s house in Yarai.
They lived apart for two months, until in September Kyōko had her
mother apologize (Western readers might expect that the apology should
have come from Sōseki) and, using Sōseki’s elder brother as an interme-
diary, asked his permission to return. Sōseki consented, warning that
she and the children should not expect to be indulged as they had been
in her father’s house.
For two months, things seemed better. Then, at the end of October,
Kyōko gave birth to their third daughter, Eiko, and as if inflamed by the
birth, Sōseki’s condition flared up again. Kyōko painted a picture of a
man in the grips of severe paranoid delusions, accusing his wife and the
maids of plotting to irritate him, convinced that the student in the board-
inghouse across the street was a private investigator following him, sit-
ting just outside the screen in the room where she was lying following
the birth, and whispering that he knew what she was up to and was
going to send her back to her father for good as soon as she was well
enough to leave. Kyōko’s mother, miserable to think that her daughter
and grandchildren were living with a madman, tried to persuade her to
come home for good. Kyōko sent her away angrily. “He can despise me or
beat me as he will,” she remembered telling her mother. “When the time
comes, I’ll be in a position to help him and the children. When I think
of the distress I’d cause everyone else by seeking safety and comfort for
myself, I know that I mustn’t move from here.”8
Incidents through the end of the year and into 1904 tested Kyōko’s
dutiful resolve. When she brought him his clothes in the morning, he
would scream at her to leave the room; he stopped giving her money to
run the household and insisted she charge everything so that he could
settle the accounts himself at the end of the month. Waking in the middle
of the night, he would call for food, and she would prepare a tray for
him, which she found untouched in the morning. When his cigarette box
was empty, he would throw it against the wall; when his pocket watch
stopped, he would hurl it to the floor. In his absence, one of the maids
he had fired who felt sorry for Kyōko would sneak in to help her with the

76   H ome A gain

housework, and she frequently appealed to Suga Torao and Takahama
Kyoshi to invite him out. At home, Sōseki accused Kyōko of doing every-
thing she could to spite him. To Kyōko, it seemed that everything Sōseki
did was designed to torment her.
There were bizarre episodes. One day the maid appeared with a rusty
short sword her master had instructed her to hand over to Kyōko with
the words “Use this to work your wiles.” The maid had no idea what he
meant, but the “spooky” look on Sōseki’s face had frightened her. Kyōko
understood at once. The Japanese word for short sword, kogatana, is used
in the phrase kogatana zaiku, “short-sword tactics,” meaning “petty trick-
ery.” Sōseki was saying in his twisted way that he was not about to let
Kyōko get to him, no matter what provocation she resorted to.9
Things at home had begun to settle down by the early summer of
1904. But there is evidence that Sōseki’s mind continued to torment him,
notwithstanding the composure he achieved on the surface. A rumina-
tion, for example, in English, scrawled in one of the memo books he
reserved for what Komiya Toyotaka labeled, for lack of a better term,
“fragments”:

I have lost my wife in teaching her a lesson; I am losing my children

in teaching a lesson to my wife and her family. I am resolved to lose
everything ere I teach them a severe lesson, except my will. It is my
will that I assert, and before it they shall bow. They shall bow before
me as they find in me a heartless husband and a cruel father and an
obdurate relative. They shall bow before me when they see their own
cowardly behavior reflected in their own minds. They will hold me as
responsible for it. Silly things! Think of the cause and the causality. If
you were as obedient and dutiful as the most dutiful and obedient of
all wives, I would not forgive thee. Wait and you will see; wait and
you will see. Try everything; try every art till you are satisfied, till you
are dissatisfied, till you are baulked [sic] of your scheme, which will all
be thrown away on me.10

But there is more to this than simply splenetic craziness:

I hate you, ladies and gentlemen, I hate you one and all; I heartily
hate you to the end of my life and to the last of your race. My hatred,
which has been of no use to you, lying where it was deep in the recess

H ome A gain   77
 of my liver or heart or kidneys, is offered now you public [sic], not for
sale, as I am not developed enough to turn everything to profitable
account, like some of your class are, but merely for charity’s sake. I
open my hitherto hermetically sealed bottle of gall and bitterness and
serve it out as much as you want, freely and gratuitously. Chemists
often talk about one compound neutralizing another. May my hatred
neutralize the poison of love and praise, weighing heavily on your soul,
with its bitterness, astringency, and sourness and restore you to your
pristine health.11

This fulmination, expressed with the license that writing in English

seemed to confer, suggests that Sōseki is referring, however uncon-
sciously, to his art, his novelist’s calling, when he promises a “dose of
hatred” that will “neutralize the poison of love and praise, weighing
heavily on your soul . . . and restore you to your pristine health.” That
seems all the more likely considering that just months after he set this
down, at the end of 1904, he indeed took up his novelist’s pen, opening
his “hitherto hermetically sealed bottle.”
How aware was Sōseki of the degree of his derangement? In a letter
to Suga Torao, dated July 3, 1903, just as his condition was worsening
again, he made light of madness, his own included:

You say Yamakawa will go insane in the near future? I’m not sure
about that. Most people are crazy; they just don’t know it. It’s nothing
special. The world is like a museum of madmen on exhibit. The ones
labeled big crazies are considered heroes or geniuses who have stum-
bled and fallen. The likes of you and I are little crazies, so we’re out
of luck. Think of thieves: the big thief is esteemed, the little thief goes to
jail. Out in the world, it’s not the category that counts, it’s just a matter
of degree.12

Remarkably, Sōseki focused his paranoia and his rage on the mem-
bers of his household and appears to have managed to function nor-
mally, or at least viably, in the outside world. His first task on returning
to Tokyo was finding a decent place for the family to live. For weeks,
while Kyōko lay sick in bed, he and Suga walked the neighborhoods
of bourgeois Tokyo—Hongō, Koishikawa, Ushigome, Yotsuya, Akasaka—
and at the end of February 1903 found a place he deemed acceptable in

78   H ome A gain

Sendagi, a fifteen-minute walk from the university campus.13 The owner,
Saitō Agu, a former classmate at the university, was teaching at the Sec-
ond Special Higher School in Sendai, 200 miles north of Tokyo, and had
vacated the house. A one-story house, 800 square feet, it was cramped
quarters by our standards for a family of four adults, including two maids
and two small children, but was typical for this sort of upper-middle-
class neighborhood. Sōseki’s study, one of two, eight-tatami mat rooms
just inside the entrance, the only room in the house with sliding glass
doors, opened onto a small garden to the south. On the other side of a
low fence at the edge of the garden was a field that belonged to the prop-
erty; an enterprising maid grew eggplants and cucumbers and planted
peanuts there.
There were moving expenses, and since they had sold their belong-
ings when they left Kumamoto, the house had to be furnished. But there
was no money for this: Sōseki had returned from England with scarcely
a dollar in his pocket. With 150 yen he borrowed from Ōtsuka Yasuji, a
professor of aesthetics at Tokyo Imperial University and his loyal advo-
cate, he went shopping with Suga and arranged for the move from his
father-in-law’s annex in Yarai. The family moved on March 3, 1903. They
lived in the house for nearly four years until the owner relocated to Tokyo.
By the time they moved out, Sōseki had established himself as a lead-
ing figure on the literary scene.
In April, he began teaching at both the First Special Higher School
and Tokyo Imperial University. Being hired at Tokyo’s two premier
schools, from both of which he had graduated at the head of his class,
had taken some doing. Officially—and Japan in those days as now was
an officialdom as inflexible as any in the world—Sōseki was still a pro-
fessor on the faculty of the Fifth Special Higher School in Kumamoto
and obliged, under the terms of his agreement with the Ministry of Edu-
cation, to teach there for four more years, two for each year he had spent
abroad. But he had no intention of returning to the provinces. The long
letter to four friends he had written from London in February 1901 ended
with a request: “And now I have a favor to ask: I want to get out of
returning to Kumamoto. I’m wondering if you couldn’t use me at First
Special Higher? There’s no reading the future, but assuming things go
according to plan and I’m still breathing and Kano-kun is still the princi-
pal, how about it? I’ll give you a discount.”14 On June 19, 1901, he brought
up the subject again in a letter to Fujishiro Tadasuke, the exchange

H ome A gain   79
student to Germany who was asked to accompany him home from Eng-
land: “I wrote to Kano [Jūkichi] asking if he mightn’t employ me at the
First Special Higher School, but I haven’t received an answer. I’ve had
enough of Kumamoto.”15
Sōseki’s friends began campaigning on his behalf at once and, by the
time he returned, had managed to secure him positions at both schools.
The awkward issue of his official obligation to Kumamoto remained,
however. The new principal of the Fifth Special Higher School wanted him
back and became more insistent when it became clear that Sōseki had
concealed his intention to remain in Tokyo. The only way out was to
resign formally, a move that had the added appeal of coming with sev-
erance pay. His letter of resignation was accepted on March 31, and he
was duly compensated in the amount of 300 yen. The money came at a
time when the family was still having to make do with leave-of-absence
pay, 24 yen a month, and had close to 300 yen in loans to repay.
Compared with Kumamoto, Sōseki’s position at the First Higher
School amounted to a demotion. Education Ministry regulations prohib-
ited a higher school from hiring a teacher at the same rank he had held
at another. Kano Jūkichi’s only option was to employ Sōseki as a new
lecturer instead of as a professor at a lower salary than he had received at
Kumamoto, 700 yen a year instead of the 1,200 yen he had received
before. Sōseki’s teaching load was heavy, twelve hours a week of Eng-
lish-language classes. He used the text chosen by his predecessor, Sam-
uel Johnson’s 1759 The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, to which
he added Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Suicide Club” from the New Ara-
bian Nights. Sōseki began each class by reading a passage aloud, then
had the students repeat the passage and translate it. His approach was
linguistic, rigorous, and unsparing: he constantly corrected the students’
pronunciation and required them to know not only the meaning but also
the etymology of vocabulary items. “Benevolence,” “sympathy,” “com-
passion” had to be broken down into their constituent elements of Greek
or Latin. On the first test he gave in May, Sōseki caught the students off
guard by asking them to provide antonyms for a list of difficult words.
To the privileged students of the First Higher School, Sōseki’s supe-
rior manner, his three-piece suit and choker collar and pointy kid shoes
and, perhaps most of all, his waxed Kaiser moustache, transformed him
into a caricature of a pretentious returnee from the West. One day, he
came to class and found a cartoon likeness of himself on the blackboard,

80   H ome A gain

featuring the high double collar that forced his head up and back. With-
out a word, he erased the cartoon and began to teach. On another occa-
sion early on, a group of students prepared questions designed to stump
him that they had lifted from the largest dictionary they could find.
Sōseki responded by firing more difficult questions back in a volley of
rapid English that overwhelmed and embarrassed them.
In a memoir written fourteen years later, the writer Naka Kansuke
recalled being a student in Sōseki’s English class:

Someone had heard that the new teacher was tougher on students than
our old one. Since we all felt beaten up badly enough as it was, this
was frightening news. And then he finally showed up and turned out
to be Natsume-sensei. I remember that the first thing I noticed were
his hair and moustache, slicked back and twirled in the manner of a
dandy. We used the same textbook as before, Rasselas, and I’ll never
forget his pronunciation as he read the beginning lines of the chapter
we started from. It was, how shall I put it, self-consciously perfect in
the most pretentious manner, and his voice was nasal and slightly
metallic. I was instantly on my guard as I heard the authority in that
voice. With the acute sensitivity of a tyrannized student, a cringing
animal, I sensed that this newcomer would exact a price for what he
taught us. And he did, his strictness was unsurpassed, but he wasn’t
severe in a mean way, he wasn’t exactly unpleasant. I remember when
we were taking a test, he’d come down the aisle and pause and look
down and say “There’s no such [Chinese] character, write that prop-
erly!” and move on. That was kind of him, but he could also inspire
fear.16

On April 21, Sōseki held his first classes at Tokyo Imperial Univer-
sity. He had not asked his friends for a job there, and he did not seem
entirely pleased to learn that he had been hired. Teaching high school
boys to read an English text was one thing, but preparing lectures on
what he called “the general conception of English literature” was another.
He worried that the task would make it impossible for him to proceed
with the magnum opus on literary theory for which he had been reading
and taking notes for two years in England. He felt unprepared to lecture
on the subject, and he was apprehensive about trying to fill the giant
shoes of his predecessor, Lafcadio Hearn.

H ome A gain   81
 Hearn was among the most gifted and accomplished of the Western-
ers who expatriated to Japan after the country was forced open in the
1850s. His story, in dramatic contrast to the alienation Sōseki contin-
ued to experience in England, is an illustration of his astonishingly suc-
cessful adaptation to a foreign culture and society. Born on the Greek
island of Lefkada—hence “Lafcadio”—in 1850, he was abandoned as a
small child by both his Greek mother and his British surgeon-major
father, grew up in Ireland under the care of a great aunt who also aban-
doned him, spent two years in a Catholic school in France where he
became fluent in French, led a vagabond life in London, and ended up
in Cincinnati at age nineteen, in his words, “dropped moneyless on the
pavement of an American city to begin life.” During his two years in Cin-
cinnati and ten subsequent years in New Orleans, he became a star
reporter, famous for his local-interest stories on a range of subjects,
including murders, the Creole population, French opera, and Louisiana
voodoo, and he contributed regularly to Scribner’s and Harper’s Weekly.
At the same time, he published translations of Nerval, Anatole France,
Pierre Loti, and Maupassant.
After two years of filing stories from the West Indies, Hearn arrived
in Japan in 1890 at the age of forty, initially as a foreign correspondent
for Harper’s. With the help of another uniquely accomplished expatriate,
the Englishman Basil Hall Chamberlain, a linguist who had the distinc-
tion of teaching philology and Japanese at Tokyo Imperial University,
he secured a position teaching English at a middle school in Matsue, an
isolated castle town at the northern tip of Shimane Prefecture on the Sea
of Japan coast. There he married Koizumi Setsu, the daughter of a local
samurai, with whom he had four children. Although he lived in Matsue
for only fifteen months, teaching and writing his earliest portraits of pre-
modern Japan, Hearn managed to become a local hero. In fact, Matsue
is still a sister city to New Orleans and holds an Irish festival on every
St. Patrick’s Day. Hearn’s Japanese house and garden is a national land-
mark and museum.
Late in 1891, Hearn moved to Kumamoto, where he taught English at
the Fifth Higher School for three years, leaving in 1894, just two years
before Sōseki and Kyōko arrived in 1896 (Sōseki was, in fact, succeed-
ing Hearn for the second time in 1903). In 1896, once again with the help
of a recommendation from Chamberlain, Hearn was appointed lecturer
in English literature at Tokyo Imperial University. At that time, he became

82   H ome A gain

a naturalized Japanese citizen and changed his name to Koizumi (after
his wife’s family name) Yakumo.
During the fourteen years he lived in Japan until his death in 1904,
Hearn produced some four thousand pages about the new world he was
experiencing. His first book, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, published in
two volumes by Houghton Mifflin in 1894, included twenty-seven sketches
of life in Japan. The writing is fluent and the detail is impressive, par-
ticularly considering that Hearn was completely blind in his left eye and
very nearsighted in his right, a disability that forced him to carry a mag-
nifying glass and to grope his way into a room and explore it with his
hands as if he were reading braille. His early essays, written in the first
flush of his Japan experience, are effusively admiring, not to mention
naive. Over time, as so frequently happens to an expatriate, Hearn
became less enamored of his adopted country, eventually exclaiming to
Chamberlain, “How thoroughly detestable the Japanese can be.”
Hearn’s most popular book was his collection of ghost stories, Kwaidan:
Stories and Studies of Strange Things.17 Like much of his work, Kwaidan is
a creative retelling of stories he had been told by his wife, Setsu, in the
English-Japanese pidgin they spoke together: Hearn never learned to
read Japanese and had hardly more than a smattering of the spoken
language.18
Hearn had been teaching at Tokyo Imperial University for six years
when he received an invitation from Cornell University to deliver a series
of lectures on Japanese culture in November 1902. It was the right
moment: he had been planning to enroll his eldest son in an East Coast
boarding school and wanted to accompany him to the United States.
But when he applied for a year of sabbatical leave, the president of the
School of Arts and Letters denied his request. Hearn was disappointed,
and he grew angrier when he next received a proposal to cut his teach-
ing load from twelve to eight hours a week, with a proportionate decrease
in salary. He was unaware that the president had resolved, with the sup-
port of the Japanese faculty—who had no love for Hearn for a variety of
reasons, his lack of scholarship, his affected Japanese dress and man-
ner, and his salary, double their own—to bring Japanese teachers into the
English literature department, and was planning to use the money saved
on his salary to hire one or more native instructors. Furious at what he
considered a slight, Hearn refused to accept the proposal. On January, 5,
1903, he received notice from the administration that the university was

H ome A gain   83
unable to renew his contract when it expired on March 21. In letters to
friends, he described his termination as an “unbearable humiliation”
and expressed anxiety about supporting his family, though in truth his
growing royalties more than ensured him of a comfortable living.
The students in Hearn’s classes demonstrated in protest after his last
lecture on March 2, and the administration was shaken. The president
requested a meeting, and when Hearn did not appear, he visited him
at his home in Nishi Okubo. Hearn could not be persuaded to accept the
new arrangement, and he severed his relationship with Tokyo Imperial
University. He received offers from both Stanford and Cornell, but he
chose to go to Waseda University instead. He died of heart failure the
following year at age fifty-four and was given a Buddhist funeral. His
grave is in Zōshigaya Cemetery in Tokyo (where Sōseki is also buried).
With Hearn gone and funds available, the faculty council recom-
mended three new appointments in English language and literature. An
Anglican minister named Arthur Lloyd was employed to teach English
for two hours a week. Ueda Bin, best known for introducing the Sym-
bolist poets to Japan in creative Japanese translations, was appointed as
a “lecturer” and assigned four hours. Sōseki was given six hours a week
at the same rank as Ueda. He was paid 800 yen; added to the 700 yen
he was earning at the First Higher School, his annual salary came to
1,500 yen. Compared with the 1,200 yen he had earned in Kumamoto,
adjusting for inflation, he was doing less well than before he had left
Japan in 1900.
Sōseki was assigned two courses, English Reading and Survey of
(English) Literature, both two-hour classes. For the reading course, he
chose Silas Marner.19 His focus was rigorous and demanding, linguistic
rather than literary, and his students resented being required to trans-
late line-by-line as if they were still in middle school. They resented
Sōseki as well, viewing him as an interloper responsible in some way for
having ousted their favorite teacher. From the outset, Sōseki inflamed
their antagonism by making no attempt to conceal his disappointment
with their performance.
In the afternoons on the same day, Sōseki taught his Survey of Lit-
erature to a much larger class. He distilled his lectures from the note-
books he had compiled in London, beginning with the eighteenth-century
novelists Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, moving on to Romantic poetry,
and then to the nineteenth-century realism of Jane Austin, Dickens, and

84   H ome A gain

George Eliot. The class was notoriously difficult: Hearn had not trained
his students in close reading and analysis of form and style. In fact, his
classes had been the opposite of rigorous. He had used Tennyson and
Swinburne as his texts and had urged his students to connect with the
subjective feelings that Romantic poetry inspired in them. In a curious
way, Hearn’s classes were Japanese in approach and sensibility, thick
green tea (matcha) to Sōseki’s Earl Grey.
If Sōseki’s students were, at least initially, dissatisfied with him, resent-
ing him for having replaced Hearn, intimidated and put off by his unfal-
tering command of his subject, his strictness, and his pretentiously
Western dress and finicky manner, Sōseki was no less dissatisfied with
them. On May 21 in a letter to Suga Torao, who was preparing to leave
Japan for a teaching engagement in Nanjing, he wrote that teaching at
First Higher, with less responsibility than at Kumamoto, was a breeze,
but that Tokyo Imperial University was another matter: “I’m not well
received; I’m told they don’t understand my lectures. . . . Depending on
how they do on their exam at the end of the term, I’m prepared to resign.
If that were to happen, it would be my intention to pursue the research
I began in England.”20
The Silas Marner final on June 11 was a disaster. It was a single essay
question: “Outline Silas Marner and provide a critical evaluation in Eng-
lish.” The students had not prepared for this and thought it inappropri-
ate for a language exam. Sōseki failed a number of them.21 The Survey
of Literature exam on June 15 was also a single essay: “Summarize the
content of my lectures since April and construct a critical evaluation.”22
The results were no better.23 In another letter to Suga, Sōseki reported
that he had been true to his promise to himself: “I went to see the presi-
dent and shared my humble thoughts about the school with him, intend-
ing to resign. He came back at me with some high-flown dissuasion and
weakened my resolve. I ended up backpedaling and agreeing to stay
on—a pitiful performance.”24
The students’ regard for Sōseki climbed when he began teaching
Shakespeare on September 29, 1903, shortly after Kyōko had rejoined
him from her father’s house. He devoted four months to Macbeth, spent
the better part of a year on King Lear, beginning on February 24, 1904,
moved on to Hamlet for six months in 1905, and finally The Tempest into
1906. The new course was scheduled at the same time as the Readings
in Silas Marner it replaced, from ten to noon twice and sometimes three

H ome A gain   85
times a week. The lecture hall, the largest in the building, classroom 20,
was filled, standing room only. The course he continued to give in the
afternoon, his theoretical overview of English literature in the nineteenth
century, was too specialized for all but English majors, but Shakespeare
was another matter. Shakespeare was among the names that epitomized,
along with, for example, Beethoven and Goethe, the ultimate Western
cultural achievement that was still very much a focus of emulation in
modernizing Japan.25
Tsubouchi Shōyō, the first translator into Japanese of Shakespeare’s
complete works, had been lecturing on the plays at Waseda University
since 1890, and Sōseki was almost certainly motivated in part by a desire
to demonstrate his own superior command of the repertory. His timing was
felicitous: in September of the previous year, having just returned from
a second European tour, the Kawakami Theater Troupe had mounted a
production of Othello at the Meiji-za theater, with Kawakami’s wife and
collaborator, the former geisha known as Sadayakko, in the role of Des-
demona. Adapted by Kawakami to accord with Japanese tastes, the pro-
duction was a hit with intellectuals in general and university students in
particular. In the fall of 1903, just as Sōseki was beginning Macbeth, the
company staged its own version of Hamlet that was even more popular
with students. In his memoir “The Human Sōseki,” Kaneko Kenji wrote,
“How fortunate for us that the Kawakami Troupe performed a Japanese-­
style Hamlet just as we were attending Natsume-sensei’s lectures on Mac-
beth! Many of the students in our class were there. I had never seen such
a crowd of young intellectuals and students at a play.”26
By the time Sōseki finished Macbeth and began King Lear in February
1904, his lectures were being attended by students of philosophy and
even the natural sciences, in addition to English majors. At about that
time, probably hoping to compete for some of his popularity, Arthur
Lloyd began lecturing on The Winter’s Tale, and Ueda Bin offered a class
on Romeo and Juliet. Kaneko recalled that Sōseki was openly dismissive
of his colleagues’ efforts.
Writing in 1916, another student described Sōseki’s approach to
Shakespeare and even recalled examples from a class on Macbeth. He
remembered Sōseki coming in shortly after the bell rang, with his bowler
hat under his arm and, on days likely to rain, his umbrella in hand,
always “spiffy with his hair neatly parted and his moustache twirled,”
acknowledging the greetings from his several hundred students, placing

86   H ome A gain

his hat and umbrella on the window sill, slowly ascending the podium,
carefully removing his text from a purple silk cloth——the MacMillan
Macbeth edited by K. Deighton—bowing slightly to the room, and begin-
ning his lecture in a “clear, bright voice with perfect enunciation”:

First he’d read aloud, then explain words and phrases, then analyze
important passages and demonstrate plot development, all with his
own unique, critical vision of things, introducing other readings,
including Deighton’s, but never insisting on them. He would even crit-
icize Shakespeare, pointing out that a metaphor was perfect or forced
or that a certain description was brilliant or clouded.27

Assuming they were accurately recalled, the following examples sug-

gest an approach unlikely to have been experienced in any other Japa-
nese classroom and reveal Sōseki’s focus on details of language and his
confidence in his readings:

macb . If we should fail?

l ady m . We fail.
professor natsume : The brilliant Mrs. Siddons was particularly inge-

nious at portraying Lady Macbeth and was said to have distin-

guished three different readings for her “We fail.” The first, “We
fail?” is an interrogation, the second, “We fail!” is an exclamation,
and the third is a flat statement ending with a period. The first con-
veys slight contempt; the second is grave, sober; and the third is
lighter and said to invoke the proverb “If we fail, we fail.” Any of
these is fine, choose the one you prefer. I’d like to read this line for
you with all three inflections, but with my reading such as it is, I’m
afraid that would avail you naught.” In truth, the author concludes,
“Sensei was extremely skilled at reading aloud, and his pronuncia-
tion was flawless.”28

A number of Sōseki’s students went on to become writers and critics

in their own right, and not a few of them later reminisced in print about
his classroom. Their portraits invariably mentioned the Anglophile dandy
impeccably attired in tailored navy with pressed trousers and a high,
“double collar,” shiny kid shoes with pointy toes and elevated heels, a
rapid, purposeful step with a rhythm all its own, and, always, the waxed

H ome A gain   87
and twirled Kaiser moustache. In the classroom, Sōseki spoke English
only, even calling the roll, “Mr. So-and so,” in a nasal, “affected” voice
the students enjoyed imitating. His manner, start to finish, was “sol-
emn,” “severe,” and “intimidating.” His exam questions were “profound,”
“unexpected,” “challenging,” and “anticipated with fear.” But “forbid-
ding” as he was, his former students tend to agree that he left them with
a precious gift, “an approach to studying and appreciating literature.”
Part of that approach seems to have been an irreverence designed to lib-
erate students from the authority of Western critics that was considered
beyond challenge at a time when Japan still viewed itself as a dedicated
student of the West. In the words of an anonymous commentator, “stu-
dent XY,” whose cutting faculty evaluations appeared in a slim volume
released in October 1905,

Natsume-sensei says it’s not necessary or even possible to understand

great works of Western literature in the same way as Western readers
do. “Appreciate whatever it is that you feel. No need to feel a certain
way because of something a Western critic may have said.” But that
doesn’t mean it’s acceptable to read carelessly. He expects us to pay
close attention to every phrase and every word. He’s also versed in
Chinese and Japanese literature and is particularly good at haiku.
There’s a mellow humor in his lectures that makes them fun to listen
to. . . . But he wasn’t always so enlightened. We hear that when he was
at the Kumamoto Higher School, he took great pleasure in making stu-
dents miserable.29

Writing in 1928, Nogami Toyoichirō, the president of Hōsei Univer-

sity, Shaw scholar, and the husband of the major novelist Nogami Yaeko,
focused his reminiscence on aspects of Sōseki’s behavior that revealed
his teacher’s inner turmoil:30

You could see him suffering even in class. He was ghostly pale, and
he began each sentence with a short, nervous cough. He had a habit
of licking his forefinger and then tracing something, possibly a Chinese
character, in the dust on his desk. He was so compulsive about this
that we worried about the dirt he was consuming when he licked his
finger.

88   H ome A gain

 We heard he rarely stopped at the faculty lounge. So he would come
directly to class in his overcoat and with his hat and walking stick.
He lectured without pause for two hours, reading from lined sheets of
paper jammed with tiny characters that he had prepared at home, one
or two sheets only for an entire lecture, and when he was finished, he
would gather up his things and leave straightaway. Someone reported
that on the rare occasions when he did stop in at the faculty lounge,
he would turn his chair away from his colleagues, ignoring them, and
sink into his book. In those days, following his return from England,
he was horribly depressed and antisocial.31

Nogami recalled an incident that impressed students and appears in

different versions in a number of memoirs. According to a diary kept by
Kaneko Kenji, it occurred on December 1, 1904, during a Theory of Lit-
erature class. Morita Sōhei placed it later, in November 1905, during a
lecture on Hamlet.32 In Morita’s version, Sōseki opened the text and
began to read in a soft voice. Abruptly, he descended from the podium
and moved down the aisle to a student sitting toward the rear of the
room. It was this student’s habit to listen to lectures with his hands thrust
inside the kimono he invariably wore. Sōseki began scolding him for this,
and as his voice rose, a student nearby spoke up: “Sensei, he has no
hands!” Silence in the room. According to Kaneko, Sōseki left the class
room without a word. In Morita’s version, which may be an elaboration,
he returned to the lectern and stood there with his head bowed. Presently,
he looked up and spoke: “I apologize. But since I’m wringing lectures
every day out of knowledge I don’t have, you might at least show us the
hands that you don’t have—” The story got around, and Sōseki was
reviled for making sport of a student’s deformity. But Morita had per-
ceived Sōseki’s dismay and understood that he had been trying to dispel
his anguish with a joke; thenceforth, by his own account, he was more
than ever eager to make his acquaintance. In time, he became a member
of the innermost circle of Sōseki’s protégés.

H ome A gain   89
 +
7

I Am a Cat

In December 1904, Sōseki’s creative energy geysered, bearing him

upward in the space of sixteen months into the empyrean of Japanese
writers who were taken seriously. His output during the first act of his
literary career went beyond prolific: even as he was serializing his first
novel, I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko aru),1 he produced eleven shorter
works of fiction, two of which, Botchan and Kusamakura,2 are among his
shorter masterpieces. Once he had taken up his pen (a quill pen inlaid
with mother-of-pearl that he had brought home from England), he wrote
incessantly, before dinner, after school, and after dinner until late at night
and, according to Kyōko, with great pleasure and small effort.
From the outset, Sōseki’s fiction was against the grain. To be sure,
the “I-novel,” the product of writers in thrall to the notion that only the
confession of actual incidents in their lives, the more shameful the bet-
ter, deserved consideration as art was still inchoate when Sōseki began
I Am a Cat. Not until 1907 did Tayama Katai inaugurate the genre with
his novella Bedclothes (Futon).3 But even before Bedclothes, writers in the
ascendant Naturalist school, influenced by Guy de Maupassant and
Émile Zola, among others, were basing their fiction on material from their
personal lives. Their work tended to be egocentric, dominated by the pro-
tagonist-cum-author’s point of view, unmediated reality serving as a
substitute for artfully created verisimilitude.4 Sōseki deplored what he
called “the gray skies of Naturalism.” He was not objecting to the use of
autobiographical material in fiction. Like most writers, he incorporated
material from his own life in everything he wrote, although he was art-
ful, never literal. He was critical of what he perceived in naturalist fic-
tion as an absence of intellectual interest and emotional power that
resulted from portraying reality unalloyed.5

90  
 I Am a Cat was originally a short story introduced by Sōseki to a read-
ing group at his house organized by the publisher of Hototogisu, Taka-
hama Kyoshi. Kyōko prepared a meal, and the participants, most of them
younger writers a number of whom became Sōseki’s disciples, read their
work aloud and critiqued it. Because Sōseki was a clumsy reader, Taka-
hama read the story for him, and he joined the others in laughing at his
own invention. Takahama wanted to publish the story in his magazine
and suggested a number of emendations, including changing the title
from “Cat Chronicle”—a stray kitten had just at this time found its way
into the Natsume household—to “I Am a Cat.”
When the story appeared in the January 10, 1905, issue of Hototogisu,
readers clamored for more, delighted by its wit and lightness of touch in
contrast to the dogged earnestness of naturalist fiction, and Sōseki was
happy to oblige. A “sequel” appeared in the February issue, and a “sequel
to the sequel” came out in April. The June 10 continuation was subtitled
“Installment 4,” indicating that Sōseki had resolved to produce a ­full-length
book. Chapters followed in July and October. Installments 7 and 8 were
published together on New Year’s Day, 1906; installment 9 was published
in March; installment 10 in April, and the concluding chapter in August. In
mid-October 1905, Okura shoten published the first five chapters as I Am
a Cat, volume 1. The first printing sold out in twenty days. By that time,
Sōseki’s students were calling him “Professor Cat.” Volume 2 was pub-
lished by Hattori shoten in November 1906. The book was designated
volume 2 of 3 (中編), indicating that more was to come, possibly wishful
thinking on the part of the publisher. But Sōseki never looked back. The
previous month, the same publisher released a slim volume of the first two
chapters translated into English by K. Ando and revised by K. Natsume.
I Am a Cat is a mordantly comic evocation of Sōseki’s deep pessimism
about his own humanity and indeed about humankind in general. The
feline narrator, an alley cat who has taken up residence in the home of
an English professor named Sneeze, is increasingly dismayed by the con-
versations at the heart of the book between the professor and his cro-
nies, who pay him frequent visits in his study. They include a doctor of
aesthetics whose name means something like “bewildered” (Meitei,
translated as Waverhouse),6 a fatuous pedant at work on a “history of
hanging” who is polishing a glass ball in hopes of eventually producing
a perfect sphere ten years down the line (the resemblance to Casaubon is

I A m a C at    91
intended), a sycophant vassal of the wealthy family down the street, a
former houseboy, and a “new playwright” working on the “haiku theater.”
The cat speaks with Sōseki’s voice, now bitingly critical, now cynically
amused. He concludes early on that “humans are selfish and immoral”
but gradually augments his understanding:

The important thing in life, whether we speak of animals or human-

kind, is knowing the self. If humans would only learn to know them-
selves, they’d deserve more respect than any cat. I might even feel
uncomfortable about treating them as caricatures in that case and put
aside this poison pen of mine. Alas, . . . it appears they know as little
about themselves as they do about the sizes of their own noses.7

The first two installments include some charming socializing between

the narrator and other felines in the neighborhood, a giant named Black
who belongs to a rickshaw man and sounds like a Cockney chimney
sweep, and a flirtatious little tabby who calls him “sensei,” presumably
because he lives with one. But beginning with installment 3, the cat
devotes most of his time to critiquing the palaver in his master’s study,
venturing outside only occasionally to spy on the family down the street,
the wealthy Kanedas.
A work of art need not have a model, but critics have been looking for
one since I Am a Cat first appeared. As early as 1906, the father of Ger-
man literature studies in Japan and Sōseki’s friend, that same Fujishiro
Teinosuke who was supposed to have chaperoned him on his voyage
home from England, introduced Japanese readers to E. T. A. Hoffman’s
unfinished Lebansansichten des Katers Murr (The Life of Tomcat Murr,
(1820–1822)) and identified similarities and differences between the
feline “autobiography” by the German master of fantasy and horror and
Sōseki’s novel. Neither Fujishiro nor subsequent scholars have been able
to verify that Sōseki had actually read Hoffman, which was available
only in German at the time, but he might have. In a diary entry late in
1915, he mentions in passing that he is reading the German translation
of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Certainly he knew about Hoff-
man’s book, since near the end of I Am a Cat, he includes a reference:

It has now been more than two years since I have been living as a cat
in this human world. I have always considered myself a creature of

92   I A m a C at
 unequaled discrimination and perceptivity, but recently a fellow feline
called Tomcat Murr abruptly appeared on the stage with a great show
of vitality and enthusiasm and caught me off guard. When I looked
into this carefully, I learned that he had in fact died one hundred years
ago and had been impelled by a spasm of curiosity to journey all the
way from Hades as a ghost to give me a scare.8

Apart from the feline narrators, the novels have little in common: I Am a
Cat is a commentary on humankind delivered by a cat; Tomcat Murr is the
autobiography of the totally anthropomorphized narrator (and, crazily, of
a second unrelated figure whose story unfolds on pages interspersed).
If a model must be found, a more likely candidate would be Lawrence
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which Sōseki certainly had read. It is hard to
imagine him reaching the end of Sterne’s hulking monster in English—
no Japanese version was yet available—and one tends to be skeptical
until reading the essay on the novel Sōseki published in 1899 when he
was thirty, the year before he went to London, and seeing how compre-
hensively he has grasped the book and how appositely he quotes from
it. The essay reveals a facet of Sōseki’s genius, that he was a heroic reader
even in English. He likens Tristram to a “sea cucumber distinguished by
no form or shape, no beginning or end, no head or tail.” But this is not
intended as a derogation. He continues, “The work that ensured a place
in history for the compulsively perverse and morbidly neurasthenic Law-
rence Sterne was the compulsively perverse and morbidly neurasthenic
Tristram Shandy; no other novel plays men for fools and clowns so extrav-
agantly, no other makes us cry so hard or laugh so loud.”9
In an interview he gave in May 1909, on the occasion of George Mer-
edith’s death, when asked whether Meredith’s novels had influenced him,
Sōseki replied, “Every book I have ever read carefully lives somewhere
inside me and influences me in some way or other.”10 In this case, to an
extent that exceeds several explicit allusions to it, Tristram Shandy is pres-
ent in I Am a Cat. The tone and flavor of the satire, the digressive nature
of the structure that defeats a narrative story line, the action consisting
in the interruption of the action, and the self-lacerating humor, all these
are evocative of Sterne’s masterwork.
Stylistically, I Am a Cat is a gallimaufry of elements: classical Chi-
nese, classical Japanese, contemporary vernacular across a range of
timbres from bourgeois refinement to “downtown” vulgarity, and a vast

I A m a C at    93
field of allusion to Western sources from the Greeks to eighteenth- and
nineteenth-­century English literature. Among the pleasures of the work
is the repeated yoking together in any given passage of an assortment
of allusions from Du Fu, the English poet Gray, Beowolf, and a contem-
porary play on words reminiscent of Cockney rhyming slang. Elsewhere,
we find references to Rabelais, Robert Louis Stevenson, Victor Hugo, Chi-
nese learning, Aristotle, Izumi Kyōka, Tsubouchi Shōyō, Shakespeare,
Henry James, Meredith, and many others. Remarkably, the elements that
comprise Sōseki’s style are still unblended in this first novel, visible on
the page to be identified and analyzed. Here, more distinctly than ever
again, we can see Sōseki creating an unmistakable voice uniquely his own
from the range of disparate elements he commands.
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke wrote that First Special Higher School students
were “more philosophical than Kant,” and Sōseki was a prime example:
extended sections of I Am a Cat, particularly in the later installments,
are devoted to ruminations, often satirical, on the nature of reality or
death or the Zen approach to leaving the self behind.
But this was essentially a comic work, colored by dark comedy.
Sōseki’s humor and, to a certain extent, his narrative method, are influ-
enced by rakugo, the comic routines he enjoyed at vaudeville theaters in
Shiki’s company. Rakugo “pilloried” the full range of characters in the
highly stratified social tapestry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries. Categories in the repertory included “fathers and sons,” “drinking
and drunks,” “cuckolds,” “quacks,” “illnesses,” “illiterates,” “deformities”
(the lame and halt, deaf and blind), “odd habits and fixations,” and
“samurai” (a fearsome, anachronistic figure who wandered in and out of
the merchant community).
Unlike other forms of storytelling and oratorio, the puppet-theater
texts, for example, refined literary tours de force, rakugo was couched in
the vernacular Japanese of the working class and the merchant, the
“Cockney” spoken east of the Sumida River in that part of Edo (and,
later, Tokyo) known as “downtown” (shitamachi). For that reason, in addi-
tion to its entertainment value, rakugo appealed to novelists of the
Meiji period who were struggling to forge a new written language that
combined written Japanese, historically an amalgam of Chinese and
Japanese elements accessible only to the highly educated, and the spo-
ken language.

94   I A m a C at
 Although Sōseki had been an ardent fan since middle school, he went
beyond relishing rakugo: he absorbed and was able to recreate it, repli-
cating in his own original way its approach to storytelling, the balance
between the narrative and the voices of the characters, its ellipses, its
sublime raciness and vulgarity, its cadences and rhythm. The stories
traded among the professor and his cronies repeatedly evoke the expe-
rience of listening to rakugo (enriched with psychological touches drawn
from, among others, William James). More than once, Sneeze’s wife, lis-
tening from just outside the room, exclaims, “It’s exactly like listening to
a raconteur” (hanashi-ka)11 or “He’s every bit as vulgar as a storyteller!”
(kōshakushi).12
The badinage at the heart of the book is rendered with delight, a nar-
rative ebullience that evokes the pleasure Sōseki takes in his ability to
bring it off and extend it endlessly, a joie d’écrire that is harder to find in
his later work. The gift for variation and embellishment that enlivens the
book is Mozartian. As one after another of the professor’s acquaintances
arrive in his study, what commences as a duet becomes a trio and then
a quartet and occasionally even a quintet, each voice a parody of dis-
tinctly different Meiji character types and personalities. More than any-
where else, I Am a Cat overwhelms the reader with inexhaustible invention
exuberantly on display.
Created to be performed, rakugo texts lie flatly on the page, balloons
waiting to be inflated. Sōseki’s humor is inherent in the writing, as in
this scolding her maid receives at the hands of young Miss Kaneda down
the street:

“Since when do you wear your hair up?”

The maid took a deep breath and replied simply: “Just today—”
“Really! You’ve got some nerve—and I see you’re wearing a new
collar?”
“Yes, Miss—you gave it to me just the other day, and I thought it
was too fine for a girl like me, so I put it away in my trunk. But my old
one was stained—”
“When did I give you something so nice?”
“New Year’s—you bought it at Shirokiya, and you said I could have
it because it was too plain for you—”
“How appalling—it looks rather good on you.”

I A m a C at    95
 “Thank you very much.”
“That wasn’t a compliment. Some nerve you have!”
“Yes, Miss—”
“What made you think you could accept something that suited you
so well!”
“. . .”
“If it looks that good on you, imagine how it would look on me!”
“Very pretty, I’m sure—”
“Some nerve you have to keep mum about it when you know it would
look well on me. And you walk around flaunting it! Such a nasty girl!”13

This is not heartwarming humor (nor is most rakugo). It manages to

be cold, cruel even, and funny at the same time, and in that regard, it is
representative. While I Am a Cat is a comic gem, the reader cannot help
noticing that its laugher is not generous but mocking, deprecative, and
cynical. Often as not, we laugh out of embarrassment or even pity. Pro-
fessor Sneeze and Doctor Bewildered debate the possibility that young
Kaneda Tomiko will sooner or later develop her mother’s oversized nose.
Sneeze, who insists he has no interest in money or authority, anxious to
ingratiate himself with the policeman who has collared a burglar, pros-
trates himself in front of the criminal whom he mistakes for the cop
standing alongside him. Earlier, he persecutes his wife when he discov-
ers a bald spot near the top of her head. They are at home alone. The
missus has washed her hair and is sewing a jacket for her child as she
lets it dry, her rear end turned to the professor, a pose the cat suggests
“may be rude.” Sneeze reclines on the tatami behind her, his chin sup-
ported in his hand, and puffs on his long-stemmed pipe. His eyes track
the smoke curling upward from her back to her shoulders to the top of
her head. He gasps in surprise:

“Do you know there’s a big bald spot on the top of your head?”
“Yes,” she replies, continuing to sew. There is no sign she is upset
at this discovery. Cool and collected, a model wife.
“Did you have that when we were married, or did it happen after-
ward?” my master inquires. If she was bald before they married, he
was duped is what he thinks but doesn’t say.
“I don’t remember when it happened, it’s just a spot of baldness,
what does it matter.” How very enlightened she sounds.

96   I A m a C at
 “It’s on your head is why it matters.” There is anger in my master’s
voice.
“That’s right: it’s my head and I’m not worried about it,” she says,
but as if she is a bit concerned, her right hand wanders to the top of
her head and strokes the area.
“Gracious! It’s gotten bigger, I didn’t realize—” Judging from her
exclamation, it appears she has finally realized that she is balder than
she should be at her age.
“When a woman does her hair up, this part gets bunched so it hap-
pens to every woman,” she says defensively.
“If it happened that fast, everyone would have a head like a tea-
kettle by the time they turned forty. It’s a disease, no doubt about it.
It might be contagious, better have Dr. Amagi take a look.” My master
ran his hand through his hair as if to check.
“You make a fuss about me, what about those white hairs in your
nostrils? If balding is contagious, then so are white hairs!”
“White hairs in the nose don’t show, so there’s no harm in them.
But if a pate, especially a young woman’s pate, is that bald, it’s an
eyesore. A deformity!”
“If I’m deformed, why did you marry me? You married me for love,
and now you’re telling me I’m deformed?”
“I didn’t know. I had no idea until now. If you’re so high and mighty
about it, why didn’t you show me your head before we married!”
“How ridiculous! Name a country where a woman has to pass a
test of her head before she marries!”14

Additional references to balding recall the bizarre letter Sōseki sent

to Kyōko from the steamship Preussen; it is a fixation there is no account-
ing for, except to say that it is one of the demons that plagued Sōseki all
his neurotic life. This was one of many tics and foibles he was careful to
transfer to Professor Sneeze, whose carping voice throughout the book
mimics so perfectly his own. I Am a Cat aspires to be more than a mod-
ern version of a nineteenth-century satire. It attempts, and achieves, a
portrait in depth of a character who is at once a parody of a compla-
cently sophisticated Meiji-period hypocrite and a self-lacerating portrait
of the author.
Like his creator, Sneeze writes haiku, which he submits to Shiki’s mag-
azine, Hototogisu, as well as bad English verse. He teaches English at

I A m a C at    97
the university; he is married with three daughters (Sōseki had four chil-
dren by 1905); he suffers from a chronic stomach illness; and he is a dis-
tant father and a cold husband. Overall, he appears to be a misanthrope
with a dim view of human nature and a deep pessimism about the pos-
sibility of happiness in life. Although he does not say so explicitly, the
cat speaks for him and, we feel certain, for Sōseki himself.
As with all narcissists, Sōseki’s vision of himself was on a pendulum.
At the top of his arc, he congratulated himself on his genius. At the low
end, he tended to excoriate himself on a number of counts. In the open-
ing pages of the penultimate installment, chapter 10, the cat serves up a
withering judgment:

My master has yet to attract a single woman. Since it appears that

even his missus thinks very little of him, it shouldn’t be hard to imag-
ine how he does elsewhere. “A man shunned even by his own family,”
so the song goes, “shouldn’t expect love from a harlot he doesn’t even
know”—this lyric applies to my master: Unloved by his own wife he
should hardly expect to do well with the gentlewomen of the world.
Don’t misunderstand me: it’s not that I feel it necessary at this moment
to expose my master’s unpopularity with the fairer sex. I say what I
say out of kindness, my desire to give my master a clue to some kind
of self-knowledge that will reveal to him how deluded he is to con-
clude that the coldness he receives from his wife is merely due to some-
thing untoward in the stars beyond his control.15

The most disturbing aspect of the misanthropy that colors I Am a Cat

is the misogyny embedded in it. Throughout, women are the butt of most
of the mean-minded joking. In the concluding installment, the professor
reads aloud to his cronies a book he attributes spuriously to Thomas
Nashe, a tract that consists exclusively of aspersions on the character of
women:

Aristotle: Since women are, in any event, beneath contempt, if you

must marry, better to choose a small rather than a large bride; for a
small good-for-nothing is less a catastrophe than a large. . . . ​Someone
asked me to name the rarest miracle. The wise man responded, “a
chaste woman.”16

98   I A m a C at
 In a touch that seems gratuitously cruel, Sneeze’s wife has come home
unnoticed and is listening to this reading from just outside the study door.

“This is a problem—our missus is back.”

“As if I care,” says the professor.
“Missus, Missus, when did you get home?”
There is no reply.
“Missus, did you hear that just now? Did you?”
Still no reply.
“Those weren’t your husband’s thoughts. He was quoting Mr.
Thomas Nashe from the sixteenth century so you needn’t worry—”
“I wouldn’t know,” came the curt response from beyond the door.17

Presently, the party breaks up, and the friends take their leave. In I Am
a Cat, as in Tristram Shandy, the end of the story coincides with the con-
clusion of life, figuratively and, where the cat itself is concerned, in fact.
The tone of the concluding pages is noticeably stark and unfeeling:

Just as when the vaudeville theater has emptied, there is a desolate

feeling in the room. My master finishes his supper and retreats to his
study. His wife gathers her padded collar about her neck against the
cold and sews a bleached kimono. The children sleep side by side. The
maid sets out for the public bath.
If one rapped on the hearts of these apparently carefree gentlemen,
like knocking on a door, it would produce a hollow sound. Sooner or
later, my master will die of his sick stomach; Kaneda has already died
of greed. The leaves on the autumn trees have fallen. If death is the
destiny of all things and if life amounts to very little else, then per-
haps the wisest thing to do is to die sooner than later.18

In the concluding paragraph, the cat, sick at heart from what he has
observed of human life, laps beer until he is drunk, falls into a bucket of
beer, and sinks down without struggling, murmuring the name of the
Amida Buddha. To the end, I Am a Cat is unredeemed; redemption would
never figure as a Sōseki theme.

I A m a C at    99
Sōseki’s wife, Kyōko. 1911. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Japanese
Literature.
Sōseki, in the Mochizuki Photographic Studio. April 1910. Courtesy of the
Museum of Modern Japanese Literature.
Sōseki, in the study in his Waseda home. December 1914. Courtesy of the
Museum of Modern Japanese Literature.
Left to right: Inuzuka Shintarō, Sōseki’s lifelong friend; Nakamura Zekō; and
Sōseki. September 13, 1912. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Japanese
Literature.
Sōseki in front of the Waseda house, with second son Shinroku (left) and
eldest son Jun’ichi (right). December 1914. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern
Japanese Literature.
Left to right: Sōseki, his disciple Gyōtoku Jirō, and his eldest daughter Fudeko.
March 2, 1910. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Japanese Literature.
Farewell party for Dr. Morinari Rinzō (back row, 2nd from left).
Front row, left to right: Daughter Tsuneko, Kyōko, son Jun’ichi, daughter Aiko,
daughter Fudeko, daughter Eiko, Komiya Toyotaka (kneeling). Back row, left
to right: Matsune Tōyōjō, Dr. Morinari Rinzō, Higashi Shin, Sōseki, Nogami
Toyoichirō, Abe Yoshishige. Oval insert: Morita Sōhei (right), Suzuki Miekichi
(left). April 12, 1911. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Japanese Literature.
 +
8

Smaller Gems

If I Am a Cat is informed by disillusionment and cynicism, the seven sto-

ries and three novellas that issued from Sōseki’s superheated imagina-
tion during that same sixteen months reveal the Romantic in him, longing
for something, true love perhaps, that he wants to believe is attainable.
In “The Tower of London,” published in Imperial Literature in January
1905, just as chapter 1 of I Am a Cat was appearing in Hototogisu, the
tower becomes a portal that ushers the Japanese narrator into moments
from its horripilating past. In the “Bloody Tower,” he encounters the two
young princes who have been incarcerated by their lethal uncle, Rich-
ard of Gloucester; the older boy, heir to the throne, is reading to his fright-
ened brother from the Bible. Like a phantasm, the scene shifts to the
boys’ mother pleading with the jailer to allow her to see her boys, and
shifts again to the two assassins lamenting their murderous action after
the deed has been done. In the “White Tower,” the narrator witnesses
the execution of the apostate Lady Jane Grey. As the executioner’s ax
falls, the scene dissolves. Like tableaux vivants, one scene after another
unfreezes as the narrator moves through the tower. Clearly, “he” pos-
sesses a novelist’s eye: the characters are imagined lucidly, and the lan-
guage is evocative, slightly formal in the literary manner but easily read.
In a postscript, Sōseki lifts the curtain on the crafting of the story. He
informs his readers that he has invented the details of the incidents he
describes and cautions them against mistaking them for historical real-
ity. He acknowledges that he has been partly inspired by two paintings
by Paul Delaroche, Edmund V and the Duke of York in the Tower (1831)
and The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833). The grisly song the execu-
tioner sings as he sharpens his ax on a grinding stone is adapted from
William Ainsworth’s novel The Tower of London. Sōseki also explains that
his decision to evoke the young princes’ murder indirectly in a dialogue

   107
after the fact was influenced by Shakespeare’s treatment of the same
scene in Richard III. Not surprisingly in view of his grasp of English
literature, Sōseki appears to have come to his fiction with an evolved
understanding of narrative modes in the West.
“The Tower of London” is a window on the part of Sōseki that was
turned nostalgically toward the past and grounded only tenuously in the
present. When the narrator returns to his lodgings and his landlord
threatens to demystify his experiences with modern explanations, he
flees and resolves never to visit the tower again. Sōseki gave voice to
this otherworldly inclination—let us call it “Romanticism”—in a poem he
wrote in March 1906 in English:

I looked at her as she looked at me:

We looked and stood a moment,
Between Life and Dream

We never met since:

Yet oft I stand
In the primrose path
Where Life meets Dream

Oh that Life could

Melt into Dream
Instead of Dream
Is constantly
Chased away by Life [sic]

The stories that followed were odes to the power of Eros. Stylistically
they are diverse, and we can see evidence of the fledgling novelist cast-
ing about for a voice that suited him. The two most popular, particu-
larly among students, were set in the time of King Arthur’s court, “The
Phantom Shield” (April 1905), and “The Evanescent Dew: A Dirge”
(November 1905). During his stay in London, Sōseki would have been
exposed to the Victorian obsession with the King Arthur legend. His first
professor at University College, W. P. Ker, was, moreover, the greatest
medievalist of his day. Among the books that Sōseki brought home from
England, both annotated in his hand, were Le Morte d’Arthur: Sir Thomas

108   S maller G ems

Malory’s Book of King Arthur, two volumes, and Lancelot and Elaine, by
Alfred Lord Tennyson. Sōseki included lectures on the style of Malory’s
Morte d’Arthur in the course he gave on the Theory of Literature between
April and June 1903.
“Dirge” is a mélange of elements lifted from Malory’s Morte d’Arthur
and Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott.” But Sōseki focused the episodes on a
theme that was all his own: the irresistible power of love and the agony
that accompanies the pleasure it brings. For Lancelot’s sake, Guinevere
has “renounced the peace of faithfulness and happily embraced anguish.”1
The Lady of Shalott, in the grip of the same passion, turns away from
her mirror and gazes directly at Lancelot as he passes by, knowing that
her action will destroy her. Elaine of Astolat gives her heart away and
then starves herself to death when Lancelot disappears. Lancelot him-
self “[has drawn] the sweet honey of happiness from the forbidden flower
of guilt” and scratches on the wall with the point of his sword: “Sin pur-
sues me—I pursue sin.”2
In a brief “preface,” Sōseki wrote,

Malory’s tale is to be prized for its lack of embellishment, but because

it is a product of the Middle Ages, it is too discursive to pass as a
novel. . . . In particular, I have often thought that as depicted by Mal-
ory, Lancelot and Guinevere were rather like a rickshaw man and his
harlot, reason enough to warrant a revision.3

The story as Sōseki reconfigured it is gorgeously told in a faux Heian-

period (794–1185) Japanese that recalls the erotically charged atmosphere
of The Tale of Genji. It is easy enough to imagine young readers at the
university being captured by the spell it creates. Sōseki confirmed that
this was so in a note to one of his disciples, Komiya Toyotaka, dated
July 18, 1906: “I hear frequently from youthful readers who enjoyed the
‘Dirge.’ One sent me a letter saying it was more precious to him than the
Bible! What higher praise could a writer receive! But something like that
is hard labor, like filling the page with haiku.”4
The most popular of Sōseki’s early works was Botchan,5 a novella pub-
lished in a special supplement to the April 1906 edition of Hototogisu, in
which the next-to-last installment of I Am a Cat also appeared. Sōseki
wrote Botchan in eleven days, a total of 146 pages, between March 14

S maller G ems   109

and March 25, 1905. At once comic and painful, it is evidence that he
came to his calling already equipped with the novelist’s gift—Turgenev’s
certainly and Henry James’s—for turning his hero loose in a story that
would allow, or compel him, to reveal the often contradictory essence of
himself. The story was inspired by his experiences as a middle school
teacher in rural Matsuyama. The narrator is a feisty little man with the
pride and hot temper of a natural-born citizen of Edo who is thrust into
a situation designed to anger and humiliate him. His eighth-grade stu-
dents at the provincial middle school, physically more than his match,
make him the butt of their jokes in a dialect he can scarcely understand
and bedevil him with pranks such as releasing grasshoppers into his bed-
ding. The faculty, eccentrics and misfits vividly etched, turn out to be a
pack of hypocrites and scoundrels. The hero responds to his tormentors
with the tessitura one would expect from an irascible little man with a
hyperdeveloped sense of self-pity and justice. But Sōseki ventures deeper:
beneath his fulminations, Botchan reveals his resignation in the face of
meanness and bad faith; his acquiescence expresses itself in a bitter-
ness about life and living in the world that has its origin in disappoint-
ment. Sōseki’s portrait of an idealist being stripped of his illusions relies
on a masterly use of irony to reveal character, a device he may have first
encountered in Jane Austen.6
Toward the conclusion, as he focuses melodramatically on the mis-
treatment of the school’s English teacher, the faculty underdog, at the
hands of the vice principal, the lecherous hypocrite “Redshirt,” Botchan’s
earnestness gets the better of his irreverence, and the novella falters, los-
ing momentum and verve. Even so, it is a poignant, comic gem.7
Grass for a Pillow (Kusamakura),8 a 160-page rumination on art and
the artist that Sōseki seems to have dashed off in a single week in August
1906, was his most radical challenge to the Naturalism in ascendance
at the time. It is at once an avant-garde experiment close to stream of
consciousness and a determinedly conservative reassessment of the tra-
ditional elements of beauty embodied in Chinese poetry and haiku, clas-
sical painting, and the nō theater.
The thirty-year-old aesthete wandering aimlessly through the coun-
tryside with his box of paints slung over his shoulder is an artist in search
of the opportunity to create a genuine work of art. In that sense, Grass
for a Pillow, in which the reader is privy to his creative process as he
deliberates the composition of his paintings or drafts haiku and Chinese

110   S maller G ems

poems, may be considered Sōseki’s version of A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man. The painter shares with Sōseki a familiarity with Western
art and refers knowledgably to Shakespeare, Tristram Shandy, Ibsen,
Oscar Wilde, Shelly, Turner, Millais’s painting of Ophelia, and so on. He
is also well versed in, and indeed prefers, traditional Chinese and Japa-
nese art, quoting Du Fu and Bo Juyi and extracting from the nō theater
an aesthetic principle he aspires to in his own art. Whereas I Am a Cat
and Botchan cough and growl the cadences of the low-down Edo ver-
nacular, Grass for a Pillow is couched in the refined, literary Japanese of
an earlier day, a language richly colored by the classical Chinese just
beneath its surface. In the famous opening of the book, the artist “pon-
ders” a dilemma as he walks along; his deliberation is cast in parallel
lines that resemble in cadence a poem in classical Chinese:

If you rely on reason, you find fault;

If you enter the stream of feeling, the current sweeps you away.
If you insist on your way, the road ahead narrows.
In any event, this world of man is a difficult place.
As the difficulty increases, we long for ease.
When we have understood that none is to be found,
Poetry is born and painting becomes possible.9

In the first chapter, an essay on art’s potential to remove the partici-

pant from the travails of life in the real world, Sōseki establishes the aes-
thetic position at the heart of the story. The painter’s avowed goal on
this journey through the countryside is to “separate and discard the
scratchy sand of human emotion to discover the pure gold that lies
beneath it.”10 To the story’s elusive heroine, Nami, he explains “my way
of falling in love is not un-emotional, it’s non-emotional.”11 Emotion, he
asserts, obscures the beauty that art must detect and capture. “The plea-
sure of the nō theater is three parts human feeling to seven parts art . . . ​
making a haiku of your tears frees you from their bitterness; now you
are happy to be a man who is capable of weeping.”12
In Grass for a Pillow, reality is invariably subordinated to art. When
the painter overhears a description of Nami’s wedding, he is able to pic-
ture every element of the scene except the bride’s face until he crafts a
haiku, Praise be to the bride / who rides across the mountains / through
blossoming spring, whereupon her face, the face of Ophelia in Millais’s

S maller G ems   111

painting, rises with perfect clarity to his mind’s eye. The verse has mate-
rialized the details of the reality. Elsewhere, the painter interrupts a story
about the Nagara maiden’s suicide lest details intrude into the picture
he intends to paint and ruin it.
Sometimes, in a similar vein, a painting or a poem provides the vali-
dation of an experience in reality. The painter sets off for the bathhouse,
and as he lowers himself into the tub, the only thing that comes into [his]
head are the lines from Bo Juyi’s poem “Gently the hot springs / cleanse
the maiden’s skin.”

‘Whenever I hear the words “hot spring,” I taste again the pleasure in
these lines. In fact, no hot spring that fails to produce precisely this
pleasure in me seems worthy of the name. I have no requirement of a
hot spring other than this ideal.13

The painter is determined to pursue his art according to the principle

of “un-emotion” that is central to his credo. He observes that the haiku
poet Bashō was so detached from what he saw that he was able to dis-
cover elegance even in the scene of a horse staling next to his pillow in
a field—the word Bashō uses is kusamakura, Sōseki’s title—and resolves
to emulate him. He will “observe people he encounters with aloofness as
though they were distant scenery, preventing any spark of human feeling
to flash between them.”14 When Nami is concerned in particular, a mad-
deningly elusive and, for that reason, tantalizing figure whose beautiful
essence he has vowed to capture in true painting, he will “leave behind
the world of common emotions and achieve the transcendent state of the
artist . . . apprehending [her] in terms of the nō or other drama or as a
figure in a poem.”
But Sōseki understands that this is a fantasy: time and again Nami
appears at critical moments to distract the painter from his pursuit of
transcendence and draws him back to the world of emotion. In the
first instance, he is working hard on creating a Chinese poem when he
glimpses a beautiful shape moving quickly past the open door and dis-
appearing; his gaze is now riveted on the doorway, “all thoughts of poetry
abandoned.” A few pages later, he is soaking in a hot bath when he hears
the sound of a shamisen in the distance, and the plangent notes usher
him back into a scene from his childhood, a pure, disembodied reverie

112   S maller G ems

that is interrupted by the entrance of a female figure partially hidden in
the steam, summoning him back to the present and impelling him to gaze
intently at the sensuous lines of her body. Still later, he visits Mirror Pool
and contemplates the opposite shore, considering how he will arrange
in his composition the pine, the dwarf bamboo, the rock, and the water.
Lost in a meditative study of the scene, his gaze wanders upward from
the water’s edge to the rocks that rise above it and there she is again,
causing him to freeze in astonishment. Once again, Nami’s presence, tug-
ging at emotions the painter cannot manage to cast aside, or reawakening
them, interrupts the process of his art.
In the final scene, the painter accompanies Nami and her father and
brother to the train station. Her brother boards a train on his way to the
war raging in Manchuria. As the train leaves, a bearded monk, Nami’s
ex-husband, appears at the window and locks eyes with her. The painter
observes an emotion on her face he has never seen before, “pity,” or
“compassion.” The story concludes: “That’s it! That’s it!” If I can capture
that, I’ll have my painting!”15
Sōseki implies that art must incorporate emotion if it is to achieve
complete expression. Whether the painter is able to identify feeling in
his subject while maintaining his own state of “non-emotion” remains
unclear.
Initially, Sōseki was pleased with Grass for a Pillow:

We humans express beauty when we encounter it, and since litera-

ture, the novel, is about conveying who we are, it simply won’t do for
the novel to exclude the beautiful. . . .
I wrote Grass for a Pillow intending something that was opposite to
what is usually called a novel. All I wanted was to leave the reader
with a beautiful feeling in his mind. For that reason, there is no plot
and nothing develops. I have no quarrel with conventional novels that
labor to convey the truth of life, but I believe there is also a place for
novels that forget our habitual pain and dwell instead on consolation.
That is what I have tried to create with Grass for a Pillow. I might
describe this by suggesting that whereas novels until now might be
likened to the poetic form we call senryū, clever verses that probe and
satirize, I think we also have a need of “haikuesque” novels that
depend on beauty for their life’s blood. And if a haikuesque novel—I

S maller G ems   113

 grant that it’s a strange label—should succeed, it would open an entirely
new domain in the world of literature. It appears that such a novel
doesn’t exist in the West. Neither, needless to say, is it to be found in
Japan.16

This brief essay was written in February 1906, in the flush of com-
pleting the work. In October, in a long, early letter to one of his favorite
disciples, Suzuki Miekichi, Sōseki retracted his assertions about avoid-
ing pain and creating beauty in the novel. The letter was an early previ-
sion of the darkness that would deepen in his writing:

From childhood until I was a young adult, I thought the world was a
dandy place. One could eat good food and dress in fine clothes, I
thought. Live the poetic life with a beautiful wife—raise a wonderful
family.
If all this wasn’t possible for me, I was resolved to make it possible.
Resolved, in other words, to avoid wherever possible the opposite of
these things. But the truth is, so long as you dwell in this world, there
is no such place. Quite the opposite of how we imagine it, this world
teems with the ugly, the unpleasant, the repellent—not only is there no
refuge, but we should embrace these realities if we hope to accomplish
anything.
I can’t say what proportion of existence is given over to living the
beautiful, the poetic life, but it must be very small. Which means that
the painter in Grass for a Pillow is on the wrong track. I suppose we
need people like him, but if you hope to survive in this world while
asserting your own self-interest, you’d better model yourself on Ibsen.
A man who wants to stake his life on literature mustn’t satisfy him-
self with beauty alone. We must be as fierce as the loyalists at the time
of the [Meiji] Restoration who went out of their way to feast on diffi-
culty. Unless we’re prepared to destroy our nerves or go mad or be
imprisoned if we are wrong, we’ll never be men of literature. A writer
simply cannot afford to be easygoing, transcendent, in love with beauty,
and isolated from the real world; he cannot venture out in quest of
pleasure but must seek pain instead.17

In another letter dated August 9, 1916, just months before his death,
Sōseki repudiated the novel out of hand:

114   S maller G ems

 I hadn’t known until your letter that you were translating Grass for a
Pillow into German. I am gratified that you would be sufficiently inter-
ested in such a work to translate it. Allow me to thank you. Unfortu-
nately, the story doesn’t merit translation. Today, I wouldn’t have the
courage to read five pages of it. Needless to say, had I been consulted
in advance, I would have withheld permission. I suppose I can’t object
to a magazine, but kindly do me the favor of refraining from publish-
ing it as a book. Natsume Kinnosuke.18

Grass for a Pillow was included with Botchan and a third novella, The
210th Day, in a collection entitled Quail Basket (Uzura-kago) published
on New Year’s Day, 1907. That brought the tally of Sōseki’s output dur-
ing the first two years of his career as a writer to two collections of sto-
ries and novellas, a short novel, Autumn Storm (No-waki), and I Am a
Cat, not to mention The Theory of Literature, his voluminous survey of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature, the culmination of
his two years of study in London, which was published in May 1907. In
his preface to that work, written in November 1906, Sōseki took the
opportunity to express deserved satisfaction with his achievement in a
quirky manner that was one of his standard modes:

In England, people observing me said that I was suffering from neur-

asthenia. I have heard that a certain Japanese wrote home to Japan
to say that I was insane. I assume that these esteemed gentlemen
were not falsifying. I regret that my awkwardness prevented me from
expressing my gratitude to them.
There is still talk of my neurasthenia and insanity. Even my rela-
tives appear to acknowledge this. Inasmuch as those closest to me feel
this way, I understand there is no room for me to protest or defend
myself. I will say, when I consider that this nervous condition and
insanity have enabled me to write I Am a Cat and to publish Fugitive
Stories and Quail Basket, it seems appropriate that I should express my
deep gratitude to these afflictions.
Assuming there is not some radical change in my personal circum-
stances, I assume this nervous condition and insanity will afflict me for
the rest of my life. And since, so long as they persist, I hope to publish
any number of Cats, any number of Fugitive Tales, and any number of
Quail Baskets, I pray that my illnesses will not abandon me. However,

S maller G ems   115

 since they impel me to turn toward fiction, I sincerely doubt I shall
have time again to indulge in idle, theoretical writing like the present
volume.19

Sōseki’s prediction came to pass: although he continued to produce

literary criticism all his life, his major works from this moment on were
novels.

116   S maller G ems

 +
9

The Thursday Salon

On October 8, 1906, Sōseki sent postcards informing his young follow-

ers that henceforth he would be available for visits to his home from
3 p.m. on Thursdays and not, by implication, whenever the spirit moved
them. He was determined to reduce the distraction of constant visitors.
To ensure that he would be taken seriously, he affixed a notice in sumi
ink on red rice paper to the trellis above his gate: “Visiting hours Thurs-
days at 3:00 p.m.”1 The haiku poet Matsune Tōyōjō, twenty-eight years
old, was shocked to see the notice that evening and complained, request-
ing that Sōseki reserve private time for him. He was told to come at the
designated hour.
The first meeting of what became known as the Thursday Salon took
place three days later, on October 11, 1906; meetings continued inter-
mittently, whenever Sōseki’s health permitted, for the ensuing ten years
until his death in December 1916. Sometimes Kyōko served food, and
there was always green tea and usually saké. As with any coterie, these
gatherings were social but also passionately literary. Regulars came with
manuscripts and read aloud from them and critiqued one another’s work.
Discussions were heated; shouting and even denunciation were not
unusual. But when Sōseki chose to speak, he was deferred to respectfully.
In time, as his status in the world of letters grew, the salon as a group
became an influential advocate for what might be styled “Jamesian” real-
ism, in opposition to the confessional fiction championed by the Natu-
ralist movement.2
The fledgling writers, critics, and literary scholars who gathered at
these meetings were mostly in their twenties, fifteen or more years
younger than Sōseki, who was thirty-nine. The majority had first encoun-
tered him as students at the First Higher School or Tokyo Imperial Uni-
versity, mostly in the English department, where he continued to lecture

   117
on Shakespeare and eighteenth-century literature. They were ardent
Sōseki readers and looked to him as a beacon illuminating the course
they hoped their creative lives would take.
The salon was not open to everyone. Each of those welcomed had
cleared a hurdle, Sōseki’s evaluation of the quality and promise of his
writing. More than a few were already, or on their way to becoming, pub-
lished authors in their own right. All were proud of their affiliation with
the Master. They styled themselves, and were acknowledged publicly to
be, “students under the gate” (monkasei 門下生) belonging to the Sōseki
school of writing. This was not a formal designation; followers were free
to come and go as they pleased, and some defected. But those who
remained in the circle enjoyed an intimacy with Sōseki that few others,
including members of his immediate family, experienced. In his after-
word to volume 1 of Sōseki’s collected letters, Komiya Toyotaka observed
that while Sōseki never wrote a love letter in the conventional sense, he
received more love letters from his followers and sent them more love
letters than had anyone in Japanese literary history.3 The observation is
poker faced: Komiya neither suggests nor implies that the intensity of
feeling that heats Sōseki’s correspondence with his inner circle might
have been fueled by something akin to homoerotic passion. But the ardor
Sōseki conveyed, certainly in his letters to Shiki and to certain regulars
in the coterie, suggests the presence of a subterranean homosexuality
that may or may not have been activated. Referring to one of many long
letters he received from Sōseki, Morita Sōhei wrote,

How many times did I read this letter? I focused on it with more
urgency and passion than a letter from a lover. And as I pored over it,
I gradually convinced myself that Sensei was my own personal sensei
and no one else’s. How conceited I was! But it wasn’t only me. Most
of us who were in and out of Sensei’s house and received letters from
him felt the same way.4

Sōseki’s candor in his letters to his followers is remarkable, and accord-

ingly they afford an invaluable look into aspects of his very private life
and feelings that he was otherwise careful to obscure. The data are copi-
ous. The two volumes of letters included in the complete works collect
more than 2,200 of Sōseki’s letters written between 1889 and his death
in 1916. A tally suggests the extent to which he maintained a distance

118   T he T hursday S alon

between himself and the literary mainstream of his day or, put another
way, the degree of his isolation. Scarcely any of the letters were to his
peers: two to Shimazaki Tōson, one to Tayama Katai, one to Nagai Kafu,
one to Tokuda Shūsei, two to Tsubouchi Shōyō, and one only to Mori
Ōgai, the other giant figure on the scene. Generally, these are pro-forma
notes written on a particular occasion. In contrast, his disciples received
far more letters and postcards than anyone else, in some cases more than
one hundred lengthy letters over the course of ten years. They include
detailed critiques of the younger writers’ work and revelations of the dif-
ficulty Sōseki was experiencing with his own. He went out of his way to
encourage them to continue working at their writing, no matter how
disappointing the results might seem. He could also be tactless, harsh,
even cruelly dismissive, but those in the inner circle learned, even as
they gnashed their teeth in chagrin, to accept the punishment he meted
out as a variety of tough love. The letters reveal a level of intimacy that
comes as a surprise: it is evident that Sōseki was actively involved in
the complex and often fraught private lives of a number of his follow-
ers. These relationships lasted for the rest of his life; most of the young
men present in the early days of the salon were in attendance at his
deathbed.
Eventually, the group of writers who were acknowledged as adher-
ents of the Sōseki school numbered close to thirty, although never more
than seven or eight were in the innermost circle. One among them from
the beginning was Suzuki Miekichi, fifteen years younger than Sōseki.
Born and raised in Hiroshima, Suzuki had been writing fiction for young
readers’ magazines, such as Shōnen Club, since he was fifteen. Hand-
some, wan, sensitive, he suffered chronically from a nervous disorder
that could be incapacitating. After graduating from the Third Special
Higher School in Kyoto, Suzuki was admitted to Tokyo Imperial Uni-
versity’s English department in 1904 and attended Sōseki’s lectures on
English literature. As he later acknowledged, he was in awe but too shy
to address his teacher. In September 1905, his nervous condition obliged
him to drop out of school and to return to the Hiroshima area, where he
spent a year convalescing, much of it on a small island in the Inland Sea.
On September 10, 1905, Suzuki’s close friend and Sōseki’s student, the
haiku poet Nakagawa Yoshitarō, the top student at the First Higher School
for three consecutive years and rumored to have read all of Shakespeare
in English, forwarded a letter from Suzuki to Sōseki, an effusive homage.

T he T hursday S alon   119

It was written in the traditional manner with a brush, top to bottom,
right to left, on scrolled rice paper that had to be unspooled as it was read.
The letter has been lost, but Sōseki’s response, communicated indirectly
in a letter to Nakagawa, reveals how susceptible he was to extravagant
praise:

September 11, 1905

I have just read the letter you forwarded to me from Miekichi, and I
was mightily surprised. The first surprise was its length: opened up, it
went right across my eight-mat sitting room and easily spanned the
six-mat room next door. If he can write a missive like that, he certainly
doesn’t have neurasthenia. It’s outrageous that he should be taking a
leave from school. Write to him at once and get him back here. I won’t
be beginning classes until next week, nor will most of the other fac-
ulty, so tell him to come back. He can attend classes or not as he
pleases; he can be here and pretend he’s on leave. How can someone
with a sick parent who needs to get started on a career as quickly as
possible persuade himself that it makes sense to take a year off! It’s
his duty to graduate as quickly as possible! Please explain this in a
letter. Make sure he knows these are my thoughts. Since all he’d have
to do is register and he’d end up with his degree, it’s a crying shame to
take a year off. Let him come back and amuse himself about town and
stop in from time to time to see Kin-yan sensei,5 and his nerves will
recover in no time.
The other thing that floored me is that Miekichi never stops talking
about me. He writes much more about me than about his father. If
that letter is twelve feet long, a good eight feet of it is about old Kin-
yan. I had never dreamed that a fellow like me could occupy a stu-
dent’s imagination to such an extent. Reading it through makes me
wonder whether his nervous condition wasn’t caused by thinking all
day about me. If I were an eighteen-year-old girl, a letter like this would
put me in my sickbed. Happily, since I’m the easygoing creature that
I am, content with a vase I find in an antique shop, this won’t require
me to spend any money on medicine, and that’s a stroke of luck. It’s
not that I’m not grateful to receive this degree of love and respect from
Miekichi. And this goes beyond gratitude, it’s terrifying. It appears that
Miekichi feels more strongly about me than does my wife. . . . Believe
it or not, I’m the sort of man who esteems himself highly and tends to

120   T he T hursday S alon

 consider it altogether reasonable that others should be taken with me—
but I never realized that I was being loved and admired to this extent.
That comes as a surprise even to my swollen ego!
In that long letter so full of praise for me, there appears to be no
flattery. None of the empty phrases or outright lies professional writ-
ers are wont to use. And no exaggeration. What his letter conveys
seems absolutely genuine. The sincerity of his feelings is beyond ques-
tion. It is for that that I am most grateful to Miekichi.
(Signed) Kin-yan6

To conclude that Sōseki was smitten may be going too far, but clearly
he was sufficiently aflutter to play the fool, asserting solemnly that Suzu-
ki’s letter contained no flattery. In the first of his letters to Suzuki—he
wrote a total of seventy-two—he referred to the homage in characteris-
tic, but not necessarily genuine, self-deprecation:

Since I have someone to respect and admire me as you do, it might

appear that I am a great man, but when I consider how the middle-
school students behind the house and the ruffians in the boarding-
house across the street mock and belittle me, I feel I’m just a worthless
good-for-nothing. This world is an odd place. I’d like to take a year off
myself and spend it on an island with you.7

On November 9, 1905, he wrote again:

People praise and respect me for being a university professor, but that
means nothing to me. Ideally, I wouldn’t go to school at all; I’d rather
hang around with the students who are in and out of my house, feed-
ing them and joking and just amusing ourselves. . . . I hear that you
are now on the island—why not try writing some sketches or even fic-
tion based on what you find there! I’m sure there are all manner of
things more interesting than we can imagine . . .

Suzuki took Sōseki’s advice and began a story while on the island,
which he finished in Hiroshima. Six months later, on April 11, 1906,
Sōseki received a fifty-page story entitled “Plover” (Chidori). Set on an
island in the Inland Sea, it is a lyrical, bittersweet account written in
delicate strokes of a brief romance between the twenty-year-old narrator

T he T hursday S alon   121

and a beautiful eighteen-year-old girl who disappears mysteriously two
days after they meet. Sōseki responded at once:

April 11, 1906

I received both your letter and the story—“Plover” is masterly. No ordi-
nary novelist could ever hope to write something like this. Fascinat-
ing! If I had to criticize it, I might say that it wanders a bit and could
use some tightening. The first exchange between Fuji-san and Segawa
is a bit flat. (All the dialogue that follows is animated.) The scene at
the end where Segawa gazes at a boat and pictures Fuji-san is a bit
overdone . . . but overall, the piece is splendid. . . . I couldn’t possibly
visit an island and write something as good as this. Miekichi, banzai!
I assume you’d have no objection if I had this published in the next
Hototogisu? Why would you object! Please do what you can to write
more like this, much more, and put the penny-a-liners to shame . . .8

One can only imagine Suzuki’s elation on receiving such a note, as if

a hand had reached down from the heavens to pat him on the back.
Sōseki wrote to Takahama Kyoshi the same day:

I have in hand a fine piece of writing. I’d like to submit it to Hototogisu.

It’s long. The author, Suzuki Miekichi, is a student at the university.
Due to ill health, he is currently at home in Hiroshima. He wrote this
expressly to show it to me. To think that a disciple could write some-
thing like this turns the sensei pale as a sheet.9

How objective was Sōseki able to be about Suzuki’s story? Takahama

did not agree entirely with his assessment. Sōseki summarized what the
editor had to say in a letter to Suzuki: the dialogue throughout seemed
flat (he suggested the effect might be livelier if the lovers conversed in
local dialect); a number of scenes felt incompletely rendered; the central
premise, love at first sight, was, after all, a cliché; and so forth. Sōseki
ended reassuringly by suggesting that the editor had missed the point:

There may be some hackneyed passages as the General [Takahama]

suggests, but what matters is your skill, which is supreme. The major
defect in your story may be that it gives rise to the suspicion that it is
contrived. However, it is strewn with accurate sketches from real life

122   T he T hursday S alon

 that help us forget momentarily any unnaturalness we would other-
wise feel. . . . In sum, Kyoshi insists the work is inadequate as a true-
life sketch and inadequate as fiction. Sōseki10 insists that none of the
ordinary novelists around today understands the true-life sketch so
well as you. . . . Understand that Kyoshi’s remarks come from a man
who is keenly focused on language; it may also be that my prefatory
remark to him about a fine piece of writing was a bit exaggerated and
motivated him to look hard for faults, but he also acknowledges how
much talent the story reveals. I had intended to ask your permission
first, but Kyoshi wanted to take the manuscript with him, so I let him
have it. Since it is so long, he may well cut it here and there. Please
put up with this without protest.11

“Plover” was published in the May 1906 issue of Hototogisu (less than
a month after Botchan). On May 3, Sōseki sent Suzuki a postcard:

Terada Torahiko [Sōseki’s scientist friend from Kumamoto] had praise

for “Plover” and wrote “Banzai to Adonis!” I also heard from [Saka-
moto] Shihōta, who wrote that neither he nor any of the others could
hope to equal the marvelous prose of this masterpiece. This has given
me a swollen head. I declared that Kyoshi was a fool to find fault.

A few days later, the precocious Nakagawa Yoshitarō delivered a pho-

tograph of Miekichi. Kyōko recalled that it was very stylish, “like a marble
bust” in feeling, and that it created a stir. “If he looked this good in a
photograph, Sōseki wondered how glorious he must look in the flesh and
asked Nakagawa, ‘Is Suzuki Miekichi as handsome as he looks?’ ‘Every
bit as handsome,’ Nakagawa replied, as if it were a dumb question.”12
A few days later, on May 16, Sōseki sent Suzuki another postcard:

Greetings. Nakagawa delivered your photo the other day. Thank you.
That photo doesn’t look at all like a marble bust. You look like a ghost.
Probably because your face and neck are so very thin. I’m certain you
are cursed by a young beauty seventeen or eighteen. Watch out for
yourself!13

Was there something unusual about sending a photograph before

a meeting had taken place, as if the principals were considering an

T he T hursday S alon   123

arranged marriage? Kyōko seemed to think so. And is Sōseki’s reply flir-
tatious? Maybe not, but certainly his imagination appears to have been
aroused.
From that day on, Sōseki was a tireless advocate, prodding Suzuki to
keep writing and admonishing him when he faltered. His confidence in
his talent was unqualified. In March 1906, he read and admired Shima-
zaki Tōson’s first full-length novel, The Broken Commandment, calling it
“an extraordinary work that merits being handed down to posterity as
a prime example of a Meiji novel.”14 Two months later, in a long letter to
Suzuki in which he asserts the writer’s obligation to focus not only on
beauty (like the artist in Grass for a Pillow) but also on the pain and ugli-
ness that are part of the real world, he praises The Broken Commandment
and, in the same breath, assures the fledgling writer that he can outdo
its author: “The Broken Commandment does a far better job at this than
anything else. But even The Broken Commandment is not all the way there.
Miekichi-sensei! Please write better books than The Broken Command-
ment as fast as you can move your pen!”15
Suzuki Miekichi did not fulfill the promise that his mentor saw in him.
At Sōseki’s urging, he returned to Tokyo in September 1906, reenrolling
in the university and becoming a member of the salon’s inner circle. After
graduating in 1908, he taught English and was dean of students at Nar-
ita high school and, after 1911, at a middle school in Tokyo, but he con-
tinued to write and publish fiction. Suzuki was prolific and well received
but never important.
If Suzuki Miekichi was the Adonis of Sōseki’s circle, Morita Sōhei
(1881–1949) was Lothario. Morita’s amorous entanglements read like a
compilation of the nineteenth-century melodramas known as “passion
books.” Born in Gifu Prefecture in central Japan, the eldest son of a land-
owner, Morita fell in love at thirteen with a courtesan twice his age when
he met her at the brothel managed by his uncle (the incident recalls The
Reivers). Back from military school in Tokyo for summer vacation, he
rowed himself from his village to daily assignations with her in Gifu City.
When it was time to return to Tokyo at the end of August, he pretended
to get on the train but instead sneaked away and lived with the girl for
a week, taking a blood oath that they would never part. Eventually she
became the mistress of an older man.
Morita’s next love was his cousin Tsune. In July 1899, at age eighteen,
he was admitted to the Fourth Higher School in the feudal city of

124   T he T hursday S alon

Kanazawa. Tsune followed him there, and when it became known that
they were living together, he was expelled. The following year, he returned
to Tokyo and passed the entrance exams to the First Special Higher
School, graduating in June 1903. That August, Tsune gave birth to his
son; Morita kept his paternity a secret. In September, he was admitted
to the English department of Tokyo Imperial University with the highest
grades of anyone matriculating from the First Higher School. He avoided
Sōseki’s famously difficult Theory of Literature class but did attend his
Shakespeare lectures desultorily, more interested at the time in French
and Russian literature.
Late in December 1905, Morita, twenty-four years old, showed up at
the Natsume house and requested an audience. He was shown in to the
study where Sōseki was working and asked him to read a short story of
his that had just appeared in a coterie magazine edited by Sōseki’s col-
league at the university, Ueda Bin. “Blighted Leaves” (Wakuruba), just
ten pages long, was a weary, cynical account of a stymied love affair
between the narrator and the younger sister of his brother’s wife.
On December 30, Sōseki wrote Morita the first of sixty letters:

I received a complimentary copy of “Gai-en” from the publisher today

and read your “Blighted Leaves.” It is well done. You must have worked
hard on your style, and you have definitely created a mood and fla-
vor. But the feeling overall is not beautiful and pleasing. I have a feel-
ing you are already married. Or if not, that you have been immersed
recently in Russian literature. I can’t say which, but this story has
emerged from books or from your actual experience. It should be lon-
ger: if you choose destiny as your theme, you must involve us in a
long process or we won’t be persuaded. I’m not saying that what you’ve
achieved is bad, only that it would be more effective if it were longer.
To venture into the interior as you have done suggests that you have
either written so much about love on the surface that you are out of
material or that your experience of love on the surface has made it
seem trivial or even foolish. To write something like this at your age,
you must have found it in a book or experienced it in your own life.
Kin16

At the time, Morita was reading Turgenev and Dostoevsky, Rudin and
Crime and Punishment in English, and was as good as married to Tsune.

T he T hursday S alon   125

He was doubtless stunned by Sōseki’s insights and said as much and
more in his memoir:

I would have to say that this letter from Sōseki-sensei brought about a
revolution in my heart that transformed me for the rest of my life. I had
never dreamed he would write to me. To be sure, I had asked him to read
a story of mine, but I was hoping at most that he might share his thoughts
with me at our next meeting. Yet he had gone out of his way to set down
his thoughts in a letter that I received on New Year’s Day! It arrived in
that familiar thick white envelope—I leave it to the reader to imagine my
surprise and delight on seeing it. I had been acknowledged by Sensei.
For better or for worse, Sōseki-sensei acknowledged my existence.17

Morita read a story that Sōseki recommended and sent him a cri-
tique. Sōseki responded with remarkable openness to a young writer he
had met only once briefly (and with a solicitude that must have been
thrilling to Morita). He began with a familiar sigh of pleasure at having
been acknowledged:

January 8, 1906
Greetings,
I read your long letter with interest. It pleased me to hear, flattery or
not, that my letter had influenced you considerably. I suppose I’m
grateful that my existence should be taken so seriously. I truly love
writing letters to people and receiving letters back. . . .
I intend reading your work whenever it appears. I also intend, to
the extent that time allows, to comment on whatever I notice. But only
on condition that you won’t get angry, no matter how critical I am. I
may be your sensei at school, but when I am writing or speaking to
you as an individual, we are colleagues. You mustn’t be in consider-
ation of me. I suspect you tend to excessive nervousness and worry
and that you try too hard to anticipate the feelings of others. It would
be better if you weren’t that way, particularly with me. You should put
your mind at ease—others close to me are quite relaxed.
Kinnosuke

Morita felt that he had been noticed by the Japanese writer he admired
above all others, and although Sōseki could be stingingly critical of his

126   T he T hursday S alon

work, the respect and the trust Morita placed in his mentor never wavered.
Late in October 1906, the first year of their acquaintance, Morita stayed
up all night (by his own account) composing a letter in which he is likely
to have revealed a suspicion that had gnawed at him all his life—a tor-
ment he would allude to in his memoir—that his real father may have
been a painter with whom his mother had been intimate, a man he had
grown up calling “Uncle.” It is clear from Sōseki’s reply, written and
mailed the next day, October 22, 1906, that he was moved. His letter is
of interest less for the consolation he offers the younger writer than for
what it reveals about his own exalted vision of himself (a fragile certainty
that waxed and waned):

Your life is just beginning. The value of your achievements will be

determined one hundred years from now. In a hundred years, who will
vex you with these matters! If you achieve greatness, these matters
will, on the contrary, redound to your honor. Just now you are para-
lyzed by the chaos you behold in front of your eyes. This is the same as
suffering over not becoming a doctor of letters or a full professor. One
hundred years from now where will the doctors and the professors be!
My ambition is to communicate to future generations with my writing.
To quarrel with next-door neighbors requires paying attention to them.
Along with paying attention comes an obligation to do what is possible
to enhance their view of you. Only a fool would fail to understand that.
I care not a fig about a year or two, nor even about ten or twenty years
of naysaying or a reputation for being mad. That is because my imagi-
nation is focused on a more splendid future. I am not such a timid
spirit that I must pay attention to my detractors. Nor am I foolish
enough to reveal my true self to them. I don’t seek praise from my
neighbors. I don’t seek reliance or faith in me. I expect instead the ven-
eration of future generations, and this expectation alone allows me to
sense my own greatness. So it should be with you! When you become
acutely aware of your own greatness, this kind of unfortunate karma
will melt away like snow on a heated brazier. Persevere! Persevere!18

Morita recalled that he had burst into tears on reading the letter, his
hands shaking.19
Over time, Morita’s impetuousness created frequent upheavals, but
in March 1908 he outdid himself when he set out for a mountain pass

T he T hursday S alon   127

intending a double suicide with a twenty-two-year old woman named
Hiratsuka Raichō. Sōseki had a hand in foiling the plot and then assumed
responsibility for containing the scandal that resulted, known as the
“Baien incident,” after the novel Morita promptly wrote about the affair.
Raichō went on to found Japan’s first literary magazine for women, Blue-
stocking, and became a central figure in Japan’s feminist movement.
When Raichō and Morita met in June 1907, Morita was feeling trapped
and desperate. He was without a steady job, having lost, as a conse-
quence of unreliable behavior, the position as an English teacher at a
middle school that Sōseki had helped him secure. In addition, he was
caught between two women: Tsune had showed up in Tokyo with their
infant son, and he felt morally obliged to provide a home for his “fam-
ily,” but he had already taken up with a young dancer (possibly the
daughter of his landlady).20 The child contracted dysentery and died, and
Tsune went back to the countryside, leaving Morita riven with guilt.
Just then, in June 1907, Ikuta Chōkō, a writer who had graduated in
his university class (best known as the translator of Thus Spake Zara-
thustra), founded a “literary society for gifted young women” (Keishū
bungakkai), and invited Morita to give some lectures. He chose Greek
tragedy. Raichō was among the fifty female college graduates attending
the weekly sessions on Saturday afternoons. Born into a wealthy, pow-
erful Tokyo family (her father had been on the drafting committee of the
Meiji constitution), she had attended an elite girls’ high school and was
one of a few Meiji-period women with a college education, having grad-
uated from Japan Women’s College in 1903. She had a passion for lit-
erature; while a member of the society, she wrote short stories and tried
her hand at translating Turgenev and Edgar Alan Poe. By the time she
met Morita, she was also engaged in a serious practice of Zen Buddhism
and had achieved, by her own account, kenshō, a pellucid vision of her
own essence. Later, she attributed her response to Morita’s blandish-
ments to a fearless curiosity about what life might bring that she had
acquired in the process of achieving clarity about herself.21
In January 1908, she was surprised to receive a long letter from Morita
critiquing one of her short stories. She remembered him as awkward with
his large head and bulky body, full of flaws, but vulnerable and not with-
out charm. Presently, he offered to take her to a meeting at Ikuta’s house
but refused to get off the train at the appropriate station and insisted on
riding to the end of the line in Nakano. The twenty-two-year-old and

128   T he T hursday S alon

her twenty-eight-year old instructor spent the afternoon walking in the
fields, had dinner at an old Western restaurant, and ended up wander-
ing in Ueno Park holding hands. Raichō’s description is brilliantly
evocative:

He started kissing the hem of my hakama like a medieval knight pay-

ing homage to a lady. Next he took hold of my hand and after kissing
it, began nibbling the tips of my fingers, two or three at a time. I stayed
perfectly still, letting him do as he wished, but to me, his gestures
seemed forced and devoid of genuine emotion. He seemed to be merely
mimicking love. . . . Why, I thought, this man isn’t one bit serious. My
patience gone, I stood up and said, “Sensei, can’t you be serious for
once! I detest insincere behavior. Be more serious, will you!” I flung
myself against him.

In Raichō’s elliptical account, the affair—apparently unconsummated—

hurtles forward bewilderingly. She received a letter that seemed influ-
enced by Crime and Punishment, which she claimed to have read with
detached curiosity, noting that like all Morita’s letters, the calligraphy
was beautiful:

When it comes to you, I think I am capable of murder. This is because

I have no way of expressing my love for you aside from killing you. I
shall kill you. But I myself will not die. I am an artist, a writer. I must
see for myself what happens to me, study my psychological state after
I commit the act. And so I intend to escape, escape as far as I can.

“Charmed and attracted by his obsessive love,” she joins him in his
fantasy of shared death and meets him at a teahouse near Tabata Sta-
tion on March 21.22 They spend the first night huddled next to a brazier
in a freezing inn in the town of Ōmiya, north of Tokyo. The next morn-
ing, they take the first train to Nishimasu and hire a rickshaw to their
final destination at Shiobara, near the Japan Alps. They spend a second
night at an inn. The next morning, they set out for Obana Pass, intend-
ing to hurl themselves off the cliff, but Morita can barely move through
the snow, and Raichō must drag him along. Morita collapses, swigs
whisky from a flask, and whimpers that he is a coward and lacks the
nerve to kill anyone. Raichō wonders what has happened to the artist

T he T hursday S alon   129

who had vowed to kill her and “live out his days in a lone cell in a snow-
bound Sakhalin cell, observing the changes in himself.” (Doubtless
Morita was imagining Dostoyevsky in Siberia.)
As Morita dissolves in self-recrimination, Raichō shows her strength.
“The time had come for me to take charge.” She clears a space in the
snow, spreads her coat on the ground, and watches over Morita as he
sleeps in a drunken stupor beneath the full moon. At dawn, she wakes
him and drags him toward the pass. Abruptly, they are intercepted by
two policemen who have been dispatched to search for them: Morita,
who had been confiding in Sōseki all along, had sent him a postcard
from Tabata Station to say he was departing on a long trip the next day,
and Sōseki, acting on a premonition, had alerted the police.
The long train ride home was a humiliation. The “lovers” sat facing
each other, Raichō between her furious father and mother, and Morita
flanked by policemen. He burst into tears; Raichō was dismayed by his
unmanly display of emotion in front of strangers. At Tokyo Station, Ikuta
Chōkō was waiting to take Morita to see Sōseki to seek advice. Sōseki
proposed that Morita stay with him for the time being—he was there for
three weeks—and later, when the time was right, ask Raichō’s father for
his daughter’s hand in marriage. Meanwhile, the couple was not to speak.
When Raichō was told, she responded, “If Sōseki thought that marriage
was the answer to every problem between men and women, he was no
different from ordinary people in the street.”
The Bai-en (or Shiobara) incident, was covered in all the papers. On
March 25, 1908, the Asahi carried a photograph of Raichō next to a story
with the headline “Unsuccessful Double Suicide by a Gentleman and a
Lady. The Man, a University Graduate and Novelist, the Woman a Col-
lege Graduate. The article noted,

Since ancient times, double suicides have not been unheard of, but
this is the first time a highly educated gentleman and lady have imi-
tated the ignorant behavior of illiterate men and women. One can only
say that this unprecedented occurrence is the result of Naturalism and
free love carried to an extreme.

Raichō bore the brunt of the repercussions. Within days, she was
expelled from the college alumnae association, and she continued to
receive, often lewd, proposals from unknown suitors. There was even

130   T he T hursday S alon

pressure on her father to resign his government post. But in the face of
public outrage, she maintained her serene aloofness:

In a few days, Chōkō returned with Morita. I sat in the room as he

apologized to my father and promised not to see me again. He may
have been acting on the orders of the two “grown-ups,” Sōseki and his
friend [Baba] Kochō, but nothing can have been more ridiculous. I
looked on with complete indifference.23

Sōseki’s involvement cost him effort and time. For weeks, while Morita
was living in the house, he fended off uninvited visits from journalists,
satisfying their curiosity diplomatically before sending them away. In
a letter to Takahama Kyoshi dated March 24, he wrote, “Things are in a
bit of an uproar around here, and I find it hard to concentrate and am
wasting a lot of time.”24 He was working on daily installments of The
Miner and having difficulty meeting his deadlines.
Sōseki did make time, unimaginably under the circumstances, to send
Raichō’s father a letter marked “Confidential!” and requesting his per-
mission for Morita to write a novel based on the incident. They were not
unacquainted, as both had been on the faculty of the First Special Higher
School, but Hiratsuka had never spoken with Sōseki, who was known
to be an unsociable eccentric. In any event, Hiratsuka declined Sōseki’s
request, but Sōseki persisted, even promising to assume some level of
responsibility for the probity of Morita’s work. Eventually Hiratsuka
assented, and Morita began writing in the summer of 1908 the novel that
would make him famous.
Letters suggest that Sōseki kept a close eye on Black Smoke. On
November 23, 1908, he wrote to Suzuki: “Morita continues to agonize
over Black Smoke. He is furious about the current state of our literary
community [bundan] and vows to give the critics something to agitate
about next year. We’ll see.”25 On January 24, 1909, Sōseki wrote brusquely
to the Asahi editor in charge of Black Smoke:

Baien hasn’t appeared for several days. What can the matter be? Nov-
els in the Asahi are famous for appearing regularly in daily installments
without a gap. I find it suspicious that this doesn’t seem to apply when
it comes to Morita Sōhei. I imagine this is due to some sort of over-
sight on the author’s part, but I’d appreciate a note of explanation,

T he T hursday S alon   131

 and I am asking you because you are closest to him. If this is due to
carelessness or other improper behavior, I would have to assume respon-
sibility. That would be awkward, to put it mildly. Kinnosuke26

Two days later, a new installment appeared, and Sōseki didn’t like
what he read: “I regret to say,” he scribbled on a postcard to Komiya
Toyotaka, “that in the concluding passage of today’s Black Smoke, Morita
destroyed a good novel. The man is a fool! What kind of an artist is
this!”27
Black Smoke was a best seller nonetheless and established Morita as
a novelist. In 1911, he embarrassed Sōseki by publishing a sequel, Auto-
biography (Jijoden), without asking permission from Raichō’s family and
thereby straining their relationship. Even so, Morita remained a central
figure in the innermost circle of Sōseki’s intimates, trading criticism of
work, confiding and being confided in, and participating in his mentor’s
daily life.
The physicist-poet Terada Torahiko was another anomalous member
of the inner circle. He first encountered Sōseki in 1897 at the Fifth Higher
School in Kumamoto and studied haiku with him. Their correspondence
about scientific method had something to do with Sōseki’s shift away
from texts per se to literary theory during his second year in London.
Graduating from the physics department at Tokyo Imperial University
at the head of his class in 1903 just as Sōseki returned from England,
Terada renewed his acquaintance and was with his teacher constantly
from that time on until Sōseki’s death in 1916. Terada was the model for
the pedant Kangetsu in I Am a Cat, a fact that he discovered to his dis-
pleasure at a meeting of the reading group at Sōseki’s house in 1905
when Takahama Kyoshi read aloud the second installment. In his first
appearance at Professor Sneeze’s study, Kangetsu smiles and reveals a
missing front tooth.

“What happened to your tooth?” my master asked, changing the

subject.
“Yes, well, to tell the truth I was eating a shiitake mushroom . . .”
“You were eating what?”
“I was, well, snacking on a shiitake—. I bit into the stem with my
front teeth and one of them sheered off!”

132   T he T hursday S alon

 “You broke a front tooth with a mushroom? That sounds a bit
elderly. It might make a decent haiku, but it’s not very romantic,” said
my master, lightly stroking my head with his palm.”28

Terada objected, saying Sōseki had no right to use in his fiction an

accident that had actually occurred to one of his front teeth. “Nobody
knows it’s you, so what difference does it make?” “But it makes me
ashamed, so I’d rather you left it out!” As the story goes, Sōseki went on
the offensive: “Sakamoto and Noma and the others bring delicacies when
they visit, persimmons and fish paste or even crab legs, but you show
up empty-handed every time!” “It appears you love receiving things,”
Terada countered, “Next time I’ll bring cash!”29
Notwithstanding this contretemps, the physicist-poet was well loved
by Sōseki and served him faithfully whenever there was an opportunity.
Komiya Toyotaka, seventeen years younger than Sōseki, was perhaps
the most devoted disciple of all. A German literature scholar by train-
ing, Komiya spent years editing Sōseki’s Complete Works, published by
Iwanami shoten beginning in 1917, the year after Sōseki’s death, and
eventually contributed afterwords (kaisetsu) to each of the eighteen vol-
umes. Komiya’s biography, Natsume Sōseki (1938), was hagiographic
and earned him the moniker “chief priest of the Sōseki shrine.” Loved
by Kyōko and particularly by the older girls, Fude and Tsuneko, he was
treated like a member of the family, an intimacy that inspired jealousy in
other members of the inner circle.
The haiku poet Matsune Tōyōjō was an “aristocrat” descended from
powerful samurai families on both sides (his mother was the daughter
of Date Munejiro, the lord of the Uwajima fief in northwestern Shikoku).
Born in Tsukiji in Tokyo, where the family maintained the Edo residence
required of all outlying feudal lords by the Tokugawa government,
Matsune was a middle school student in Matsuyama, the seat of his fam-
ily’s Uwajima fief, when Sōseki arrived there in 1895. Impressed by his
haiku, Sōseki introduced him to Shiki, and Matsune began contributing
to Hototogisu as a twenty-year-old. He continued to exchange haiku with
Sōseki at the First Higher School and Tokyo Imperial University and
even after he entered the Imperial Household and rose to the position of
lord chamberlain. Sōseki could be uncomplimentary about Matsune, as
in the following appraisal, but in truth he seems to have enjoyed his

T he T hursday S alon   133

company, particularly when they sat together, as they often did, critiqu-
ing each other’s haiku:

Matsune has his own charm. And since he comes from aristocrats,
there is a refined element about him. But he’s not very bright. And he
loses his temper too quickly. . . . With a baron and a baroness for an
uncle and aunt and the Mitsui family for relatives, he takes a 30-yen-
a-month job and whines about it—an odd duck. He’s also arrogant.
He sits himself down in your house and eats a meal when it’s served
to him as if that’s altogether his due. Never a word of thanks. He’s
really something, empties the bowl as if he’s eating at his own table.30

There were other accomplished, eccentric characters with whom Sōseki

remained in close contact until his death. Let us introduce them as they
take the stage. A group of creative individualists with strong personali-
ties, they had mostly in common the same elite education—First Higher
School into Tokyo Imperial University—and shared a veneration for their
mentor. In her history, Kyōko wrote that charter members of the salon
continued to gather on the ninth day of every month, the anniversary of
Sōseki’s death, and had already met 130 times.

134   T he T hursday S alon

 +
10

A Professional Novelist

Early in December 1906, Sōseki learned that his landlord was returning
from Sendai to take a teaching job at Tokyo First Higher School and
was intending to move back into his house, obliging the family to find
another place to live after nearly four years. The timing was bad: Sōseki
had just begun writing his novella Autumn Storm and was supervising
final exams at both schools. Kyōko had to find a house on her own, and
rental properties in Tokyo were in short supply. Working with a realtor,
she began canvassing suitable neighborhoods and finally, just in time,
located a house she thought would do in the same part of the city, ten
minutes’ walk from Tokyo Imperial University, at the top of a hill above
Koishikawa in Nishikata-machi. On December 24, Sōseki sent post-
cards requesting help to several disciples, including Suzuki Miekichi.
His letter to the haiku poet Matsune the next day, Christmas, is dis-
jointed, touched by madness even, as if the stress of the move coming
when it did may have unhinged him. His opening lines may be an
oblique corroboration of Stephen Dodd’s suggestion1 that he was
“open to a wider range of erotic possibilities than has generally been
acknowledged”:

I read your letter: You won’t come to see me, you want to come, you
long for me, you’re like a woman. Recently, I received a letter asking
me to become the sender’s daddy. I felt unqualified and declined.
It may surprise you to learn that plenty of men fall for me. Women
don’t succumb as easily. And since they don’t speak up as men do, I
wouldn’t notice even if someone had.
In general, it’s my disciples who fall for me. Maids detest me. Maids
and I are an unfortunate combination.

   135
 He continues with his dissatisfaction with the new house:

We’re moving on the twenty-seventh. To Nishikata-machi. A body

needs his own house or he wanders all over the place and loses him-
self. Renting a shambles of a place that’s hardly better than a board-
ing house for 27 yen a month is idiotic. Better to go for broke, borrow
the money, and build a mansion. In the near future, I’ll be bringing all
of you together for a housewarming. But not as long as I’m living in a
rental.
I [will be publishing] a major work in Hototogisu called Autumn
Storm. It surpasses Goethe’s Faust and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, so please
read it.
I doubt I’ll be able to handle o-toso [sweet saké] on New Year’s Day.
I intend to take an early morning walk with one of my disciples,
Komiya Toyotaka. How about joining us on the walk?
December 25 (1906)
Kin2

Moving was an undertaking: Sōseki’s fourth daughter, Aiko, who had

been born in December 1905, was just one year old, and the family now
had three maids, Kyōko’s personal maid (koma-tsukai), a housemaid
(nakabataraki), and a scullery maid (shitabataraki). Suga Torao arranged
for two horse-drawn wagons to make two round trips each for a total of
5 yen. (The new residence was fifteen to twenty minutes away.) Sōseki’s
disciples transported the breakables by rickshaw. One brought lamps;
another a grandfather clock. Suzuki carried the family cat in a waste
basket. On December 29, Suzuki and Komiya arrived to repaper the shoji
doors, a job that took them all day. When they had finished, Kyōko gave
them each 5 yen. “Ever after,” she recalled, “whenever they ran out of
spending money, they would suggest it was about time to repaper the
shoji.” On another occasion, Komiya asked for 2 yen to buy a new pair
of geta. Sōseki overheard and snapped, “A student should be satisfied
with zori with hemp soles that cost 15 sen!”3
The dislocation of a move might have been traumatic even if Sōseki
had not been engaged at just that moment in a negotiation that would
transform his life as a novelist. In November, the Yomiuri newspaper
offered him 60 yen a month to write a daily survey of what was appear-
ing in the literary magazines. A frequent visitor had reported that he

136   A P rofessional N ovelist

habitually grumbled about having to teach and write at the same time,
and the paper judged that the moment for an offer was at hand. The
Yomiuri hoped his presence as a regular contributor would increase its
readership among intellectuals, who esteemed him highly, and in the
process would reestablish the paper as the leading publisher of “cultural
arts.”4
In a letter dated November 16, Sōseki declined the offer: “Even if the
Yomiuri were to match my university salary, writing something to be read
and thrown away the same day is unlikely to secure my reputation in
the future any more than teaching English literature.”5 On November 20,
the man behind the offer, Takegoshi Yōtarō, a member of parliament with
a close connection to Prime Minister Saionji Kinmochi and an adviser
to the Yomiuri, visited Sōseki at his home and urged him to change his
mind. Sōseki agreed only to give it some thought, but on November 20
the paper ran the following advertisement: “The paper announces with
great excitement that Natsume Sōseki, the brightest new star in our lit-
erary firmament, will become a special contributor to these pages. Look
for a masterpiece from his pen before the year is out!”
Sōseki did publish the preface to his forthcoming Theory of Literature
in the Yomiuri later that month, and subsequently, on New Year’s Day
1907, a ten-page admonition to critics appeared, in which he used Mac-
beth, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello to illustrate the danger of eval-
uating works of literature on the basis of expectations and old rules.6
Once again, the Yomiuri crowed, “Sōseki will be appearing regularly as
a special contributor! A dazzling example of his work is the masterpiece
in these pages today! For a spectacular view of the panorama of today’s
literary art in Japan, consult Yomiuri!” But Sōseki did not appear in the
paper again.
Meanwhile, the Japanese newspaper with the largest national circu-
lation, the Asahi shinbun, was preparing an offer of its own. The terms of
the proposal, unprecedented in Japan, were that Sōseki the novelist
would grant the Asahi the exclusive right to serialize his fiction in its pages
in return for an annual salary to be paid monthly. The young staffer cho-
sen to convey the offer in person, Sakamoto Settchō, had been Sōseki’s
student at Fifth Special Higher School in Kumamoto and had maintained
a connection while studying Japanese literature at Tokyo Imperial Uni-
versity by soliciting Sōseki’s comments on his haiku. As it happened,
the editor of the paper’s arts section also came from Kumamoto. The

A P rofessional N ovelist   137

younger Sakamoto’s involvement as a go-between illustrates the degree
to which personal connections interlaced and influenced intellectual soci-
ety at the time.
At their meeting on February 24, Sakamoto asked how much longer
Sōseki would have to teach in order to satisfy his agreement with the
Ministry of Education, and Sōseki explained that his four-year obliga-
tion following his return from England would be fulfilled at the end of
March 1907. In general, the young journalist found Sōseki receptive to
what he had to say. Taking his leave, he went straight to the home of the
novelist Futabatei Shimei, just down the street, where his superiors from
the paper were anxiously awaiting his report. Futabatei was as excited
as the newspapermen when he heard what sounded like “hopeful news.”7
It is easy to understand why Sōseki rejected the Yomiuri and accepted
the Asahi. The Yomiuri had proposed paying 720 yen per year, 80 yen
less than he was making at the university, for a column or a column and
a half of literary criticism rather than fiction. The Asahi was offering 2,400
yen a year for novels, and its circulation had climbed to 500,000 read-
ers, 200,000 in Tokyo and 300,000 in Osaka, compared with only 90,000
for the Yomiuri. At the time, Sōseki needed 200 yen a month to support
his burgeoning family, including money he was sending every month to
his surviving stepsister and to Kyōko’s impoverished father. The pros-
pect of reaching such a large readership was tempting. Still, it was a dif-
ficult decision that required deliberation. His first response to the Asahi,
addressed to Sakamoto on March 4, is an early indication of how care-
ful he was about money:

I have been considering your proposal seriously but have been

extremely busy, and before I had a chance to make up my mind, I
received an offer from the university to assume responsibility as a full
professor for lectures in English literature. I have asked for time to settle
my business with the Asahi before responding. As it appears I’ll have
some free time two to three weeks from now, I would like, if possible, to
discuss the matter in detail directly with Ikebe-san.8 Meanwhile, here
are some concerns I’d like placed on the table:
1. Emolument. Is the figure you mentioned the other day set in stone?
Guarantee. I would like a letter of guarantee that I will not be
dismissed without cause, not only from Mr. Ikebe but also from Mr.
Murayama.9

138   A P rofessional N ovelist

 How many years must I be employed until I can expect to receive
what in the civil service is known as a pension, and what percentage
of my monthly salary will such a pension represent?
(I have taken the liberty of broaching these crass financial concerns
because I don’t contemplate returning to academia, even if I fail at
the paper, and feel I need the prospect of a degree of stability com-
mensurate with the risk I shall be incurring.)
2. The work. How many months must my serialized novel (one a
year) continue? Will I be obliged to concern myself with complaints
that may be forthcoming from your salespeople? I wouldn’t be sur-
prised if my novels were unsuited to today’s press—would that be
a problem? Perhaps that will change ten years from now. But it is also
possible that Sōseki will cease to be in vogue as he is now—will that
be a problem?
Aside from my novels, how much other material can I choose to
write in a day or a week?
Needless to say, I shall leave my teaching job, but will I be able, as
now, to write what I choose in the nature of novels, editorials, or what-
ever, when I am asked by various magazines?
Will I be allowed to collect and publish under my own copyright
the novels and other material that appear in the Asahi?
Some things I dislike about the university. At the same time, I love
the sequestered life of a university professor. I am accordingly some-
what hesitant. With apologies for troubling you, I would be grateful if
you could inquire about each of these matters when the opportunity
presents itself.
I don’t require an immediate reply. If I have an opportunity to sit
down with Mr. Ikebe, I can ask him these questions directly.
In haste,
Natsume Kinnosuke
P.S. So far no one has left academia to strike out into the wilderness.
For just that reason, I’d like to try. Proof of how odd I am.10

Ikebe promptly drafted a memo of intent that addressed most of

Sōseki’s concerns satisfactorily. If there was a sticking point, it was the
expectation that he would publish two novels a year of one hundred
installments or more in length. In his second long letter to Sakamoto, dated
March 11, Sōseki agreed to publish his fiction exclusively in the Asahi

A P rofessional N ovelist   139

but was careful to explain the impossibility of creating to order. The letter
restates his desire for a guarantee that would allow him to feel secure in his
new position. Here again, he reveals an almost paranoid cautiousness:

[T]he type, length, and timing of said works shall be at my own dis-
cretion. In other words, to the extent possible in the course of a year,
in accordance with where my interest takes me, I shall find time to
conceive and create and shall dedicate my entire output to the Asahi.
That said, however, inasmuch as this is literary narrative, it won’t be
possible to observe time frames mechanically. Nor will it be possible
to preconceive the number of installments or their length. Some will
be longer, others shorter. There will also be times when I write many
times in a week or, again, only once or twice in a month. The truth is,
I don’t really know myself what my limits are, but if you base your
expectations on what I accomplished last year, you won’t be far off.11
Since I was teaching last year as I wrote, when I turn to writing as my
principal occupation, I may produce even more, but for the time being,
please use last year as a standard. Needless to say, the better part of
what I write will be lyrical, in particular, novels (Some years, I might
do just one long work and have done with it or, at other times, two or
more shorter works such as Botchan, at my discretion.)
As for remuneration, I accept the 200 yen per month you have pro-
posed. I would, however, like to receive New Year’s and midsummer
bonuses, as your other employees do. Perhaps these could be equal
to four times my monthly salary. . . .
I do request formal guarantees from Ikebe-san and the publisher
that my position is stable and assured. This is just a precaution. As a
university professor’s position is remarkably trouble free, leaving the
university impels me to hope for a position no less stable. Since Ikebe-
kun is a friend and gentleman, I know I am assured of this, but in the
event he should leave the paper, I could be left with no one other than
the publisher to honor these conditions or to whom I could appeal to
honor them, and hence I desire a contract with both Ikebe-kun and
the publisher.
In conclusion, I have set down so many niggling details because
once I leave the university and venture out into the wild, I have no
intention of becoming a professor ever again. As I continue to reflect on

140   A P rofessional N ovelist

 this, additional conditions may occur to me. If and when they do, I
shall articulate them, but for the time being, I place the above on the
table for your consideration and hope to hear from you.
Natsume Kinnosuke12

On March 15, Ikebe Sanzan visited Sōseki at his home, hoping to

finalize the arrangement. Sōseki recalled the meeting five years later:

At the time I was living in Hongō, Nishikata-chō. I ushered him to the

second floor. The house, which we were only renting, was flimsily built
in the extreme. The second floor creaked even when someone as slight
as I tread on the tatami. I had, of course, heard of Ikebe-kun but this
was the first time we had met, and I had no idea what he looked like
or how he might comport himself. In a word, he was a giant: his face
was large, his hands were large, his shoulders were broad—everything
about him was on a grand scale. His hulking presence in the slender
matchstick confines of my parlor gave rise to a sense of incongruity
as if, to exaggerate a little, I had invited a statue of the great Buddha
into my house. What happened next was a surprise to me. We talked,
and as we spoke, I began for some reason to associate the man sitting
in front of me with Saigō Takamori. That association stayed with me
even after he had left. Needless to say, I had no knowledge of Saigō
Takamori. So it wasn’t as if Saigō had evoked Ikebe-kun for me but
the other way round: this is the sort of man Saigō must have been,
I thought. I was serious, as I demonstrated in the letter I wrote to my
contact at the Asahi the minute he left. I no longer recall exactly what I
said, but the gist of it was that the meeting with Ikebe-kun had finally
dispelled the uneasiness I had continued to feel throughout our long
negotiation. I felt as if I had met with Saigō Takamori. . . . Learning just
recently from an intimate of Ikebe’s that he had always kept my best
interests in mind and bet everything he had on preserving my position
[at the paper], I knew that the image of his character that had engraved
itself on me at that first meeting had been no illusion.13

The fact that Sōseki was able to impute integrity and honor to Ikebe
Sanzan because he identified him with Saigō Takamori is revealing.
Saigō, a huge man as charismatic as he was fierce, was one of the young

A P rofessional N ovelist   141

samurai from the outlying domains who rose to positions of leadership
in the new government after the Imperial restoration of 1868. In 1873,
Saigō severed ties with the government over the invasion of Korea, which
he had advocated zealously, and returned to Satsuma, a domain cen-
tered in Kumamoto. Four years later, early in 1877, having survived a
government attempt to assassinate him, Saigō led his army into the field
in a rebellion aimed at exposing the perfidy of the emperor’s ministers
in Tokyo. Eventually his rebel forces were overwhelmed but not before
thousands had died on both sides. Saigō declared his loyalty to the
throne until the bitter end, riding into battle wearing his Imperial army
uniform. The night before the last stand, he committed seppuku and died
a rebel and, to many, a martyr. Years later, the emperor granted him a
pardon posthumously and restored him to his stature as a national hero
who epitomized the samurai values of fearlessness and honor.
We should bear in mind that Sōseki was already a boy of ten in 1877
when the Satsuma Rebellion took place and would certainly have heard
talk of Saigō’s exploits. Clearly, his distinctly premodern values power-
fully affected Sōseki, notwithstanding his Western sophistication. Here
we have a small yet eloquent example of the conflict between the feudal
and the “modern” worlds that beset the Meiji intellectuals and became
one of Sōseki’s prevalent themes.14
On March 19, Ikebe hosted a celebratory dinner at the Nihon Club in
Yūrakuchō. On March 25, Sōseki sent a letter of resignation to the College
of Letters at Tokyo Imperial University. The school returned the letter,
requesting an emendation before they would sign it: They had replaced
Sōseki’s “ I should like to resign my post” with “I hope to be excused from
my post.” In his eagerness to be done, Sōseki duly made the change.
On May 7, the Asahi ran his short essay “On Joining the Asahi.” It is a
curious document that conveys a tangle of messages in just a few pages.
In places, it is genuine: Sōseki explains that his four–year teaching obli-
gation to the government has been fulfilled and that his university salary
had been insufficient to support his large family and required him to
maintain several teaching positions at once while finding time to write, a
situation that had caused him to lapse into nervous prostration. “Some
of you may think I brought this on myself with the writing, scarcely more
than a hobby, and you are welcome to think so, but let me tell you that
Sōseki is recently unable to feel alive unless he is writing something.”
Elsewhere, it appears that he is intending to provoke:

142   A P rofessional N ovelist

 Unarguably, the university is a nest of renowned professors. To be sure,
professors and Ph.Ds worthy of respect are to be found burrowing
there. And scholars beyond counting are eager to make their way
beneath the red gate to the lecture podium, proof that the univer-
sity must be an estimable place. . . . I agree that it is, but kindly
don’t assume that means I think journalism is not an admirable
profession. . . . ​If working on a newspaper is a job, so is working at a
university. If working at a newspaper is a vulgar job, then so is work-
ing at a university.

The language conveys anger just beneath the fluent, clever surface.
Other passages seem, more than passive-aggressive, perverse:

When I lectured at the university, a dog was always barking annoy-

ingly. If my lectures were bad, that dog was at least half responsible.
I’m certain it had nothing to do with a lack of learning on my part. I
hate to say this to students, but if they have complaints, they should
take them to the dog, since it’s entirely his fault. . . .
My happiest times at the university were in the reading room in the
library, browsing in the latest editions of magazines and periodicals.
I regret keenly having been too busy to devote as much time to that
as I would have liked. Moreover, whenever I was in the reading room,
the library staff in the next room would be talking in outrageously loud
voices, laughing, and otherwise clowning around. They seemed to
have infinite ways of disturbing my refined pleasure. I once made bold
to present a letter to the university president, Dr. Tsuboi, asking him to
do something, but he never lifted a finger. If my lectures were bad, this
situation was at least half the reason. I hate to say this to students,
but if they have complaints, they should take them to the library staff
and the president, who were at fault. To be held accountable for this
myself, as though I were inadequately educated, would be an insup-
portable outrage.

Naming the president of the university would have been perceived by

readers as the height of indiscretion and suggests that Sōseki was in the
grip of strong feelings when writing that might have been less provoca-
tive under these felicitous circumstances. His essay is angry and, beyond
angry, retaliative, and, in its way, smacks of paranoia, qualities that

A P rofessional N ovelist   143

surfaced recurrently in Sōseki’s complex character. In his closing lines,
he returns to a note of gratitude that has the ring of sincerity:

The Chinese say something about good faith being summoned forth
by good faith in others. I am grateful to the Asahi shinbun for placing
an eccentric like me in an environment suitable to an eccentric, and it
will be my happy duty to perform on the paper’s behalf to the utmost
of my eccentric ability.15

On May 28, 1907, the paper announced the forthcoming serialization

of its first Sōseki novel, and ran a paragraph in which the author explained
his choice of title, The Poppy (Gubijinsō):

Last night on a walk with young [Komiya] Toyotaka in Morikawa-chō,

we bought a pair of potted plants. When I asked the gardener what
the flowers were called, I learned that they were “poppies.” As it hap-
pened, I was in need of a title and feeling badly about missing the
deadline to announce the new novel, and so, carelessly enough, I
decided to borrow the name of this flower.
They had white and crimson and deep purple petals folded in a
tangle drooping at the crown as if untrimmed and too heavy for the
stem. In the lantern light of a fading spring evening, the effect was
somehow suggestive, ghostly, bewitching. I wondered if my new novel
would convey that same mood, but of course, even its creator wouldn’t
know until he began to write it.
The paper tells me we need an announcement. An announcement
requires a title. Perhaps The Poppy isn’t right, but it is at hand, conve-
nient. With this brief comment on how I came to it, I take up my pen.
Sōseki.16

The Poppy appeared in both the Tokyo and Osaka Asahi in 127 install-
ments from June 23 to October 29, 1907. Sōseki worked through the hot
summer, allowing little to distract him.17 Throughout his career, he shared
with many other serious writers a tendency to fixate on whatever he was
writing at the moment. But his state of mind as he worked on this first
full-length novel of his new career went beyond preoccupation: he was
obsessed, frantic to make The Poppy a success and possibly suffering a

144   A P rofessional N ovelist

recurrence of mental instability as a result of the strain. The violence he
expresses in a shocking note to Suzuki Miekichi on June 21, just two
weeks into the writing, recalls his worst days in 1904 and 1905:

Today I’m taking a break from The Poppy. When I have one of my
anger fits, I feel like lopping off the heads of the maid and my wife
with a fine Masamune blade. But since that would mean I’d have to
commit seppuku, I restrain myself. And that aggravates my bowels and
makes me constipated, which is unbearable. I have trouble somehow
feeling that my wife is human.18

Until now, Sōseki had published principally in Hototogisu, with a

monthly circulation that had increased, after he began publishing in it,
to a little more than 8,000 copies, or in Chūō kōron, which reached 10,000
readers at most. This time, in the two Asahi papers, he would be writing for
a potential audience of 500,000 readers, many of them encountering his
work for the first time. The entire nation was watching: Sōseki’s move
from the university to the newspaper had been headline news.
The ballyhoo that accompanied the novel’s appearance even before
serialization began was singular. Newsboys at bus and trolley stops
pressed papers into people’s hands shouting “Sōseki’s Poppy in these
pages!” A well-known jeweler in Ueno designed “Poppy” rings. The Mit-
sukoshi Department Store, in advance of the summer season, created
“Poppy yukata.”
Sōseki wrote at a breakneck pace: on June 17 he reported to Matsune
Tōyōjirō that he had just handed in ninety-seven manuscript pages. “I
have read your letter but haven’t the leeway to write back at any length:
I think of nothing but The Poppy all day long.” His closing lines suggest
that he was experiencing a crisis of confidence: “I stop to read over
something I’ve worked so very hard on and am often disappointed by
how trivial it seems. So this is it? Nothing more? How disheartening!. . . ​
My wife never touches any of my work. Apparently, the ladies have trou-
ble with it.”19
In mid-August, Sōseki expressed what became a chronic complaint
about the impossibility of finishing the novel he was working on: “More
than one hundred installments, and I’m still not finished. Having no idea
where it is heading, I feel worried and unsettled. Penelope’s web. I’ll be

A P rofessional N ovelist   145

assaulting The Poppy from now until the end of time.”20 Ten days later,
he was still buried in the writing: “ I feel like stepping out to have a look
at all the fuss caused by the flood, but I’d better stay in and keep ham-
mering away at The Poppy.21
During the months he worked on the book, Sōseki rarely left the house.
On June 11, he received an invitation to a discussion of “national litera-
ture” followed by a Japanese banquet—”evening dress not required”—
at the residence of the prime minister, Marquis Saionji. A dabbler in
poetry, the marquis had arranged for three consecutive evenings desig-
nated pretentiously “gatherings in the whispering rain” and had invited
every famous poet and novelist in the land to attend.22 The initial group
of eight included, in addition to Sōseki: Tayama Katai, Futabatei Shimei,
author of Floating Clouds; and Tsubouchi Shōyō, the first translator of
Shakespeare (whose translation of Hamlet Sōseki deplored).23 Tsubou-
chi and Futabatei declined the invitation, as did Sōseki, who appended
to his note a haiku that exemplified what Shiki had in mind when he
praised his gift for humor:

hototogisu Cuckoo bird!

kawaya nakaba ni with unfinished business in the privy
idekanetari I cannot sally forth

The poet hears the cuckoo while in the outhouse. Traditionally, the
cultivated man of letters was expected to hearken to the cuckoo’s call
and appreciate it (the cuckoo’s manifold symbolic burden must have
made it difficult to fly!). Alas, under the circumstances, this was impos-
sible. Matsune Tōyōjō read into the lines the implication that the humble
poet—on the privy—was comparing the cuckoo with the exalted guests
with whom he could not possibly associate, and claimed that Sōseki
intended the added touch of cynicism. Scribbled on a postcard, the haiku
conveyed unambiguously the poet’s disregard for social status. Sōseki’s
brother-in-law urged him to reconsider sending it, but Sōseki chortled,
“This will do fine!” and dropped it in the mailbox.
Until now, Sōseki’s fiction had been distinguished in part by a seem-
ing effortlessness of execution. The Poppy, however, feels laboriously
overwrought. Consider the following exchange between Fujio, the twenty-
three-year-old enchantress who is the novel’s heroine, and one of her
suitors, the poet Ono:

146   A P rofessional N ovelist

 “When I see Cleopatra as Shakespeare depicted her, I get a strange
feeling—” [Ono said.]
“What kind?”
“I’m being dragged down an ancient hole I can’t escape from, in a
daze, and Cleopatra is projected before my eyes in splendid purple.
It’s as if a single figure rises from a faded brocade print and gleams in
purple.
“You talk so much about purple—why?”
“No reason—that’s just how it feels to me—”
“Is this the color?” Swiftly the girl sweeps her long purple sleeve
from the fresh tatami where it lies half-spread and flutters it in Ono’s
face. Abruptly Cleopatra’s scent is strong in his nostrils.
“Don’t,” he cries, regaining his senses in a flash. Swiftly as a starling
skims the sky and streaks beneath the falling rain the shocking purple
stills, the lovely arm rests on her knee. Quietly rests there, as if no pulse
were beating.
Little by little, the strong scent of Cleopatra in his nose fades. Pur-
suing the shadow suddenly summoned forth from two thousand years
ago, the shadow receding as if reluctantly, Ono is lured into the sty-
gian realm and transported backward into the distant past.
“It isn’t love like a gently wafting breeze or of tears or sighs. It’s
love as a storm, a howling storm that’s never been charted. It’s love
as a five-inch dagger,” he says.
“Is love as a dagger purple?”
“Love as a dagger isn’t purple, purple love is a dagger.”
“Are you saying purple blood would spurt if you stabbed love?”
“I’m saying a dagger would gleam purple if love got angry.”
“Is that something Shakespeare wrote?”
“It’s my interpretation of something Shakespeare wrote. When
Anthony married Octavia in Rome—when a messenger brought the
news of the wedding—Cleopatra’s—”
“Purple was deeply stained in jealousy I suppose—”
“When purple burns in the Egyptian sun, a cold sword glistens.”24

Passages like this one, and the novel abounds in them, might have
made Mishima Yukio groan with pleasure. Throughout, the book is a
rank greenhouse of purple prose—Sōseki labors to fashion rhetorical
mountains out of emotional molehills.

A P rofessional N ovelist   147

 Kōno Kingō, twenty-eight years old, is a self-styled philosopher
and heir to his family’s estate who has lost his way in life. His half sister
Fujio, the centerpiece of the novel, is a beautiful twenty-three-year-old
whom the narrator likens to Cleopatra, haughty, quick-witted, beguiling.
Fujio’s mother is anxious to have her daughter marry well, but propriety
requires that her elder stepbrother, the head of the household since his
father’s death, marry first. But Kōno is not inclined to marry. He spends
his time brooding, writing in his diary sententious entries about the
nature of life and death, and preparing to leave the house behind to
become a monk.
There are two contenders for Fujio’s fickle heart, Munechika Hajime,
also twenty-eight, a distant relative and Kono’s close friend, and Ono
Seizō, a poor poet. Fujio is bored by Munechika and sweet on Ono; it is
to him that she intends to give her father’s gold watch.
Unfortunately, Ono is betrothed to a demure, retiring young woman
named Sayoko, whose father, a professor, was his benefactor when he
lived in Kyoto. Early in the novel, the professor, who is aging and ill,
moves back to Tokyo with Sayoko for the first time in twenty years, in
hopes that his daughter’s presence will remind Ono of the promise he
made five years ago to marry her.
Sōseki has assembled all the ingredients he needs to fashion a melo-
drama. In the long and rambling course of its unfolding, the characters
display a full palate of emotions, jealousy, ambition, heartbreak, and
anger, but they fail to convince us they are real. The narrative device
Sōseki uses to transport the story to its overheated conclusion is so crude
that the reader wonders whether it is intended as a parody of early
attempts at realism:

Following Ono’s friend, two rickshaws depart. One heads for Ono’s
boardinghouse. One sets out for the professor’s lodging. Fifty minutes
later, a third rickshaw with its black hood lowered races off in the direc-
tion of Kono’s estate. Our novel must now relate in order the mission
of each of these rickshaws.25

The principals converge on Kono’s mansion and await Fujio’s arrival:

she has left for a rendezvous with Ono at Ōmori Station, which he has
failed to keep. She is furious, not suspecting that he has had a change

148   A P rofessional N ovelist

of heart and decided to marry Sayako after all. The concluding scene
plays like the finale of an opera buffa:

The rain streaming off its black hood, the rickshaw advances on the
house. Atop the cushioned seat, Cleopatra’s anger rears like a horse. Its
wheel carving ruts in the gravel, the rickshaw skids to the entranceway,
and Cleopatra emerges in her deep purple scarf and rushes inside.
Anger personified, she strides in to the study like a compromised queen
and halts in the center of the room—six pairs of eyes fasten on her
purple scarf.
“Welcome home!” says Munechika [one of two suitors] with his
cigarette between his lips. Fujio disdains to return the greeting with
so much as a word. Drawing up to her full height, she surveys the
room smolderingly. When her gaze reaches Ono, it alights and knifes
into him. Sayoko makes herself small behind his back. Munechika
stands abruptly and tosses his half-smoked cigarette into a grape-color
ashtray.
“Ono-san! Why didn’t you come?”
“I would have regretted it.”
Ono’s speech was clearer than usual. Lightning crackled from
Cleopatra’s pupils—such impudence!—and struck him between the
eyes.
“I require an explanation for a broken promise.”
...
Munechika stepped forward, brushing Ono aside and revealing
Sayoko behind him.
“Fujio-san! This is Ono-san’s wife!”
Fujio’s countenance darkened with hatred. Gradually hatred
became jealousy. At the moment when jealousy was most deeply
engraved, it turned to stone.
“She’s not his wife yet. Not yet, but sooner or later. I’m told Ono
gave her his word five years ago.”
Sayoko dipped her head on her slender neck, her tear-swollen eyes
still downcast.
Fujio didn’t move, her white fists clenched.
“That’s a lie! A lie!” she exclaimed twice. “Ono-san is my husband.
My future husband. What are you saying, how dare you!”

A P rofessional N ovelist   149

 “I’m just stating the facts with the best of intentions. While I’m at
it, I thought I should I introduce Sayoko—”
“So you wish to humiliate me!”
Behind the petrified expression a vessel abruptly burst. Purple
blood filled her face with renewed anger.
“I mean well, please don’t misunderstand.” Munechika appears
unmoved.
Now at last, Ono spoke.
“Everything Munechika-kun says is the truth. This is my future
wife for certain.—Fujio-san, until now I’ve been a shallow individual.
I owe you an apology. I owe Sayoko an apology. I owe Munechika-
kun an apology. From this day, I intend to reform. I intend to become
a serious human being. Please find it in your heart to forgive me. If I
had gone to Shinbashi, it would have been a calamity for both of us.
So I didn’t go. Forgive me.”
For a third time, Fujio’s expression transformed. The blood from
the ruptured vessels had receded, and only the color of humiliation
remained vivid. Abruptly the mask shattered.
Hysterical laughter poured out of the window and vanished into
the rainy sky. At the same moment, she thrust her clenched fist into
her obi and drew out a long chain.
“In that case you won’t be needing this. Munechika-san, it’s yours!
Take it!”
Her white hand extended from her sleeve, exposing her arm. Her
father’s watch dropped heavily into Munechika’s swarthy palm. Mune-
chika stepped forward and planted himself in front of the hearth. With
a grunt he lifted his dark fist above his head. The watch shattered on a
corner of the marble.
“I haven’t gone out of my way to interfere because I wanted a watch.
Ono-san, I haven’t stirred up trouble this way because I wanted a
woman as inconsiderate as this one. Seeing me destroy this, perhaps
all of you will understand what’s in my heart. This is a step in the direc-
tion of the moral high ground, don’t you agree, Ono?”
“I do!”
Fujio had been standing as though in a daze and now, abruptly,
she seemed to freeze. Her hands stiffened. Her legs stiffened. Knock-
ing over a chair, she collapsed on the floor like a stone statue that has
lost its balance.26

150   A P rofessional N ovelist

 Readers were shocked and bewildered by Fujio’s death, but Sōseki
had always intended to kill her off. On July 19, he responded to a letter
from Komiya Toyotaka in which his most devoted disciple must have
expressed admiration:

You mustn’t be so sympathetic to Fujio She’s a disagreeable creature,

poetic but hardly complaisant [italics mine]. A woman who lacks a moral
sense. I intend killing her off at the end, it’s one of the principal goals
of the book. If I can’t dispose of her cleverly, I’ll have to redeem her.
The trouble is that a person like Fujio becomes ever more hopeless if
she is saved.27

The novel concludes with an entry from Kono’s diary that follows
Fujio’s cremation, in which he formulates a distinction between comedy
and tragedy. The subject was very much on Sōseki’s mind as he wrote
The Poppy. His notebooks that summer of 1907 are filled with a running
cogitation, including diagrams attempting to illustrate all the ingredients
of each. “The stuff of comedy,” o-toso, “is what the ordinary man frets
about from dusk till dawn: millet or rice, this woman or that, English or
German. Comedy is exclusively about life and the pursuit of trivial hap-
piness. Tragedy manifests in that moment when we are suddenly made
to realize that death, which we so abhor, is an eternal trap that must not
be forgotten. The grandeur of tragedy, its greatness, is that it compels us
to exercise our otherwise dormant moral sense.”28
It seems clear that Sōseki intended The Poppy to evoke the “grandeur”
of tragedy, and that he wanted the reader to recognize the awakening of
moral purpose that tragedy inspires in the rejection of Fujio by Mune-
chika and Ono, rivals in love. But that remained a mere notion in the
author’s mind: It is hard to imagine anyone reading the novel today
or, for that matter, at the time, feeling that he was in the presence of a
tragedy, least of all Sōseki himself, a brilliant student of Shakespeare
and, in particular, of Hamlet.
Perhaps Sōseki’s desperation to make a success of his first Asahi
contribution had befuddled him into believing that he had created some-
thing of greater moment than it actually possessed. But those blinders,
assuming he ever had them on, came off soon enough. Late in 1913,
Sōseki wrote to a former student in Kumamoto to reject his proposal to
translate The Poppy into German:

A P rofessional N ovelist   151

 I am honored by your interest in translating a work of mine, but regard-
ing the title you have designated, The Poppy, I feel I must decline for
the following reasons: First, this is not a representative work of mod-
ern Japanese literature.29 Second, it is a difficult work in its own nig-
gling way and unlikely to survive translation. In the third place, I have
less interest in this book than in any other I have written. Finally, it is
badly made. If my only consideration were artistic, I would have let it
go out of print, but inasmuch as it continues to generate a small rev-
enue in royalties and because it strikes me that having already exposed
my shame, it would avail me little to hide it away now after all these
years, I have let it be. . . . Nonetheless, it strikes me as unwise to go
out of my way to export my shame all the way to Germany. Accord-
ingly, I would be grateful if this matter could be dropped.30

Whatever Sōseki may have thought at the time or in retrospect, The

Poppy was the most acclaimed novel of 1907. Readers devoured every
installment and cried for more. The ornateness of the language was as
intoxicating as the fragrance of poppies; its very difficulty made it seem
refined, superior to the work of anyone else. When the publisher released
the book in hardcover on New Year’s Day 1908, the entire printing of
five thousand copies sold out before noon.
On September 29, 1907, the family moved again for the second time
in less than a year. Initially, they had been paying 27 yen a month for
the Nishikata-machi house, but the landlord had raised the rent almost
at once to 30 yen. Now he was asking for 35 yen a month, and Sōseki
would not hear of it. “I want nothing more to do with a landlord who jacks
the rent up arbitrarily whenever he pleases,” he wrote to Suga Torao on
September 2, the day he finished The Poppy. This time he took responsi-
bility for finding a house, searching neighborhoods to the west of Hongō
toward Shinjuku, accompanied by Suzuki and Komiya (proximity to the
university was no longer a priority). The place he chose was in Waseda
Minami-chō, blocks away from Waseda University and virtually around
the corner from the house where he had grown up. Was this a coinci-
dence, or was he being drawn by nostalgia or a need to feel reconnected
to his past? In any event, the move represented a return to home base
after an absence of sixteen years. A single-story residence on a spacious
lot with no garden to speak of but some healthy trees, the house included
just inside the entrance on the right a room that appealed to Sōseki as

152   A P rofessional N ovelist

a possible study, an “odd space” according to Kyōko, “neither Japanese
nor Western nor Chinese.”31 Sōseki put a rug on the floor and worked
mostly at a desk in a Western chair. The property was managed by a
physician who lived across the street; the rent was 40 yen a month, but
when the doctor saw Sōseki’s card, he proposed reducing it to 35 yen and
Kyōko agreed, although she claimed it was more than she could afford.
The move was managed just as before: Suga arranged for the horse
and wagon, and disciples were enlisted to transport breakables by rick-
shaw. Once again, Suzuki was in charge of transporting the cat in a
wastebasket. Morita Sōhei was waiting at the new house to help move in.
This time, in addition to the three maids and four daughters, there was
a baby boy, Sōseki’s first son, Jun’ichi, born on June 5, just as he was
beginning work on The Poppy. As always, it was a difficult birth—Kyōko
had suffered terrible morning sickness since March—and a doctor had
to be called to aid the midwife. Returning from school, Sōseki heard the
news and seemed “very happy, repeating to himself, “Is that so—a boy,
indeed!” Komiya and Suzuki showed up with a large sea bream (tai), a
fish traditionally served on auspicious occasions. On June 7, Sōseki
wrote to his editor at the Asahi in response to an inquiry about his prog-
ress on The Poppy:

I had just begun to write when, wouldn’t you know it, we had a birth.
The doctor arrives. My missus groans. With all the commotion, I only
managed to write a single installment. . . .32

Is this an example of the Meiji gentleman’s disinclination to reveal

personal feelings? Is a father’s happiness being masked? Possibly.
Waseda Minami-chō was the last move Sōseki would make. He lived
here for nine years until his death in 1916, and it was in this house that
he wrote all his major novels, beginning with Sanshirō in 1908.33

A P rofessional N ovelist   153

 +
11

Sanshirō

Traditionally, Japan was closed for business for the first seven days of
the New Year.1 During this period, families received visits from relatives
and friends. Since no shopping was possible for a week, housewives and
their servants worked in advance to prepare an adequate amount of the
special New Year’s food—dumplings; vegetables simmered in soy sauce;
and pounded rice, o-mochi, served in a New Year’s broth called o-zoni—
and stored it in the drawers of lacquer boxes (recall Kyōko’s distress when
she ran out of sweet yams on New Year’s Day in Kumamoto). A quan-
tity of sweetened saké (o-toso) was also on hand. In effect, every day of
the new year until January 7 was an open-house party.
On New Year’s Day 1908, the new Natsume residence in Waseda was
a festive scene. The house was filled with intimates who came and went—
Komiya Toyotaka, the haiku poet Matsune, Morita Sōhei and Suzuki
Miekichi, Takahama Kyoshi the Hototogisu editor, Terada Torahiku the
scientist, and others—and there was a lot of drinking and tipsy merri-
ment. Morita showed up in a bespoke frock coat and was laughed at for
being a dandy; Takahama appeared shortly afterward in kimono embroi-
dered with his family crest and wearing a formal hakama— the clash of
styles in the same room was typical of the times.
Someone brought up chanting passages from nō plays (hereafter I
shall use the Japanese term, utai, which is written with an alternate
character for singing), and Sōseki, who had dabbled in the art in Kuma-
moto, was asked to perform something auspicious for the new year.
Takahama Kyoshi had been practicing the nō drum—a small drum stead-
ied atop the shoulder with the left hand and struck with the right—and
nothing would do but to send a rickshaw to his lodgings to fetch his.
When it arrived, a small brazier was brought from the kitchen to warm
the head to proper tautness, and Sōseki launched in, with Takahama

154  
accompanying his performance with appropriate shouts and resonant
thumps. Sōseki was unable to sustain his recitative, however, and accord-
ing to Kyōko, “his voice began to tremble and he withered.” Sōseki joined
the others in laughing at his own insipid effort. Takahama stood in for
him and finished the piece by himself.2
An amateur reciting passages from nō plays written in the fourteenth
century might be likened to an aficionado with a singing voice attempt-
ing arias from an opera. But insofar as the nō texts are not, strictly speak-
ing, set to music, the analogy is faulty. Instead, they are chanted, the
voice rising and falling according to a notation system that also indi-
cates variations in tempo. In Botchan, listening to his landlord practic-
ing, the narrator observes with his typical cynicism, “Utai is the art of
chanting a passage that’s understandable when read in such a compli-
cated way that it’s incomprehensible.”3 A professional nō actor begins
training as a small child, often debuting in children’s roles at the age of
five or even three (the Kanze school actor Sakai Otoshige, who has been
designated as a “living national treasure,” liked to say that he began his
training in his mother’s womb). The result for those who achieve great-
ness is a voice that seems to issue from a bottomless depth, resonant
and expansive beyond imagining even behind the performer’s wooden
mask. Amateurs can only hope to approximate this helden voice, and
most never come close. Sōseki’s voice was sometimes described as “thin,”
even “squeaky.” Kyōko was always unimpressed and seemed to take
pleasure in telling him so (in Kumamoto, defending himself against her
criticism, he insisted he was more skillful than his colleague, whose utai
he likened to “farts bubbling up in the bath”). One of his disciples, the
George Bernard Shaw scholar Nogami Toyoichirō, attempted a guarded
appraisal: “He wasn’t skillful, but he wasn’t necessarily hopeless. He had
good volume and his voice was substantial and bright.”4
His experience at the New Year’s party prompted Sōseki to begin
practicing utai in earnest, working on a selection every evening after din-
ner. With an introduction from Takahama, he met the nō master Hōshō
Shin and arranged for him to come to his house for private lessons twice
a week for 9 yen a month. The relationship continued intermittently for
eight years and had its ups and downs. Sōseki made many demands on
his teacher’s time, and it is not clear that he considered Sōseki a promis-
ing student, though he was careful what he said in his published recol-
lections. For whatever reason, he frequently canceled a lesson at the last

S anshi r ō    155
minute; Sōseki, who would have spent hours preparing, was let down
and resentful. Finally, in April 1916, seven months before he died, he ter-
minated his arrangement with his teacher.
Under Sōseki’s influence, a number of his disciples took up utai;
Komiya began at once, and Abe Yoshishige5 and Nogami Toyoichirō fol-
lowed. Matsune was already an accomplished amateur in the Kanze
school of nō performance. At times, Nogami observed, when practicing
editors of the Asahi were also present, the Thursday salon seemed more
like a recital group than a literary gathering. “We were so engrossed it
was odd,” Nogami wrote, “I wonder now what was wrong with us.”6
Morita and Suzuki Miekichi declined to join in.
Beginning in 1908, Sōseki’s letters and diaries are full of references to
utai. Except when his stomach illness prevented him, he practiced with
the same ardor that drove his pursuit of poetry and, in the last years,
painting, sometimes morning, noon, and night.
In July and August, casting about for new formats, Sōseki wrote “Ten
Nights of Dreams,” tenuously related sketches rendered in vivid detail
that revealed a gift for the surreal and the macabre.7 He was still work-
ing on “Dreams” when the Asahi informed him that he was scheduled to
serialize another full-length novel to follow Shimazaki Tōson’s Spring
when it concluded in mid-August. He began writing in early July—the title
was Sanshirō, a man’s name—and finished in a little more than three
months, on October 5. As always, he was impatient, despite his remark-
able progress. In a letter to Takahama Kyoshi dated August 31, he wrote,
“Sanshirō is not progressing. On a day like yesterday, I barely sit myself
down when visitors show up. I take this to represent a curse from the
heavens and put my pen aside resignedly.”8
In August, he sent the editor of the arts and culture page a note that
he wanted the paper to carry as an advertisement for the new novel. He
listed four possible titles: A Youth (Seinen), East and West (Tōzai), Sanshirō
(a given name), and Flatland (Heiheichi). “I’d be grateful if you would
choose one of these four,” he wrote. “Sanshirō is at the top of my list
because it is so ordinary. The problem is, it might not inspire readers
with sufficient curiosity to want to read it.”9
Writers with a burgeoning national reputation do not customarily
leave the selection of a title to an editor. But Sōseki’s relationship to his
titles was, from the beginning, baffling. What appears to be over time

156   S anshi r ō
his passivity and even indifference in regard to his titles is difficult to
explain.
The letter continued with a summary and what amounted to a
disclaimer:

“Graduating from a rural higher school and entering the university in

Tokyo, Sanshirō experiences a new environment. His behavior is influ-
enced in various ways by his relationships with classmates, superiors,
and a young woman. The challenge will be to turn these people loose
in this environment. Free to swim by themselves, they are certain to
create waves. In the course of their flailing about, I believe that read-
ers and author alike will be drawn to this environment and will come
to know them. If the environment should lack the appeal it needs or
the characters should be deemed unworthy of knowing, I suppose we
will be mutually obliged to accept our bad luck with resignation.
This will be an exercise in the ordinary. I’m not after anything sensa-
tional.” Please use the above in your advertisement.10

Anodyne as it is, Sōseki’s précis reveals something crucial about his

evolving approach to fiction. We need only substitute “plot” for “envi-
ronment” to understand that he was viewing his story as a vehicle, the
wheels of the cart, designed to allow his characters to reveal themselves.
This represented a reversal of traditional Japanese fiction in which ste-
reotypical characters functioned to transport the story and aligns Sōseki
with the proponents of realism who were his contemporaries in the West.
Sōseki began Sanshirō with at least one of its characters, the heroine,
Mineko, clearly in mind and, extrapolating from his “advertisement,”
created an “environment” that would compel her to reveal herself along
the way. In conversations with Morita Sōhei about Hiratsuka Raichō
and the heroine of Herman Suderman’s novel Es War (1894), which he
had just read in English translation (The Undying Past), Sōseki alluded
to the notion of an “unconscious hypocrite” and declared his intention
of coalescing a heroine around this apparent contradiction.11 There is no
question that Mineko ensnares the naive country boy Ogawa Sanshirō,
but it never comes clear whether her seductive behavior is “uncon-
scious” or intentional. Mineko emerges as one in a procession of elusive
women, Nami in Grass for a Pillow, Fujio in The Poppy, Chiyoko in Until

S anshi r ō    157
Beyond the Summer Solstice, and Kiyoko, the erstwhile lover who still
haunts the hero’s dreams in his last novel, Light and Dark, all of whom
tantalize and bewilder the men who pursue them.12 Mineko’s mystery,
the ambiguity of her intentions, is the source of the narrative tension that
propels Sanshirō and becomes the most engaging aspect of this not
entirely successful novel.
There is additional evidence in the text itself that Sōseki was focus-
ing on approaches to characterization as he worked on the book. Late
in the story, Sanshirō visits an artist’s studio to watch Mineko model for
a portrait. The painter delivers a remarkable summation of the artist’s
challenge and goal:

The painter doesn’t paint the heart. He paints expressions of the heart
that appear on the surface, and if he observes and captures those man-
ifestations precisely, the heart itself will naturally emerge. Aspects of
the heart that can’t be perceived on the surface lie beyond the paint-
er’s capacity to express. So we paint only the flesh. Take [Mineko’s]
eyes. I don’t paint her eyes intending to reflect her heart. I’m painting
them as eyes. I paint them because I love her eyes. Their shape, the
shadow of her double lids, the depth of her pupils—I paint everything
that is visible to me. And the coincidental result is that a certain expres-
sion emerges. If it doesn’t emerge, it means I used my colors badly or
I mismanaged the shape, one or the other.13

The painter’s credo recalls John Ruskin’s thoughts on seeing—”observe

everything and depict the details accurately and the essence beneath the
surface will emerge.” Sōseki had read Ruskin extensively (his library con-
tained the six-volume edition of Modern Painters) and cites his aesthetics
in his Theory of Literature (1907).14
Sanshirō was not the first rite of passage in the panorama of new Japa-
nese fiction. In 1895, the critic and translator Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–
1935) published Student Types in Today’s World (Tōsei shosei katagi), a
series of sketches of student life in Tokyo organized around the story of
a love affair that appeared doomed but concluded happily (and uncon-
vincingly). He intended his fiction to serve as an illustration of the revo-
lutionary ideas about realism and the novel that he had formulated in
his hugely influential essay “The Essence of the Novel,” published in the

158   S anshi r ō
same year. Student Types was read widely and enthusiastically in its day,
especially by student readers, and to be sure, Shōyō achieved a degree
of “realism” in his incisive characterizations and detailed rendering of
dormitories, streets in the student quarter, restaurants, and the like. But
his effort was ultimately a failure, owing more to the melodramas of the
nineteenth century than to a new vision of fiction liberated from the for-
mulaic “punishing vice and rewarding virtue.” The book was in vogue,
but only briefly.
Sanshirō, though, became a perennial best seller. Readers have always
been drawn to the protagonist’s resolute optimism and goodwill and
savor the scenes of life in early twentieth-century Tokyo as seen through
his unjaded eyes. Twenty-three years old, Ogawa Sanshirō, a graduate
of the Fifth Higher School in Kumamoto, comes to the capital to enroll
in Tokyo Imperial University and encounters a cohort of characters who
open his eyes to the complexities of modern life, a brave new world in
which he discovers science, politics, backbiting, and, of course, love.
Sanshirō’s circle of friends includes a cynical philosopher, Hirota, whose
soured view of the world reflects Sōseki’s own; Hirota’s former stu-
dent, Nonomiya Sōhachi, a scientist loosely modeled on Terada Torahiko;
Sasaki Yōjirō, an irreverent undergraduate who looks after Hirota-sensei
and rooms with him (possibly modeled on Suzuki Miekichi); and Satomi
Mineko, the “unconscious hypocrite” who beguiles him.
Sanshirō’s vexing experience of Mineko is at the heart of the novel.
He first lays eyes on her when she strolls past him in the company of
another woman and drops a white flower at his feet as he sits contem-
platively at a pond in the middle of the campus (known ever since as
“Sanshirō Pond”). He encounters her a second time as he is leaving the
hospital where he has delivered a kimono to the scientist’s ailing sister:

Surprised, his quick step along the corridor faltered. Silhouetted in the
bright light streaming in from the other end of the corridor, the girl
moved a step forward, and Sanshirō moved, too, as though she had
beckoned him. They drew closer, fated to pass each other. Abruptly,
the girl looked behind her. There was nothing to see outside but a daz-
zling screen of early autumn green. Nothing appeared in response to
her gaze, and nothing awaited it. Sanshirō used the moment to assess
her attitude and what she was wearing.

S anshi r ō    159
 He didn’t know what to call the color of her kimono. It was rather
like the clouded reflection of the evergreen’s shadow upon the water
of the campus pond. Bright stripes rippled the length of it, now mov-
ing together and now apart, thickening as they overlapped and sepa-
rating again. This irregular but not disorderly pattern was intersected
one-third of the way down by a broad obi. It had a warm feeling, pos-
sibly because of the yellow it contained.
When she turned to look behind her, her right shoulder drew back
and her left hand, still at her side, moved forward. It held a handker-
chief; visible in the grip of her fingers, the cloth appeared to flare
smoothly—probably silk. From the hips down her body was poised.
She turned back around, and as she approached Sanshirō with her
eyes lowered, she suddenly lifted her head slightly and looked straight
at him. Her eyes stood out beneath her dark eyebrows, brightly alive,
her gaze was composed. Sanshirō would never forget the contrast
between her shining white teeth and her complexion.
The girl bent her body slightly forward. Sanshirō was less surprised
at being greeted by someone he didn’t know than by the graciousness
of the greeting. Her body above her hips lowered like a slip of paper
descending on the wind. Swiftly. And then halted unmistakably when
it achieved a certain angle. This was not a bow that had been learned
and memorized.15

The magnified detailing of the passage produces an effect that is dis-

tinctly feminine and somehow, implicitly, seductive. Mineko is casting a
spell, intentionally or not. Later, she refers to this encounter, but the ambi-
guity of her behavior is sustained.
Their first exchange occurs soon afterward, when they both show up
at an apartment they have been asked to make ready for Professor
Hirota and Yojirō to occupy. Mineko bows as before, her eyes on his
face, and Sanshirō is reminded of the English word, “voluptuous,” used
by his professor of aesthetics to describe the paintings of Jean Baptiste
Greuz.
The following Sunday, Mineko invites Sanshirō to join her, the pro-
fessor, Nonomiya, and his sister on an outing to see an exhibition of dolls
at the Chrysanthemum Festival. Making sure that Nonomiya is engaged
elsewhere, Mineko abruptly leaves the exhibit hall and Sanshirō hurries

160   S anshi r ō
after her. After a long walk away from the noise, they come to an open
field next to a stream and engage in an awkward conversation:

“Hirota-sensei and Nonomiya-san must be looking for us,” he said

as if it had just occurred to him. Mineko’s response was chilly:
“Who cares! We’re too grown up to be lost children—”
“But we have wandered off!” Sanshirō insisted.
“Since he likes avoiding responsibility, that ought to suit him per-
fectly,” Mineko remarked, the chill in her voice even more noticeable.
“Who does? Professor Hirota?”
Mineko didn’t reply.
Do you mean Nonomiya-san?”
Mineko said nothing.
“Are you feeling better? If you are, maybe we should be heading
back?”
Mineko looked at Sanshirō. Half standing, he sat back down on
the grass. At that moment he had the feeling that he was no match for
this woman. At the same time, he was vaguely aware of a kind of
humiliation that accompanies the feeling of having been seen through.
“Lost children—” Her eyes still on Sanshirō, Mineko repeated the
phrase. It was Sanshirō’s turn to say nothing.
“Do you know how to translate ‘lost children’ into English?”
The question was so unexpected that he was unable to answer yes
or no.
“Shall I tell you?”
“Please—”
“ ‘Stray sheep’—does that make sense?”
It seemed to him he understood “stray sheep.” And it seemed to
him he didn’t. But it wasn’t so much the meaning of the phrase that he
understood or didn’t understand as the meaning of the woman who
had used it. Gazing at her face in vain, he said nothing. Whereupon
she turned abruptly serious.
“Do I seem too forward?”
There was something apologetic in her tone. Sanshirō was taken
by surprise. Until now she had been enshrouded in a fog, and he had
wished the fog would lift. Her question had dispelled the fog, and she
had emerged distinctly. Now he regretted the clarity.16

S anshi r ō    161
 The scene ends with Mineko declining to take the hand Sanshirō
extends to help her across the stream and then falling against him,
momentarily in his arms. Subsequently, too distracted to listen to his
teachers, he scribbles the words “stray sheep” in his notebook; and
Mineko sends him a provocative postcard—can this be unconscious?—
on which she has drawn two stray sheep lying together on the grassy
bank of a stream. Sanshirō is overjoyed at the implication.
But above all, he is bewildered: “Recently he had been captured by
a woman. To be captured by a lover might be an enjoyable imprison-
ment. But he had no idea whether he was an object of infatuation or of
ridicule.”
Presently, out of the blue, Sanshirō is informed by his friend that
Mineko is getting married. “It’s all arranged?” he inquires flatly. “That’s
what I heard, but I don’t really know.” “Is it Nonomiya?” “Nope, not
Nonomiya.” “But then—” he began and fell silent. “Do you know?” “No
idea.” Sanshirō listens in silence to his friend explain how foolish of him
it was to fall in love with a woman like Mineko, his thoughts hidden
from the reader. If he is devastated, he betrays no sign.
Sanshirō does not attend the wedding, but he does accompany his
friends to see the finished portrait of Mineko. He lingers in front of the
painting, entitled “Woman of the Forest,” and Yōjirō asks what he thinks.
“The title is wrong.” “What should it be?” Sanshirō did not reply. But he
repeated silently to himself, “Stray Sheep,” “Stray Sheep.” The implica-
tion seems to be that Sanshirō has matured sufficiently to realize that
like Mineko, he, too, is adrift in his life.17
Notwithstanding setbacks, Sanshirō manages to avoid bitterness and
remains guileless and hopeful most of the time. Certainly his vision as
he stands at the threshold of his adventure is unironic to a degree rarely
found in a Sōseki character, as if he had been created at a time when
the author was at least considering the possibility that innocence could
survive in a world that increasingly repelled him: “He was on his way to
Tokyo. He would enroll in the university. He would brush up against
famous scholars, associate with students of refinement, pursue his
research in the library, publish. The world would applaud him, his mother
would rejoice.”18 In no time at all, Sanshirō has distilled from this cheery
prognostication a similarly optimistic plan of action: “To bring his mother
to Tokyo from the country, take a beautiful bride, devote himself to
learning—­he couldn’t do better than that.”19

162   S anshi r ō
 But even Sanshirō is not entirely sunlit. He is a country boy, inexpe-
rienced and naive to be sure, but no simpleton. He is tormented by jeal-
ousy and gripped by anxiety and even terror at the thought of life’s
uncertainty. One still autumn night, he is house-sitting for the scientist
when he hears a cry in the darkness: “Ah, only a little while longer!” He
hears “total abandonment in the cry and the absence of any expecta-
tion of a response.”20 Just then, the roar of an oncoming train reaches
him from the distance, and he senses that the feeble cry in the dark and
the train share a destiny and shudders at the connection he has made.
His premonition is borne out. He sees men with lanterns moving along
the tracks and follows the lights to the corpse, a young woman with her
body torn apart from shoulder to hip, only her face unharmed:

Considering her face and the cry in the night and the cruel fate that
must have been lurking behind them, he couldn’t help feeling that the
root of what we call life that seemed so substantial and solidly planted
was likely to work itself loose at any time without our knowing it and
float off into the darkness. Sanshirō was purely and unavailingly
afraid. It was but one roaring instant. Until then she had been alive.21

Although the uneasiness created by this episode is contained, it

casts its shadow across the book. At the end, Sanshirō seems poised to
enter the dark regions inhabited by so many of Sōseki’s characters still
to come.
The character of Sanshirō was almost certainly inspired by Komiya
Toyotaka, the disciple whom Sōseki described as “the most noble being”
he knew. Komiya recognized himself in the book. After reading the first
installment on the train home to visit his family, he confided to his diary,
“I have the feeling Sanshirō is written about me” and, two days later,
“Sanshirō more and more suspicious.”22
In 1929, on the thirteenth anniversary of Sōseki’s death, Komiya pub-
lished excerpts from the diary that he had kept in 1908 and 1909, the
years when Sōseki was writing Sanshirō and his subsequent novel, And
Then (Sore kara). The youngest member of the inner circle, Komiya was
twenty-six at the time and completing his last year as a student of Ger-
man literature at Tokyo Imperial University. His diary provides a delight-
ful picture of the intimacy between sensei and disciple. It reflects the
earnest, guileless young man that Sōseki loved and reveals Komiya’s

S anshi r ō    163
dependence on his teacher as a mooring in his life and his closeness to
Kyōko and the children, particularly Fude, nine years old in 1908:23

J a n . 1. (1908): Sensei’s house.

J a n . 2. Sensei’s house.
J a n . 3. Sensei’s house.
J a n . 4. Sensei’s house. The Missus gives me a splendid wallet. After din-
ner I set out to make the rounds of relatives to wish them well in the
New Year.
J a n . 9. Sensei’s place. Nogami [Toyoichirō] arrives. Morita [Sōhei] arrives.
[Takahama] Kyoshi shows up. Sensei proposes utai with Takahama.
While they’re at it, we go into the parlor and play cards.
J a n . 23. Sugar in Sensei’s urine. As I recall, Goethe also had diabetes.
J a n . 30. [Takahama] Kyoshi, Morita, Terada.
M arch 7. My birthday. Went to Sensei’s house at night. Red beans and
rice, sea bream in broth, sea bream sashimi, sea bream broiled with
miso. I stay the night.
M arch 26. (Thursday) Sensei’s. Headache. Morita was there. I stay the
night.
M arch 27. I stay over.
M arch 28. Back to my boardinghouse. I didn’t want to leave. I wish I
could be at Sensei’s at least when I go to bed.
M arch 29. The Missus shows up with Fudeko and Tsuneko. We go to
the movies at the Kinkikan24 in Kanda.
M arch 31. Sensei shows up. Since the weather is good today, he’s mak-
ing the rounds of friends. . . . We go to the bath together. Then we have
some beef at my boardinghouse. He leaves at around nine.
A pril 6 (ill in bed): Fudeko-san comes to see me. She rushes in carrying
a bouquet of camellias in her left hand and clutching a basket of tan-
gerines and apples to her chest with her right. I was feeling lonely and
was so happy to see her! We had supper together, and I sent her home.
A pril 11. Sensei pays me a sick call. Too happy for words. But I’m just
recovering and can’t see him on his way properly when he leaves.
A pril 14. The Missus invites me to kabuki. I ask if Sensei’s coming and
she says maybe later, but he doesn’t appear . . .
A pril 16. I go to Sensei’s. Stay the night.
A pril 23. Stay the night.

164   S anshi r ō
A pril 25. The Missus shows up with Fudeko. We go out for supper and
then walk around Kanda. Home at ten.
A pril 30. I finish my graduation thesis. The first thing I intended to do
when it was finished was show it to Sensei. I spent five days making
a clean copy in excited anticipation, but when I read it over, it sud-
denly struck me as trivial, and I abandoned my plan to take it to Sen-
sei’s house and felt miserable . . .
M ay 10. The Missus tells me Fude is fond of me and asks me to take her
as a wife before she gets too old. Home at ten.25
M ay 15, 21, 28. I stay over at Sensei’s.
S ep tember 24. (Thursday) Sensei’s. Because of the rain, I’m the only one
there. We lounge around and talk. I stay over.
S ep tember 27. Drank with Suzuki Miekichi at the Hirano-ya. Couldn’t
help feeling we were Sanshirō and his buddy Yojirō.
O ctober 1. Sensei’s. Stay over.
O ctober 6. Sensei’s. The Missus throws the party she promised to cele-
brate my graduation. Since Terada-san received his doctorate, the
party is for him, too.26 Terada-san. Suzuki, Nogami.
O ct. 8. Sensei’s. I stay over.
O ct 9. I deliver the manuscript for Sanshirō to the Asahi.

1909

J a n . 24. Fudeko comes over. I take her to a movie at Kinkikan.

J a n . 25. I go to the Asahi to pick up Sensei’s salary.
J a n . 28. Sensei’s. All the maids have left. Catastrophe.27
Feb 4. Sensei’s. As I enter the study, he says, “I read your essay28 [pub-
lished in Hototogisu]—well done!” He seems relieved, and the look on
his face seems to be saying “You did it!” . . .
Feb . 5. Sensei treated me to roast duck at the Tama-tei. I had the feeling
this was a reward for my essay, and I was thrilled beyond words. . . .
Feb . 25. Sensei’s. I stay over.
M arch 7. (Thursday) Stay over at Sensei’s.
M arch 12. Beginning today, I go over a German translation of Andreyev
with Sensei.
M arch 13. Sensei says he’s enjoying the German and asks me for more
time each week.

S anshi r ō    165
M arch 21. Sensei says, “I want to critique [Morita’s] Black Smoke, but
I’ll be starting a new novel of my own [And Then] and probably won’t
have time. I’d like you to write something instead.”
M arch 24. Terada-san’s farewell party.29 The Hoshigaoka teahouse.
Strange dishes, and it cost me 3 yen. I borrowed Sensei’s hakama.
Stayed over.
A pril 8. Sensei’s place. Stay over.
A pril 1. Sensei’s.
M ay 4. Leaving for home [ in the Kyoto area] tomorrow. Fudeko-san
says I’m to be back in time for her birthday.
M ay 22, 25, 27, 28, 30; June 1, 3, 4, 6, 8: Sensei’s place.
June 24. (Thursday salon) Elisséeff comes along.30
A ugust 1, A ugust 3: Sensei’s place.
A ugust 14. And Then is completed.31

Komiya’s diary breaks off on September 2, 1909, the day that Sōseki
left on a tour of Manchuria and Korea hosted by Nakamura Zekō.

166   S anshi r ō
 +
12

A Pair of Novels

And Then (Sore kara) and The Gate (Mon), written in 1909 and 1910, are
profitably read as a pair. The hero of And Then is about to hurl himself
into an adulterous relationship with his best friend’s wife that will cer-
tainly result in ostracism and possibly madness. The husband and wife
in The Gate, living “beneath the shadow of a cliff,” seek refuge in each
other from the isolation they suffer as the result of their past transgres-
sion of the social order. Employing this twin motif, Sōseki succeeded in
dramatizing a theme that was becoming central to his cynical and
increasingly embittered vision of life: that the price exacted by the asser-
tion of ego (possibly a symptom “incurred” from Western individual-
ism) was isolation, loneliness, and existential pain.
And Then is animated by a story designed to compel the characters
to reveal themselves in depth. Nagai Daisuke is an aesthete and intel-
lectual who lives with a houseboy and a library of Western books paid
for with a monthly stipend from his father. His complacent, idle, bach-
elor’s life is derailed by the return to Tokyo after three years of his for-
mer best friend, Hiraoka, and his wife, Michiyo. Hiraoka has borrowed
money from usurers and is in financial trouble. Overcoming her embar-
rassment, Michiyo visits Daisuke to ask for a loan. There is a charged
awkwardness between them; Michiyo covers with one hand a ring that
Daisuke presented her when she was married.
Their history is rendered in brief strokes that leave questions unan-
swered. In their student days in Tokyo, first Daisuke and then Hiraoka
grew close to Michiyo, the sister of a mutual friend. For two years, the
four friends were frequently together. Then Michiyo’s brother died of
typhus. “That autumn,” we are told abruptly, with no explanation, “Hira-
oka married Michiyo. Daisuke was the go-between. The couple moved
away to Kyoto and remained there until now.”

   167
 Gradually, as Michiyo and Daisuke are reunited, their mutual attrac-
tion is reawakened. Buried feelings are hinted at but never expressed.
Even so, Sōseki managed to construct scenes that simmer, torrid moments
compared with the tepid writing to which readers of other Japanese writ-
ers were accustomed in 1910. Michiyo visits Daisuke to thank him for
his loan of 200 yen. She arrives in a pouring rain (Sōseki often used
heavy rain as a curtain isolating two people from the rest of the world.)
She asks if she can drink from the glass that Daisuke uses to rinse his
mouth in the morning. He leaves to get her fresh water, and when he
returns with a teacup of water, she already has filled his glass from
the large flower bowl and drained it. Daisuke is surprised, and so is the
reader: Michiyo’s impetuousness conveys intimacy.
Sōseki delicately evokes an erotic undertone. Michiyo observes Daisuke
toss the lilies she has brought into the bowl where the larger flowers min-
gle with the lilies-of-the valley floating there. His carelessness prompts
her to ask when he began disliking lilies. Daisuke recalls, as she intends,
having lovingly arranged lilies for her and her brother and insisting they
take time to appreciate them. He can only smile ruefully.
Daisuke calls on Michiyo at her house when he knows that Hiraoka
is away:

“I wonder why you haven’t married yet,” she asked. Once again,
Daisuke was unable to reply. Watching Michiyo’s face in silence, he
saw the blood gradually drain from her face as she grew noticeably
paler than usual. He became aware for the first time of the danger of
remaining seated face to face with her. Within two or three minutes,
the words that emerged naturally from their mutual concern were likely
to push them beyond the boundary of acceptable behavior. Even if they
were to cross that boundary, Daisuke had command of the conver-
sation that he would need to draw them back again as if nothing had
happened. But he wouldn’t resort to the suggestive banter between
men and women he encountered in Western novels; it was too explicit
and licentious, cloying in its linear way. This might have worked in
the original language, but it was a sensibility impossible to transpose
to Japan. He had no intention of using lines imported from abroad to
advance his relationship with Michiyo. Between them, everyday lan-
guage would suffice. However, even in everyday language, there lurked

168   A P air of N ovels

 the danger they might slip from point A to point B. Daisuke barely
managed to stop himself one step from the cliff.1

Their longing builds until Daisuke is compelled to speak out. He sum-

mons Michiyo to his house, and they reminisce about their past together.
The distance between them contracts, and Daisuke declares himself:

“You are essential to my existence. Absolutely essential. I asked you

to come just so I could tell you that.”
Daisuke’s words contained none of the adornments normally used
by lovers. His tone, like the words he chose, was plain, verging on
severe. If there was anything childish about the moment, like a nursery
rhyme, it was that he had summoned her expressly to tell her this, as
if it were a matter of urgency. Michiyo had the capacity to understand
urgency detached from the mundane. But she had little interest in
the adolescent rhetoric that appeared in common novels. The truth
was, Daisuke’s words had not appealed to her sensuality in any spec-
tacular way. His words had passed by her sensuality and reached
her heart. From beneath her trembling eyelashes, tears ran down her
cheeks.
“I want you to acknowledge that. Please acknowledge it.”
Michiyo continued to cry. She was in no state to reply. Taking a
handkerchief from her sleeve, she pressed it to her face. Daisuke moved
his chair closer.
“You’ll consent to this, won’t you?”
Her face still covered, Michiyo said, her voice muffled by the hand-
kerchief, “You ask so much!” The words struck Daisuke like an elec-
tric shock. He felt the pain of realizing that his confession had come
too late. If he were going to confess, he should have found the cour-
age before Michiyo married Hiraoka. Hearing these words emerge
between her sobs was more than he could bear.
“I should have confessed three or four years ago,” he said, and fell
silent in despair.
Michiyo abruptly removed the handkerchief from her face and
gazed at Daisuke with reddened eyes.
“I don’t need a confession but why—” She hesitated and, finding
her resolve, “Why did you throw me away?”2

A P air of N ovels   169

 The scene finds its way to a bold explicitness that far exceeds the lim-
its of conventional social intercourse:

“Michiyo-san, please be honest. Do you love Hiraoka?” Michiyo

didn’t reply. Her face grew visibly paler. Her eyes and mouth tensed
in an expression of pain. Daisuke spoke again.
“Well then, does Hiraoka love you?”
Michiyo’s head remained bowed. Daisuke was on the verge of fol-
lowing his question with a resolute decision when suddenly she looked
up. The anxiety and pain that had hardened her face until now had
almost disappeared. Even her tears had dried. Her face was paler than
before, but her mouth was firm, her lips untrembling. Her solemn words
ushered from those lips softly, one disconnected syllable at a time:
“We have no choice. Let’s prepare for the worst—”3

The word Michiyo chooses, kakugo, can be used to mean readiness

in the face of impending death, often on the battlefield. Michiyo is declar-
ing that she is prepared to endure whatever may befall them as a conse-
quence of their action. Daisuke, in a confrontation as brutal as any in
modern Japanese literature, visits Hiraoka to inform him that he is tak-
ing his wife away. He asks for Hiraoka’s forgiveness and offers to accept
whatever punishment he wishes to inflict. Humiliated and enraged, Hira-
oka asks what punishment could possibly restore his ruined honor and
demands to know why Daisuke had pledged to help him win Michiyo and
had even wept with joy for him. “Hiraoka,” Daisuke replies imploringly.
“I loved Michiyo before you did. I wasn’t then who I am now. When I
heard your story, I felt that helping you fulfill your desire, even if it meant
sacrificing my own future, was my duty as a true friend. That was wrong
of me.”4 Daisuke’s explanation is thematically important. His “chivalry”
proves to be a misapprenhension. At the time, he cherished the illusion
that he was behaving selflessly, but now he understands that he wanted
Michiyo and, selfishly, still wants her. In Sōseki’s cynical view of things,
this comes as no surprise: torment often has its source in egotism.
Daisuke’s family is enraged at his behavior and promises to disown
him. Daisuke assures himself of his equanimity:

He was confident in his own mind that he had walked the proper path.
And he was satisfied. Only Michiyo would understand his satisfaction.

170   A P air of N ovels

 The others, his father and brother, society, and everyone who belonged
to it were all enemies. They wanted to incinerate them, enfolding them
in fiery flames and scorching them to death.5

But in the concluding lines of the novel, boarding a trolley in search of

work, Daisuke lurches toward madness, perceiving everything he passes
as fiery red—a mailbox, signs, umbrellas, a balloon. He resolves to stay
on the trolley “until his own head is burned to ashes.”6
Daisuke is Sōseki’s first indelibly memorable character since the epon-
ymous hero of Botchan. He represents the Meiji intellectual paralyzed
by the unfamiliar ideas he has absorbed from his obsessive reading of
Western books and his determination to assimilate a foreign approach
to being in the world. Sōseki achieves this by locating him in a historical
context. Like himself, he is only one generation removed from a feudal
world governed by neo-Confucian notions of fealty to one’s lord and
the subordination of individual rights and desires to the well-being of
the group.
Sōseki succeeds in dramatizing the social and moral chasm that
divides Daisuke’s world from his father’s. He defines himself by his West-
ern rationality, whereas his father boasts of his “nerve” as a samurai
warrior who, when he was only eighteen, had the courage to slay a bully
who insulted him. Daisuke recoils as quickly from stories that illustrate
a code of honor he considers simplistic as he would recoil from the smell
of blood. His invalidation of his father’s position is surely intended as a
parody of the Meiji intellectual’s complacency:

He didn’t consider himself indolent. He belonged to a superior race of

people whose time was not despoiled by an occupation. Whenever
his father spoke in this way, he felt sorry for him. His infantile mind
couldn’t register that his son’s meaningful use of time was bearing fruit
in the form of lofty ideas and noble sentiments.7

But despite his rebelliousness, Daisuke has not been entirely emanci-
pated from the values of his forebears. No matter how ardently he argues
that Nature is a more powerful force than social law, he is not immune
from his family’s outrage at his decision to violate a taboo. On the con-
trary, the family’s opprobrium is sufficient to push him toward a nervous
breakdown and worse. Ultimately, Daisuke’s plight consists in being

A P air of N ovels   171

caught between two irreconcilable realities, one founded on feudal val-
ues that are historically grounded and the other foreign and difficult to
assimilate. Daisuke may be seen as representing the Meiji man.
At the same time, he is also an individual rendered with precision.
Consider the opening paragraph of the novel (the Japanese reader would
know that the camellia symbolizes a severed head):

Next to his pillow a single camellia in full bloom had fallen to the tat-
ami. Daisuke was certain he had heard the impact as he lay in bed the
night before. He had suspected that it sounded as loud as it did, like a
rubber ball being thrown from the rafters, because it was late at night
and everything was still. But just to make sure, he had placed his right
hand on top of his heart and had confirmed the regular beating of his
pulse against the space between his ribs before drifting off to sleep.
Half awake, he had gazed for a while at the color of the flower the
size of an infant’s head and then, as if remembering something abruptly,
had placed his hand on his chest and begun again to test the pulsing
of his heart. Recently, he had developed the habit of checking his
pulse in bed. As always, his pulse was regular. He tried imagining the
warm, crimson stream of blood flowing languidly beneath his hand. It
occurred to him that this was life. It occurred to him that he was con-
stricting the flow of life with pressure from his hand. And it struck him
that the throbbing that resembled the hand of a ticking clock was like
a warning bell summoning him to death. If only he could live without
hearing that bell—if the pouch filling with blood inside him wasn’t also
a pouch filling with time—how free of care he could be! How deeply he
could taste of life! Alas—Daisuke shuddered. He was a man so con-
sumed with a desire to live that he couldn’t bear to imagine a tranquil
heart reliably nourished by its river of blood. Sometimes, while still in
bed, he would rest his hand beneath his left breast and wonder what
would happen if someone struck him there with a hammer. His health
was good, but there were times when he held the truth of that in his
consciousness as a stroke of good fortune close to a miracle.8

The character revealed in this sketch, remarkably psychological for its

time, bears a close resemblance to its author: morbidly focused on him-
self, a narcissist and a hypochondriac with a desperate attachment to life
and an equally virulent fear that the miracle of life is insubstantial.

172   A P air of N ovels

 Another dilemma implicit here bears more directly on the theme of
And Then. Daisuke is driven by a compulsion to analyze the fragile mys-
tery of life, to probe and test it with his conscious mind until he feels he
has mastered it by means of reason. His struggle often results in a vari-
ety of mental paralysis that Sōseki considers an occupational hazard of
the Meiji intellectual:

At night he would crawl under the covers and, as he was nodding off,
would exclaim to himself, “Here it is! Here is how I go to sleep!” In that
instant, he would be wide awake again. He repeated the process again
and again, night after night, tortured by his curiosity, and always the
same result until he couldn’t stand it any longer. He longed to escape
the pain, and he knew that he was behaving like a fool. Referring his
clouded consciousness to his lucid consciousness and attempting to
recollect both at the same time was, as [William] James said, tanta-
mount to lighting a candle to investigate the darkness, or halting the
spinning of a top to study its movement. The result would be a lifetime
of sleeplessness.9

Elsewhere, Daisuke reflects that he is no longer capable of crying and

ascribes his emotional dysfunction to the baleful influence of Western
civilization:

In the days when Daisuke was often in Hiraoka’s company, he was a

man who enjoyed crying for the sake of others. But gradually he had
lost the ability to cry. It wasn’t because he considered it modern not to
cry. He would rather have said, on the contrary, that he was modern
because he didn’t cry. He had yet to run across a man locked in fierce
battle for survival, groaning beneath the oppressive burden of West-
ern civilization, who could cry in earnest for another man.10

Most significantly, if Western civilization has deprived him of tears,

the clarity of reason on which he prides himself has made ardor
impossible:

He was certain: Our normal motives and actions weren’t adequately

elevated, genuine, or pure to warrant addressing them with ardor. They
were far lower than that, baser. Those who did attend to such ignoble

A P air of N ovels   173

 motives and actions with ardor were either indiscriminate infantile
thinkers or charlatans who affected ardor to aggrandize themselves.
He was accused of cold dispassion, and while he wouldn’t claim that
his attitude represented an advance in the development of the spe-
cies, it was unmistakably the result of a clearer, more accurate autopsy
of the human being. Since close examination of his own motives and
actions revealed them in the main to be cunning or insincere or down-
right sham, he was unable to address them with ardor.11

This is interesting for the light it shines on the cynicism about human-
kind that was deeply rooted in Sōseki himself. It also calls into question
the catastrophic resolution that ends And Then. In view of Daisuke’s well-
documented commitment to reason and its power over him, the reader
must wonder how it is that he succumbs to love, becoming a natural
instead of a social man and allowing his heart to dictate to his head. Or
are we to accept this but understand that the struggle to silence the voice
of reason in the face of passion, more than the guilt of violating a taboo,
has pushed him toward what appears to be madness?12
The Gate, a vivid picture of a married life becalmed, reminds me of
Beethoven’s later string quartets: it is a masterpiece of restraint and
spareness, its harmonies as open as the distance between the stars.
Sōsuke and his wife, O-Yone, live in a house deeply shadowed by an
overhanging cliff that blocks the sun. Their physical circumstances
reflect their emotional life together. Like creatures “denied the sun who
cling together for warmth in the unbearable cold,” they live in isolation
from the rest of the world, relying on each other for whatever comfort is
available and confirming their destiny in their mutual dependence.
Sōsuke and O-Yone transgressed six years before the novel begins,
betraying the man who was Sōsuke’s friend and O-Yone’s lover. Their
lives in the present are tyrannized by their guilt and by a fatalistic resig-
nation to their suffering:

They spoke little about the past. At times, it appeared they had agreed
to avoid it. Occasionally, as if attempting to console her husband,
O-Yone would say, “Something good is bound to happen. Bad things
don’t keep happening forever!” Sōsuke knew that his wife’s words were
offered in good faith, but he couldn’t help feeling that the destiny that
had made a plaything of him had borrowed her voice to deliver a

174   A P air of N ovels

 vicious rebuke. At such times, he smiled bitterly and said nothing. If
his wife continued blithely, he would blurt out: “But we’re people who
have no right to expect good things!” That would silence her. And
before they knew it, facing each other in silence, they had fallen back
into the pit that was the past they had created themselves.13

The Gate is a structural tour de force: for two-thirds of the novel, the
reader is kept in the dark about what actually has happened. We are
told only that Sōsuke had to drop out of Kyoto University in his second
year and that he and O-Yone subsequently moved out of Kyoto to Hiro-
shima and from there to Fukuoka on the island of Kyushu, a backward
and isolated place in 1908, where they spent two difficult years in exile
before finally moving back to Tokyo. There is an abundance of cryptic
allusions like this, including repeated references to “karmic retribution”
that serve only to deepen the enigma. The placid surface of the narra-
tive is also disturbed now and again by ripples of distress that suggest
a deeper turbulence. An example is an apparently harmless, certainly
innocent, remark by Sōsuke, intended to account for the cheery atmo-
sphere in the home of their landlord, Sakai, above them at the top of the
hill: “It’s not just money. It’s because they have so many children. Chil-
dren generally brighten up even a poor household.” The remark falls on
O-Yone like a blow, but she says nothing until later that night when she
opens the kind of painful conversation the couple is careful to avoid
when possible.

“You said before that life is sad without children—”

“I wasn’t speaking about us,” Sōsuke protests.
“But you’re always thinking how lonely it is for us, so it’s natural
you’d say something like that—”
“I’m not saying it isn’t lonely,” Sōsuke ventures and, faltering, offers
unpersuasive reassurance, “Anyway, it’s what it is—don’t worry about
it.” But O-Yone isn’t reassured: “I feel so badly for you!”14

This forlorn exchange opens a small window on the past. We learn

that O-Yone has been pregnant three times and has lost all three chil-
dren. She is certain that their deaths were punishment for her action in
the past, still undisclosed, and when she goes to see a fortune-teller,
he confirms her fear: “You are aware that you have done something

A P air of N ovels   175

unpardonable to another person. You are paying for your sin and your
children will not survive.”15
The story chronicled on the surface is about money. Sōsuke has been
cheated by his uncle out of a portion of his inheritance. Now his aunt
informs him that she can no longer afford to finance his younger broth-
er’s education because her own son, an unsuccessful businessman, is in
need of financial support. This precipitates a domestic crisis that is nei-
ther remarkable nor dramatic. The drama that charges the novel is sup-
plied by the tension between the ennui at its quotidian surface and the
suppressed passion that disrupted the past. Sōseki began experiment-
ing with this narrative strategy in And Then and returned to it in Kokoro
(1914) and, most effectively, in his final novel, Light and Dark (1916). His
approach is strikingly different from, say, Turgenev’s: the Russian realist
preferred to destabilize his story in the present, often by introducing a
disruptive female character, as in First Love and Fathers and Sons.
Sōseki manages to forestall lifting the curtain on the mystery until
the opening paragraphs of chapter 14:

Sōsuke and O-Yone were unquestionably an intimate couple. In the

six long years since they had come together, not half a day had passed
between them unpleasantly. Not once had their faces reddened with
the heat of an argument. They bought their cloth from the draper and
wore it, their rice from the rice store and ate it. But other than this,
these were people who depended hardly at all on society in general.
Except as a provider of their daily needs, they scarcely acknowledged
its existence. Their only absolute necessity was each other, and in each
other they found an abundance of what they required. In their hearts
and minds, the city might as well have been the mountains. . . .
In lieu of seeking diverse contact with the world for six years, they
had devoted that time to sounding the depths of each other’s hearts.
In time, their lives had penetrated to the very bottom of each other’s
being. In the eyes of the world, they were two people as before. But
to each other, they had become a single organism that was morally
indivisible. . . .
As they proceeded with their lives, linking one more than ordinar-
ily intimate day to the next, their eyes on each other without even
noticing it, there were times when they became acutely aware of their
own longing for intimacy. At such times they couldn’t help recalling,

176   A P air of N ovels

 looking back across the long years of intimate life together, the price
they had paid for their bold decision to get married. Trembling, they
knelt before the terrific revenge that nature had placed in their way.
At the same time, they made sure to light a stick of incense to the god
of love in thanks for the happiness they had achieved, thanks to that
revenge. They were being whipped along on their way to death. But
they understood that the tip of the whip was coated with honey.16

Is Sōseki being ironic, mocking the couple’s attempt to mitigate their

pain? Or does he want us to accept that Sōsuke and O-Yone have achieved
a mutual understanding and even something akin to happiness in their
isolation? Before long, he will arrive at the certainty that two hearts beat-
ing as one is impossible. The Gate suggests that he is still able to believe
that genuine intimacy, if not love, can be achieved.
Details of their transgression remain undisclosed until, as undramat-
ically as a stream making its way around a bend, Sōseki wends his way
into the past by introducing Yasui, a close friend of Sōsuke’s during their
first year at Kyoto University. Visiting his friend after summer vacation,
Sōsuke catches sight of a girl wearing a yukata moving about at the rear
of the house, but she isn’t mentioned and doesn’t appear. The following
week, Yasui introduces her as his “younger sister.”17 Sōsuke is left alone
with her and they speak briefly; the feeling created is that the wheel of
destiny has begun to turn:

Sōsuke still remembered the words they had exchanged in that three
or four minutes. They were nothing more than the simple words an
ordinary man exchanges with an ordinary woman just to be sociable.
They might have been described as shallow and bland as water. He
couldn’t begin to count how many times until now he had chanced on
some occasion to engage in essentially the same conversation with a
stranger on the roadside.
As he recalled that brief conversation, he confirmed that each line
was so plain it was virtually colorless. And it struck him again as
strange that their future together should have been painted fiery red
by those transparent words. With the passage of time, that bright
red had lost its vividness. The flames that had scorched them both
had faded as their lives descended into darkness. Turning to the past
and observing the sequence of events backward, Sōsuke perceived

A P air of N ovels   177

 the degree to which that innocuous conversation had darkened their
history, and he was frightened by the power of destiny to transform
an ordinary moment into something terrible.

The passage continues with Sōsuke’s retained memory of the physi-

cal scene rendered in stop-time, one frame following another:

He remembered as they paused together in front of the entrance how

the light had cast only the upper half of their shadows against the earth
wall. He remembered that only the irregular shape of O-Yone’s para-
sol and not her head had been projected on the wall and how the sun,
no longer overhead in the early autumn sky, had burned down on
them. Her parasol still open, O-Yone had moved into the shade of a
willow tree. Sōsuke remembered taking a step back and comparing
the color of the purple parasol edged in white and the not entirely
faded green of the willow leaves.
Thinking back now, it was all clear. So there was nothing odd about
it. Together they waited for Yasui to emerge from the shadow of the
wall and set off for the town. The men walked side by side. Shuffling
along in her zori, O-Yone dropped behind. The friends did most of the
talking, but their conversation was brief. Sōsuke left them on the road
and returned to his house.18

Sōseki’s account of the transgression when it inevitably occurs months

later is detached, more prosaic than lyrical, an emotional confit. He had
no trouble with scenes like those between Daisuke and Michiyo in which
passion was present but under control. But unmastered moments like this
one repelled him just as they did Henry James, and he tended to dis-
place them into the past and, as here, to strip away their physicality:

Whenever he recalled those days, he imagined it would have been less

painful if nature’s progress had been halted and they had been abruptly
turned into stone. It began toward the end of winter as spring awak-
ened and was complete by the time the scattered cherry blossoms were
replaced by green buds. From beginning to end, it was a battle for life
and death. The pain was like warming green bamboo and pressing
the oil from it. A raging wind took them by surprise and blew them
down. By the time they picked themselves up, they were covered in

178   A P air of N ovels

 sand. They recognized that they had fallen, but they didn’t know when.
The world accused them of sinning, but before they suffered the pangs
of conscience, they doubted their sanity. Before they could feel morally
ashamed of themselves, they were perplexed by their irrationality. . . . ​
Shackled together by an incorporeal chain, hand in hand, they dis-
covered they had to shuffle forward together in step for ever after.
They abandoned their parents. They abandoned their relatives. They
abandoned their friends. In the largest sense, they abandoned society
in general.19

Returning to the present, Sōseki may have had trouble knowing how
to finish his novel. Sōsuke abruptly resolves to seek self-knowledge
through Zen practice and is accepted for a ten-day stay at the same tem-
ple in Kamakura where Sōseki had gone to meditate in 1895. The experi-
ment fails just as it had in real life. The episode seems designed expressly
to lead to the concluding lines: “He was not someone who would pass
through the gate, nor would that be the end of it. He was the unfortunate
soul who must stop in his tracks beneath the gate and wait for the end of
day.”20
The “Zen” installments reduce to a digression that feels tacked on
and lead to a consideration of the novel’s title and how it was chosen. In
a letter dated March 4, 1910, to Terada Torahiko in Berlin, Sōseki wrote,
“I’ve begun a new novel. It began appearing on March 1 in both Tokyo
and Osaka. The title is The Gate. Morita and Komiya made it up for me,
and now I’m in trouble because it has nothing remotely to do with a
“gate.”21 According to Morita, the day before the novel was due to be
announced in the paper, Sōseki asked him to write something and, while
he was at it, to come up with a title. Astonished and reluctant to bear
sole responsibility, Morita enlisted Komiya’s help. Opening Thus Spake
Zarathustra to a random page, Komiya happened on the word “gate”:22
“ ‘How about this?’ he asked Morita. “Yes, ‘gate’ works; it can be used to
symbolize anything.’ ”23 Sōseki learned the title of his new novel only
when it appeared in the paper the following morning, or so the story
goes.
Although Sōseki was often careless about his titles, this seems extreme,
and it is tempting to dismiss it as apocryphal. But there is the evidence
of Sōseki’s letter and Morita’s recollection. It seems possible that Sōseki
had not included the Zen sequence in his plans for the book and created

A P air of N ovels   179

it only to justify the title chosen by his protégés. That might account for
its tenuous connection to the work overall.
In brief moments in The Gate, the light of day shines through the clouds
that darken the sky above the protagonists. But in the final exchange
between them, lines that Sōseki recapitulates at the end of his penulti-
mate novel, Grass on the Wayside, he appears to close the door on the
possibility of recovery: “Gazing through the glass panes in the door at
the gentle sunlight, O-Yone exclaimed, her face brightening, ‘Spring is
here again at last!’ ‘Yes,’ Sōsuke replied, ‘but it will be winter again soon
enough.’ Lowering his head, he resumed clipping his nails.”24

180   A P air of N ovels

 +
13

Crisis at Shuzenji

Sōseki’s stomach tormented him as he worked on The Gate. Normally

reticent about his health, he complained to Suzuki Miekichi in a letter
dated March 29, 1910:

You say you are sad. All of us are sad for one reason or another. Read-
ing The Fledgling’s Nest each day in the paper, I can sense that you are
having a hard time with it, but once you have started something, you
are obliged to finish it as beautifully as you can, and I hope you will do
so. Not that I don’t realize how exceedingly difficult it is to work on a
novel every day while holding down a teaching job. My stomach is act-
ing up horribly; when I allow myself to write as much as I like, I exhaust
myself, so I am making my peace with just one installment a day.1

A second letter written on May 16 to another disciple suggests that

he was feeling worse:

I, too, am working hard on utai. When you are in Tokyo this summer,
let’s practice together.
I am very pleased that you are enjoying The Gate. Recently, my
health has been bad, and writing is a painful chore. I’d like to finish
quickly and take a break. This time I’m considering checking into a
stomach clinic and getting some serious treatment. They say that when
you reach forty, your vitality ebbs.2

On June 6, shortly after finishing The Gate, Sōseki went in for an exam-
ination at the Nagayo Gastroenterology Clinic.3 Test results on June 9
revealed blood in his stool and indicated “the likelihood of stomach
ulcers.” After a third visit on June 13, he was told to stay indoors and to

   181
refrain from utai. That day he noted in his diary that he had disobeyed
the doctor’s orders: “At home I sat on the couch and began to read, and
when I felt sleepy I recited Fuji-daiko. After supper I practiced Kagetsu.
If this makes me worse, it will be my own fault.”4
On June 18, he was admitted to the clinic and remained there for six
weeks, until July 31. For the duration of his stay, his diet for lunch was
milk, one soft-boiled egg, sashimi, and rice. Dinner was lighter: milk, one
egg, and chawan-mushi, a steamed custard prepared for him without the
mushrooms and other vegetables usually included. For two weeks begin-
ning on July 1, slices of devil’s tongue root (konnyaku), a fleshy tuber the
consistency of jellyfish, were boiled and applied to his stomach piping
hot. This was agony: “On the very first day, my stomach blistered and
was a wretched thing to behold. This caused me more pain than my ill-
ness ever has.”5

On the last day, [he noted,] when the nurse came to change the dress-
ing, she was impressed by the deep burn. Later, when Dr. Sugimoto
came on his rounds, he informed me the burns would be a memento.
If this charred skin memorializes the healing of my chronic stomach
ills, it will be a joyous memorial.6

This proved to be wishful thinking.

Visitors stopped in frequently from the nearby Asahi offices. Naka-
mura Zekō was often there, and Kyōko came every day. Morita and
Komiya showed up regularly, often on business having to do with the
“cultural column” that Sōseki had been editing in the Asahi since Janu-
ary 1909.
The July 1910 issue of the literary monthly Shinchō featured a nine-
teen-page roundtable entitled “On Natsume Sōseki.” The appearance of
a Sōseki feature in one of the country’s major literary monthlies was evi-
dence of his popularity among readers, not to mention his status inside
the literary community, with which he had little to do. Eight writers and
critics were asked to consider the answers to ten questions.
“All agree that he is the greatest stylist on the scene,” one wrote, “his
prose improves with each and every work. The writing in his recent The
Gate has richly evolved.”7 “It is exceedingly rare for a university profes-
sor to write this well,” said another. Regarding his “sociability,” respon-
dents used words like “eccentric,” “tactful, and “proper.” “He doesn’t

182   C risis at S huzenji

socialize much,” wrote Mr. X, “but he can be diplomatic and is skilled
at accommodating himself to others. He is wonderful at a roundtable.
He rarely pays visits but receives many visitors. All want something from
him; very few are real friends.”8 The haiku poet and children’s book
author Satō Kōraku provided the warmest and most vivid picture:

He is very tactful and speaks quietly. His words are full of flavor, and
he pronounces them slowly, purposefully, appearing to savor each of
his clever remarks the way a man who loves his saké moistens his lips
at the saké cup. . . . He certainly isn’t easygoing, but he communicates
warmth to whomever he addresses as though he were speaking with
a friend. He listens to everything with great interest, however nonsen-
sical it may be. If I visit him, he will return the visit, and if I write, he
will unfailingly reply—he is punctilious in his socializing, and yet his
conversation is anything but prim or correct but rather bursting with
wit and humor, filled with Edo verve.9

Assessing Sōseki as a family man, the literature scholar and transla-

tor Baba Kochō provided a picture that was credible if a bit shocking:

Today’s twenty- to-thirty-year-olds tend to take good care of their

wives, but older men like us are quite the opposite. I cannot picture
Sōseki being caught in an emotional entanglement with his wife. Nor
do I suppose that he is madly in love with his children. This is how it
is with me, so perhaps I am projecting. I see Sōseki as a reliable and
understanding lord of his manor. He doesn’t seem to be, however, the
sort of man who expresses deep love for the others in his family.10

Sōseki’s condition improved. Beginning on July 19, he was allowed to

venture outside; he had a haircut and took long walks to Yūrakuchō, the
Ginza, and Hibiya Park. He was discharged on July 31. At home, he wrote
letters and postcards for several days, thanking people who had visited
him at the clinic and informing them of his intention to spend a month
convalescing at Shuzenji, a hot springs resort in the mountains on the
Izu peninsula. Matsune had suggested this: he was due to spend time
there in attendance on Prince Kitashirakawa, and he proposed that
Sōseki join him at the annex to the Kikuya Inn. According to Kyōko,
he was looking forward to composing haiku with Matsune while he

C risis at S huzenji   183

recovered. The day before he left, he returned to the clinic for a checkup
and received permission to travel.
Sōseki took a train on August 6. Within a day of arriving in a pour-
ing rain that continued for days, he became sick again. He noted in his
diary on August 7:

My stomach is off. It’s not exactly swollen, it doesn’t exactly hurt and
I’m not exactly suffering from heartburn, but I’m somehow conscious
of all that. . . . Evening. In the next room, someone is chanting in the
Kanze style. Next door, a shamisen is being played. I’m sitting here
alone reading William James’s A Pluralistic Universe. I don’t quite get
it. I go to bed at nine. At ten, Matsune comes in to say that His High-
ness has just now retired. Apparently, he has read Cat.11

The next day Sōseki was worse:

Rain. I rise at five and go to the bathroom. Nothing. I go down to the

baths. When I get out, my stomach cramps horribly. Pain unbearable.
In the bath again and cramps again. I barely manage one bowl of
rice. Matsune informs me that His Highness would enjoy a conversa-
tion, but I decline. I haven’t brought proper clothing; besides, speak-
ing in this voice of mine would be painful for me and for the listener.
Medicine just after eight. Nō next door and bunraku across the hall
[reciting texts from the puppet theater]. Back from the bath, I take
medicine again and am seized with another spasm. It seems the hot
baths are not good for me.
Awaken from a dream in the middle of the night. Pain and pres-
sure in my chest; hard to bear.
The clinic is far better for me than this hot springs therapy. I had
no pain there; everything was handled methodically, and that felt
good. My bowels were regular.12

The rain continued. Eastern Japan, including Tokyo, flooded, bridges

came down, houses collapsed. Meanwhile, Sōseki got sicker. On August
12, he noted:

I spend the days on the border between life and death as though in a
dream. I keep myself alive with ice and milk . . . half the night it feels

184   C risis at S huzenji

 as though I’m surviving one breath at a time between the spasms in
my stomach, a terrible feeling. No one knows. Even if they did, there
is nothing they could do about it. Sweat runs off my face and down
my back.13

On August 17, he vomited a quantity of thick liquid “darkened as

though a bear’s liver had been dissolved in water” and was informed by
the local doctor attending him that it was blood. Alarmed, Matsune
called the Nagayo clinic and cabled Kyōko (there still was no telephone
in the house). The clinic informed the Asahi; the editor in chief arranged
at once to send a doctor from the clinic to Shuzenji, along with a Sōseki
follower from the Kumamoto days, Sakamoto Settchō, representing the
paper.
Settchō and Dr. Morinari Rinzō arrived in Shuzenji on August 18
expecting the worst, but when Morinari examined Sōseki, he concluded
that his condition was not critical. Kyōko arrived the following day, hav-
ing left the children with her mother in Yokohama. That night, Sōseki
vomited blood twice more but appeared to be feeling better. Seeing that
his patient appeared stable, Dr. Morinari announced that he must return
to Tokyo to take care of pressing business at the clinic. He did not explain
that the director, Dr. Nagayo, was seriously ill himself. Unaware of this,
Kyōko objected to Morinari’s leaving. If the account in her memoir is reli-
able, she was remarkably outspoken, especially as the patient’s wife
(patients and their families were expected to defer to the doctor):

That was simply unacceptable! Sōseki made sure to visit the clinic
before his departure and had been told he was well enough to make
the journey. Abandoning the patient after what I think must have been
a misdiagnosis—that was out of the question, and I said so in strong
words! Dr. Morinari didn’t know what to say, and then he cabled
Director Nagayo and was told that he should stay with the patient until
he had recovered completely and that the assistant director, Dr. Sugi-
moto, would be coming to examine Sōseki himself.14

Sugimoto arrived late in the afternoon of August 24. Sōseki was hav-
ing a bad day, weak and “pale as a sheet of paper.” But Sugimoto found
his condition “cause for optimism.” Sakamoto Settchō, overjoyed, cabled
the Asahi, “The result of Dr. Sugimoto’s examination is reassuring!” But

C risis at S huzenji   185

just two hours later, at 8:30 in the evening, Sōseki vomited a basin full of
blood, somewhere between 17 and 27 ounces, depending on the account,
and lapsed into unconsciousness. Drs. Sugimoto and Morinari had left his
bedside and were having dinner in their room across a courtyard. Kyōko,
alone in the room with him, recalled what happened:

He looked so terrible I asked him how he was feeling, and he snapped

at me, “Get away from here!” and then he made a gagging sound
I’d never heard before. I called to the maid to fetch the doctors back,
and when I turned around, he gagged again. It was an eerie sound and
the look on his face was awful and his eyes rolled up and blood
began dripping from his nose. Then he grabbed hold of me and vom-
ited a huge quantity of blood; my kimono was dyed crimson from my
neck down to my waist.15

When the two doctors rushed into the room, they found Sōseki uncon-
scious and were unable to detect a pulse. Sugimoto called for camphor
and administered as many as sixteen injections (the number he remem-
bered), followed by additional shots of saline solution. Multiple accounts
of people in the room agree that Sōseki remained unconscious for thirty
minutes. In the official version of the episode, memorialized forever after
as the “Shuzenji catastrophe,” his heart had stopped for the entire time.
Since he cannot have survived thirty minutes of cardiac arrest, his pulse
must have remained too faint to detect. At the time, neither of the doc-
tors was optimistic about Sōseki’s chances of living through the night.
The following morning before he returned to Tokyo, Dr. Sugimoto advised
Kyōko that her husband was still in danger and would be unlikely to
survive another hemorrhage.
A month passed before Sōseki learned from Kyōko the details of what
had befallen him. Until then, he was under the impression that he remem-
bered clearly everything that had happened from the moment he vom-
ited blood until the following morning:

Though I was certain I was fully and lucidly conscious while the doc-
tors were injecting me, the truth is, I had been dead for all of thirty long
minutes. . . . I am told that when my wife clung to me as I vomited, the
gushing blood had soaked her yukata. I am told that Settchō said to

186   C risis at S huzenji

 her with a quavering voice, “Missus, you must bear up!” I am told his
hands were shaking so badly he could scarcely write the cable he sent
to the paper. I am told the doctors gave me one injection after the
other. . . . I remember turning on my right side, in violation of the doc-
tor’s order to remain flat on my back, and then I remember looking
down into a basin filled with bright blood. I would have sworn that
not one second of time had intervened between those two moments
of consciousness. I cannot convey my astonishment when my wife
informed me that I had been dead for thirty minutes in the interim. . . . ​
I wasn’t even conscious that I had awakened. I didn’t feel that I
emerged from shadow into sunlight. Needless to say, it never occurred
to me that I had traversed that numinous domain one tries to evoke by
marshaling the phrases describing the mystery of human life, the faint
beating of wings, the echo of something retreating into the distance,
the fragrance of a fugitive dream, the shadow of an old memory, and
so on. I was aware only of pressure on my chest and trying to turn my
head to the right on my pillow and, in that instant, apprehending the
red blood in the basin. The thirty minutes of death that intervened
might as well not have existed for me, not as time, not as space, not as
the memory of an experience. As I listened to my wife’s account, I had
to wonder whether death could be such a fleeting thing.16

At the darkest moment, Sakamoto Settchō asked Kyōko for a list of

names to whom he should cable the news that, as they all thought, Sōseki
was dying. Kyōko recalled that she had given him thirty or so names, but
Morita Sōhei later reckoned, possibly with his typical hyperbole, that
Settchō had rushed to the telegram office with “at least one hundred”
names. In any event, the result was that busloads of well-wishers bearing
gifts of cake and tea began arriving at the Kikuya Inn the next morning,
clamoring for an audience or at least a look at the patient, and occupy-
ing every room in the inn. The press of visitors continued unabated for
the duration of Sōseki’s forty-eight-day stay at Shuzenji. The first wave
included immediate family: Kyōko’s younger sister and her husband and
three children from Osaka, Ikebe Sanzan and a contingent of Asahi exec-
utives, Sōseki’s editor from Shunyōdō, and followers from his inner circle,
Morita, and, a few days later, Suzuki Miekichi, Suga Torao, and Komiya,
who traveled from Fukuoka in Kyushu, postponing his wedding.

C risis at S huzenji   187

 Strangers also continued to come and go, having read the message
that Settchō cabled to the Asahi: “Sōseki suffers massive hemorrhage.
Condition critical.” Settchō had been wiring the paper daily with news
of Sōseki’s condition (and keeping a “Shuzenji diary”), and all his terse
updates had been published, migrating from page 3 to page 1. In the
Asahi’s judgment, Sōseki’s illness was a matter of national interest, and
the paper was positioned to maintain a monopoly on access to the news.
(This became pertinent to the subsequent controversy about the expenses
related to Sōseki’s illness that his friend Ikebe had authorized the paper
to cover.) In his memoir, Morita Sōhei described a “noisy throng” of
people that continued to “pour out of every train that arrived” and sighed,
“Fame certainly came with its own burdens. . . . Sensei was no longer just
our sensei, he belonged to the Asahi now, and to the world.”17
Sōseki remained in bed at the Kikuya Inn for just over six weeks. On
October 5, when a stool sample sent to Tokyo tested negative for blood,
he was deemed strong enough to return to the clinic. On October 11, he
was lowered from the second floor of the inn on a sled covered in a
white cloth—“my first funeral”—and loaded onto a wagon that took him to
the train station. Guests at the inn lined up to watch him leave. Matsune
boarded the train at Shinagawa, one stop before Shinbashi where a
crowd had gathered to see Sōseki being taken off on a stretcher (his
arrival time had been posted in the Asahi). There is something plaintive
about Sōseki’s diary entry about arriving at the clinic:

This feels like home. It is quieter than Shuzenji. I’m told they have
posted a notice, “Visitors forbidden.” Sugimoto had mentioned that
the walls would be repainted and the tatami mats replaced with new
ones, and he was true to his word. I am calm as I go to bed. There is
little trolley noise from the street.18

The following morning, Kyōko disclosed what had been kept from him,
that Dr. Nagayo had died on September 5. “[Ill as he was], the director
had cabled Morinari and instructed him to remain in Shuzenji until I
was well. I am still alive, and the man who ordered the treatment for me
is already dead. Life is imponderable.”19
Returning to Tokyo from the bustle of an inn, where he had not been
protected from endless visitors, Sōseki craved seclusion. He wrote on
October 31,

188   C risis at S huzenji

 What pleases me now, more than the sound of people, are the voices
of beasts. I prefer the color of the sky to a woman’s face. I prefer flow-
ers to visitors, quiet reverie to chatting. More than entertainment, I
enjoy reading. What I crave is repose. For the business of life, I have
no heart.20

Sōseki passed the time gazing at the vases of white chrysanthemums

that the clinic’s gardener brought to his room, practicing calligraphy, and
reading the Chinese classical texts he asked Matsune to send him,21 labo-
riously copying out “sutra-like” sentences, “just as [he] had copied out
Ogyū Sorai as a young man,” and marveling that he had the strength to
do it.22
But “the business of life” would not leave him alone. He had gradu-
ally become aware of a dispute inside the newspaper about his medical
expenses. By the time Sōseki returned to the Nagayo clinic, the Asahi had
expended a considerable sum of money on his lengthy stay in Shuzenji.
His powerful advocate, Ikebe Sanzan, a man with ethical standards he
upheld no less punctiliously than did Sōseki himself, had justified the
expenditure as money well spent on securing a monopoly on journalistic
coverage, first-page material, of his friend’s illness, and he was insisting
that the Asahi should not expect to be reimbursed. Others at the paper
disagreed. As the official Asahi shinbun history reported tactfully, “Not-
withstanding the solicitude of the editor in chief, inasmuch as the illness
was so protracted, objections were raised inside the paper about having
covered all medical expenses.”23
During his stay at Shuzenji, Sōseki had been insulated against any
knowledge of finances, but it is easy to imagine his anger on learning
about the talk of impropriety. It is likely that he heard about the dissen-
sion inside the paper directly from Ikebe himself, during his visit to the
clinic on October 20: “Ikebe came yesterday. Said I should leave the issue
about Asahi money to him. I agree. In fact, shortly after I returned, I
had instructed my wife to see about resolving our debt to the paper.”24
In a letter to Kyōko dated October 31, among the harshest of the thirty-
five letters he sent her during their marriage, he accuses her of failing to
deal with repayment effectively:

Your response yesterday to the matter of paying the doctors the fees
they are owed was entirely inadequate and caused me a sleepless

C risis at S huzenji   189

 night. Yes, you are busy; Sakamoto is busy; Ikebe is busy; and Shibu-
kawa is ill in bed.25 I realize that makes it hard for things to proceed
as I wish them to. Even so, now that I understand what has happened,
I won’t rest easily until everyone is promptly satisfied, the doctors, the
patient, and everyone else involved. The next time we speak of this, I’d
like to think you will be prepared to have something relevant to say.

The letter continues in the querulous tone that made Sōseki a diffi-
cult person to be around:

The best medicine for me just now is physical rest and peace of mind.
Recuperation isn’t simply a matter of taking medicine and staying in
bed. Listening to disagreeable things and feeling stymied and being
forced into unpleasant situations all are far worse for me than sneak-
ing a piece of cake. As I said last night, if my expenses until now are
settled conclusively, if there is a minimum of traffic in and out of my
room, if I am able to spend my time from morning till night in peace
and quiet (that is, doing just as I please by myself), and if, in that way,
my health is restored and my appetite returns, I shall be, well, call it
content.

• Be sure you remember to return the books to Shibukawa.

• Be sure you remember to ask Nogami what he wants to do with
the texts for utai.

Life is all about troublesome matters. I venture out a step and immedi-
ately want to draw back. But since I have no money, until I get well I
have no choice but to hurl myself into the fray, wearing my nerves
down and inflaming my stomach. Being sick is the only respite avail-
able. Nothing is more odious to me than having to fume and fret dur-
ing my sickness. This is a welcome, a precious, illness. Please allow me
to be ill in peace.
Respectfully, Kinnosuke
To the esteemed Kyōko (Kyōko-dono)26

In a diary entry on November 26, after noting that he had eaten his
first vegetables and felt reborn, Sōseki recorded another brief visit with
Ikebe: “He says he went to the CEO and was told the funds had been

190   C risis at S huzenji

entrusted to him and he should do with them as he saw fit. I accepted
this and he went on his way.”27
Accepting aid from the Asahi left Sōseki feeling indebted and deter-
mined to make good on his contract. Knowing that he was too weak to
undertake a novel, he began a memoir in which he tried to convey phil-
osophically and aesthetically the effect of his near-death experience.
In view of its lyric beauty, the title Sōseki chose was misleadingly
­prosaic: “Recollecting and Other Matters.”28 One hundred pages long, it
appeared shortly before he was discharged, in the cultural column that
Morita was overseeing, in thirty-three intermittent installments between
October 29 and February 20, 1911. (On April 13, he added a postscript
in which he described spending New Year’s Day in a hospital for the
first time in his life.) Ikebe, supposing that Sōseki was not up to the
effort, disapproved. When Sōseki told him that his doctor had no objec-
tion, Ikebe replied, “A doctor’s permission is one thing, but you have no
business doing this without your friends’ permission as well.”29 But Ikebe
relented when he was advised by a doctor friend a few days later that
boredom was known to increase stomach acid.
“Recollecting” is an account, partly recalled and partly reconstructed
from what Sōseki had been told about his experience at Shuzenji, with
excursions into the more distant past, such as the death of his elder
brothers, and some contemporary chronicling of his days of convales-
cence back at the Nagayo clinic. Throughout, he returns to his determi-
nation to retain the tranquillity that he viewed as a gift of his illness. He
worried that the onslaught of life in the mundane world he had reen-
tered was effacing that fragile sensation, leaving only a dreamlike mem-
ory: “Returning to Tokyo having just managed to survive,” he wrote, “I
am already on my way to losing the however feeble sense of peaceful-
ness my illness had instilled in me.”30
The memoir is enriched by poetry: eighteen haiku and sixteen classi-
cal Chinese poems (kanshi). The poetry figures importantly in Sōseki’s
effort to recapture the state of mind he entered while deathly ill. But this
was not simply a matter of reclaiming; it amounted as well to a quest,
via memory, for the truth of his experience in the past and, beyond that,
for the essence of himself. In that sense, his effort recalls a process that his
contemporary, Marcel Proust, described as “involuntary” or “unbidden”
memory, the writer’s window on “true impressions.” Sōseki is nowhere
explicit about this, but in a meandering meditation on the importance

C risis at S huzenji   191

of the poetry to him and how it was created, he approaches the same
notion:

A sick man feels separated from the real world. And others observe
him with a forgiving eye, as though he had stepped down from society.
He is relieved to feel that he needn’t work a full day, and others are
sorry for him and don’t expect it. The space created in this way is
filled by a serene springtime one could never hope for in health. This
peacefulness is contained in my haiku and Chinese verse. Since I am
not concerned with their merit as poetry but choose to view them as
a memento of my tranquillity, they are inexpressibly precious to
me. The poems I wrote during my illness were neither antidotes to
boredom nor enforced by idleness. They welled up in me effortlessly,
many-colored robes descended from heaven, at a time when my spirit
had escaped the pressures of real life and I had regained my inherent
freedom. . . . The verses I include here are not intended to show read-
ers the kind of poet I am . . . but rather to convey at a single glance the
moods I lived with at the time:

Aki no e ni expanse of bay

uchikomu kui no beneath the autumn sky
hibiki ka na a mallet thwocks

This verse came to me suddenly just ten days or so after I had

returned to life. The pellucid autumn sky, the broad bay, the echo of
the mallet in the distance, I can still recall vividly the mood, somehow
appropriate to components like these, that visited me on and off in
my scarcely conscious state at the time. . . . 31
In bed at the inn in Shuzenji, I cherished a sensibility, a certain
refinement virtually impossible to express in a Western language:

[In Chinese] Man of refinement yet to die;

In illness dwells pure leisure.
In the mountains the livelong day,
He gazes mornings at emerald hills.

Why did I struggle so with rules of tone and prosody that I barely
remember, or go to such lengths to achieve effects that only a Chinese

192   C risis at S huzenji

 reader would appreciate? I can only say that the essence and style of
Chinese poetry have passed down to us in Japanese from the days
when the early emperors ruled our land and are not easily removed
from the minds of Japanese my age and older. When I feel cornered
by the pressures of everyday life, I cannot even compose the very much
simpler haiku, not to mention troublesome Chinese verse. But at times
like this, when I observe the real world at a distance and there are no
snarls in my spirit, haiku well up naturally and Chinese poems come
to me in a variety of forms depending on what interests me. Looking
back at such a time, I realize it was the happiest season of my life.32

A view commonly encountered in Sōseki studies is that the “Shuzenji

catastrophe” turned him into a different writer. Critics attempting to
define the change tend to refer portentously to a Chinese phrase of four
characters—sokuten kyoshi (則天去私)—that Sōseki mentions for the first
time in remarks to disciples at the final meetings of the Thursday salon
in 1916 and that he brushed on a scroll as an example of his calligra-
phy.33 Although there is no record that he ever defined precisely what he
meant by the phrase, it is easily construed: sokuten, “accord with heaven”
(nature, natural law), and kyoshi, “depart the self.” If indeed that is what
Sōseki intended, it can hardly be considered new, since the pain of ego-
ism and the loneliness that results is a vintage Sōseki theme in works as
early as Grass for a Pillow (1905). To be sure, “Recollecting” includes dis-
quisitions on the boundary between life and death that may have been
inspired by his near-death experience at Shuzenji, and his reading dur-
ing this period, including William James, suggests that he was thinking
about metaphysics. But Sōseki’s predilection for philosophy was always
evident, and while several of the five novels he would still write before
he died are very much meditations on the meaning of life as much as
they are dramas, they convey less a sense of discontinuity or new direc-
tion than of evolution. In fact, the change in Sōseki’s fiction after Shuzenji
is that it became even more what we might call “novelistic.”
That Sōseki experienced a possibly unfamiliar sense of gratitude is
beyond question:

Lying on my back and staring at the ceiling, it occurred to me that

everyone in this world was kinder than I. A warm wind abruptly rose
and caressed a world that until now had appeared to me as merely a

C risis at S huzenji   193

 difficult place in which to survive. I was entirely unprepared for the
possibility that the busy world would expend so much care and time
and kindness on a man over forty, a man about to be deselected by
nature, a man without a distinguished past, and even as I recovered
from my illness, I recovered my heart. I thanked my illness. I thanked
as well the people who had been so unstinting of their care and time
and kindness to me. And I prayed that I might also become a good
man. I vowed to make an eternal enemy of anyone who sought to
destroy this happy thought.34

Let us accept at face value even the disconcerting last line that seems
to suggest that feeling generous toward his fellow man did not come eas-
ily. Kyōko noted in her memoir how pleasantly surprised she was to
observe in her husband an unfamiliar gentleness and a kindness to oth-
ers. Toward the end of his stay at the clinic, when Sōseki was allowed
once again to venture out, he went to the Ginza and purchased for Dr.
Morinari a silver cigarette case that he had engraved with a dedication
and a haiku written in his own hand: “In gratitude to the brilliant doc-
tor Morinari for the heartfelt care I received at Shuzenji”:

Asasamu mo In chill of morning

yosamu mo hito no and cold of night
nasake kana! the warmth of [your] compassion!35

Perhaps his experience did soften him, but he could still be testy.
Kyōko recalled an outburst when Komiya and another disciple asked her
to treat them to eel and rice as they were leaving the clinic. “What kind
of a scoundrel asks a man’s wife out to a restaurant when he’s lying sick
in bed!” The young men left disconsolately. When Kyōko returned to the
clinic the next morning, Sōseki inquired what had happened, and when
she informed him that his disciples had gone straight home, he said,
“That’s a shame! I was harsh with them only because that laggard
Komiya tends to be extravagant—”36
As his strength returned, Sōseki began taking longer walks, shopping
for medical books in secondhand bookshops and using the information
he gleaned to argue with his doctors. At times, overexerting himself, he
felt nauseous and out of breath and was barely able to make it back to

194   C risis at S huzenji

his bed. On one such occasion, Dr. Morinari reminded him that the bush
warbler was known to forget its song each year when spring had passed
and was obliged to restore his voice gradually through daily, patient,
practice. “Is that so?” Kyōko recalled Sōseki asking and then falling silent
as though reflecting. When Suzuki Miekichi heard the story, he remarked,
“He listened that way because it was a doctor talking, but if one of us
had said that, he’d have demanded to know since when we had turned
into experts on the warbler’s song!”37
Shortly before Sōseki was discharged from the clinic, the mundane
world intruded yet again on the tranquillity he was determined to pre-
serve. On February 20, Kyōko took delivery of a letter from the Educa-
tion Ministry informing him that he had been awarded a D.Lit. degree
and instructing him to present himself at ten the following morning for
the induction ceremony (normal dress, as opposed to coat and tails). If
he were unable to attend, he was to send a representative. Kyōko called
him at the clinic from the neighbor’s phone the next morning; Sōseki
instructed her to send Morita Sōhei as his representative and cautioned,
“Make sure he understands that he isn’t to suggest in any way that I am
prepared to accept this honor.” But when she returned to the house, the
certificate had already arrived in a mailing tube. Calling Sōseki back,
she remembered a sinking feeling that he would consider this presump-
tuous, and she was right: “Send it back,” he snapped, “I have no use for
such a trifle.”38
As the uproar that ensued suggests, the doctorate in literature was
prestigious, equivalent to the French Order of Arts and Letters or per-
haps a British cultural knighthood. In the context of the powerful social
hierarchy that still obtained in Japan, rejecting an honor bestowed by
an official agency like the Education Ministry was considered egregiously
disrespectful. There was even a legal question concerning whether such
an appointment could be rejected: since it was conferred by a cabinet
member, who served at the pleasure of the emperor, it could be inter-
preted as having the force of an imperial decree.
Kyōko contacted Morita and explained that Sōseki wanted him to
return the degree. He recalled,

I trudged over to the ministry at Hitotsubashi on foot and returned

the little package. From there I went straight to the clinic and reported

C risis at S huzenji   195

 that I had accomplished my mission. Sensei greeted me with a scowl on
his face I had rarely seen, as if I were an emissary from the ministry—
this was an unpleasant errand.39

By the time Morita arrived, Sōseki had already mailed a letter to the
ministry:

I understand that this academic degree refers to what I read about

in the newspaper several days ago: namely, that the Committee on
Degrees has recommended me for a doctorate. I am constrained to
say, however, that I have made my way in the world until now as just
Natsume so-and-so, and I wish to continue in life in the same way, as
simply Natsume so-and-so. Accordingly, I have no desire to be awarded
a doctorate. While I am reluctant on this occasion to create inconve-
nience or seem unreasonable, I must decline the award for the forego-
ing reason. Thank you for your understanding.40

The complete text of Sōseki’s letter appeared on page 3 of the Asahi

on February 24 and triggered a controversy that lasted for two months,
much of it taking place in the pages of the newspaper. The contested
question was whether a degree conferred by a cabinet minister could
legally be declined. Legal experts weighed in on both sides; Sōseki
refused to budge. The ministry sat on the problem for two months until,
on April 12, the diploma was returned to Sōseki with a terse note:

We are in receipt of your wish, communicated on February 21, to

decline the doctoral degree conferred on you. As the degree had already
been awarded at that time, there is, unfortunately, no way to revoke it.
Your understanding will be appreciated. We are sending under sepa-
rate cover the certificate issued by the Minister of Education.41

The letter arrived on a busy day for Sōseki: the doctor who had nursed
him back to life, Morinari Rinzō, was returning to his home on the Japan
Sea in Niigata Prefecture to open his own practice, and his grateful
patient hosted a going-away party for him. Guests, charter members of the
“Chicken-Liver Society,” dined on grilled chicken liver. Kyōko was there
with the children, as were many members of the inner circle: Matsune,
Abe Yoshishige, Nogami, Komiya, and others. At 5 p.m., a photographer

196   C risis at S huzenji

from the Mochizuki Photographic Studio in Hongō arrived to take a
memorial photograph in the garden. Curiously, Morita’s and Suzuki’s
faces appear as oval inserts in the upper right of the photo. Afterward,
aficionados, including the guest of honor, joined Sōseki in utai.
Sōseki responded to the ministry the next day, April 13:

Regarding your declared inability to accommodate my wishes because

I objected to the degree after it had been conferred, allow me to repeat
my reply to yours dated above:
It was upon and because of receiving notice of the degree that I
declined to accept it. Please consider that there was neither a neces-
sity nor the possibility of declining at any time before that. Despite
the fact that there is room for interpreting the award to imply the pos-
sibility of turning it down, the minister of education has seen fit to
decide unilaterally that it may not be declined. Let me declare that I
am deeply offended by the minister.42

The ministry’s final letter to Sōseki is dated April 19, 1911:

We understand the position you detailed in yours of April 13. It is a

matter of some considerable regret to me that we must stand in opposi-
tion to your wishes; however, as the decision was reached at a plenary
meeting of the ministry that our interpretation of the decree does not
allow for the possibility of rejection, I must beg your understanding on
this matter. As for your returning the certificate yet again, because the
degree has been awarded we have no choice but to consider you a doc-
tor of literature, whether or not the certificate is in your possession.43

Sōseki continued his way through life as “Natsume so-and-so,” and the
Ministry of Education would ever after consider him Natsume Sōseki,
D.Lit.
The government’s intractability was predictable, but Sōseki’s refusal
to accept a national honor is puzzling. People as close to him as Morita
Sōhei were bewildered: “I could never understand why Sensei had cho-
sen to become so exercised about a basically trivial matter like this.”44
Sōseki’s anger may have been aggravated by the suspicion that the
degree had been awarded as abruptly as it was because the committee
feared that the state of his health demanded prompt action. This had

C risis at S huzenji   197

certainly been a consideration in the case of another of the five awardees,
the major poet Mori Kainan, who was in the hospital in critical condi-
tion. Sōseki was also in the hospital and had been, just weeks before,
in critical condition. It was, accordingly, not such a paranoid leap to the
supposition that the doctoral degree was being hurriedly prepared for
him lest his health take a fatal turn.
One clue may be a note in English written by the Scotsman James
Murdoch, Sōseki’s English teacher at the First Higher School. At the time,
Sōseki was receiving many letters, some congratulating him on the award
and then congratulating him again for declining it, but he singled out
Murdoch’s note and translated a line: “What has just happened is proof
that you have moral backbone, and that is cause for rejoicing.”45 In the
end, there is no knowing whether Sōseki was acting on moral principle
or reacting to some manifold slight that had offended his vanity.46

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 +
14

A Death in the Family

Contention about his doctorate was not the only assault on Sōseki’s frag-
ile nerves in the dark year of 1911. Another was Morita Sōhei’s decision
to write a sequel to Black Smoke without permission from Hiratsuka
Raichō or her family.1
A year had passed since Sōseki completed The Gate in June 1910, but
he was still feeling insufficiently recovered to undertake a novel and
accordingly recommended Morita as his replacement when his turn came
around in May. The Asahi cannot have been happy with this substitu-
tion, but no one was prepared to object to a recommendation from
Sōseki. Morita himself, having watched his friend Suzuki Miekichi ago-
nizing the previous year over his novel The Fledgling’s Nest, was uneasy
about accepting the assignment. But turning down the Asahi was unthink-
able, and he knew his mentor was expecting him to perform. A notice to
readers announcing the launch of a new novel to be entitled Autobiogra-
phy (Jijoden) appeared in the paper on April 8. On that same day, as if
Nature were auguring the upheaval the novel would cause, Mount
Asama, 125 miles to the northwest, erupted with an explosion that was
heard in Tokyo.
Morita’s novel was serialized between April 27 and July 31. On May
17, Sōseki noted in his diary:

I had a troublesome visitor yesterday. Ikuta [Chōkō] showed up with

Hiratsuka Tomoko’s [Raichō’s] mother in tow. She asked me to with-
draw Autobiography from the Asahi. Listening to the circumstances as
she explained them, it became clear that Morita had broken his prom-
ise. I sent Ikuta in a rickshaw to Morita’s place, but he was appar-
ently at the paper, so I called but he sent a note saying he preferred

   199
 to stay away. Komiya happened to be visiting at the time, and I sent
him off to fetch Morita.2

Sōseki doesn’t say whether he met with Morita subsequently, nor does
Morita mention a scolding in his brief account, but he does acknowl-
edge that “writing Autobiography was yet another cause for regret when
I think of Sensei.”3
At the paper, Morita’s second confessional was widely viewed as
“problematic,” and on June 10, a meeting of the editorial board was con-
vened to discuss the matter. Sōseki attended and commented in his
diary laconically: “Went to the meeting. Morita’s novel criticized. I partly
defended it and partly agreed and left.”4
Although he does not say so, Sōseki must have been troubled by the
distress Morita was causing. In the fall, he would be deeply upset by
unexpected ramifications.
In June, Sōseki received an invitation from the Nagano Prefecture
Teachers’ Association to lecture in Nagano City, to the northwest in the
Japan Alps, a region rich in history that he had never visited. Kyōko was
opposed to the trip, worried about the toll it would take on his health,
and when he insisted on going, she declared she would accompany
him. Sōseki objected, feeling strongly, as would any respectable Meiji
gentleman, that a man did not venture into the world with his wife trail-
ing behind him (literally, since women were still expected to walk behind
their husbands). But Kyōko was adamant, and Sōseki relented. They left
from Ueno Station on June 17, and he delivered a lecture, “Education
and the Literary Arts” to packed auditoriums three times, in Nagano, in
nearby Takada, where he was hosted by Dr. Morinari, who had relo-
cated his practice there, and finally in Suwa. Along the way, Sōseki and
Kyōko stopped to sightsee, returning to Tokyo late at night on June 21.
The significance of this short journey to the snow country was that it
left Sōseki feeling confident that he had recovered his health. Conse-
quently, at the end of July when he received a request from the Osaka
Asahi shinbun to participate in a lecture tour in the Osaka area in August,
he agreed. The tour was promotional: by sponsoring free lectures open
to the public by its best-known contributors—each program featured three
speakers—the paper hoped to expand its circulation. Since his long ill-
ness at Shuzenji, Sōseki had been feeling indebted to the Asahi for the
financial help he had received, and he may also have felt uncomfortable

200   A D eath in the F amily

about having failed to deliver on his contractual obligation to serialize
one long novel each year. Even so, had he not just returned from a suc-
cessful trip to the north country, he might have heeded Kyōko’s anxious
warning that an intensive tour in the withering summer heat was
foolhardy.
Sōseki prepared four substantial lectures for his four appearances. He
delivered the first, “Avocation and Vocation,” to an audience of one thou-
sand people jammed into the largest hall in the city of Akashi on the
southern shore of Lake Biwa (the “desolate spot” to which Prince Genji
was exiled). The program began at 1:30 and ended at 5:30 p.m.; Sōseki
was the last of the three speakers. (The first lecture had been on con-
temporary France, and the second on Japanese policy in Manchuria.)
Afterward, Sōseki was taken to dinner by the mayor and his staff.
On August 15, Sōseki spoke again in Wakayama, to the south, again
in third position. Revised for publication along with the others, his lec-
ture was entitled “The Flowering of Modern Japanese Culture.” It was a
blistering day, and by the time he had finished, Sōseki was exhausted.
On August 17, Sōseki spoke to a crowd of 1,400 people in Sakai, just
north of Osaka. The lecture was entitled “Form and Content.” His open-
ing remarks were mildly supercilious and no doubt left the audience won-
dering whether they were being mocked as provincial, but they were
charmed nonetheless. At the podium, Sōseki was a virtuoso:

When I arrived here, just before noon, the streets were hushed and so
was the hall. But as the time approached, this huge audience assem-
bled and made me think that Sakai must be a splendid place, a town
with a hefty appetite for lectures. And since I’ve traveled here all the
way from Tokyo, I’ve been hoping for the pleasure of speaking in a
place like Sakai where folks like you are hungry for lectures. So I hope
you’ll validate the excitement I’m feeling by paying close attention
right to the end of what I have to say. And with that, I suppose I should
launch into something about “Form and Content” as advertised.5

The tour culminated the following night, August 18, in Osaka. It began
at 6 p.m. and featured five speakers, with Sōseki leading off on the sub-
ject of “The Literary Arts and Morality.” He had overindulged at a ban-
quet in Sakai the night before, stuffing himself on octopus, a local
specialty of that seaport, and his stomach was already beginning to

A D eath in the F amily   201

bother him. The evening dragged on, and the stifling hall was jammed
with people. Returning to his inn, he was struck by a wave of nausea and
went to bed. Minutes later, he vomited blood. It had been just a year,
and here he was again. He tried to get out of bed but was too dizzy to
move. He called for a maid and had her contact the Asahi offices to ask
them to find him a hospital. The paper arranged for him to be admitted to
Yugawa Hospital and cabled Kyōko, who arrived in Osaka on August 23
expecting the worst and relieved to find her husband resting comfortably.
Sōseki remained in the hospital for nearly a month, until Septem-
ber 14. On September 8, he sent a postcard to Terada Torahiko, just
back from Germany, to complain about being on a diet of soft food
once again. He appended a haiku that evokes the patient’s ennui and
disheartenment:

Kōmori no Bats
yoyo goto ni night after night
usuki kayu watery gruel.6

One imagines Sōseki spooning his gruel and watching bats wheeling
in the gathering darkness outside his window. Later he changed “bats”
to “lightning”:

Inazuma no
yo yo goto ni
usuki kayu

Was that an improvement? To this reader, the image of darting bats

is more evocative.
No sooner had Sōseki returned to Tokyo on September 14 after twenty-
four days in the hospital than his chronic hemorrhoids flared up hell-
ishly. They turned out to be infected, and he also was suffering from an
anal fissure that required surgery, which he underwent in the third week
of September. When the cocaine that was locally applied wore off, the
pain was excruciating, and he was compelled to lie still on his mattress
for a week. The surgery healed poorly, and the wound became infected,
forcing him to commute to the clinic for treatment every other day until
the new year. Despite the agony, he was characteristically stoic, even to
his diary:

202   A D eath in the F amily

 November 20,
Dr. Sato once again spread open the wound in my anus where he
had cut. I could hear the sound of scratching. This time he was satis-
fied that he had gone deep enough. The nurse assured me he was
really finished this time. But the wound is still five centimeters deep,
and if it’s to heal all the way, assuming it will heal finally, I may have
to go through this twice or three times more. It seems these are perni-
cious hemorrhoids.7

At this point in her memoir, Kyōko offered a moment of comic relief.

Because of his chronic indigestion, Sōseki was always prone to flatulence,
but after his surgery he began producing “a strange and uncommon
sound,” which Suga Tarao, within earshot, likened to “a torn paper shoji
flapping in the wind.” All agreed that Suga’s characterization was per-
fect, including the perpetrator: Sōseki ordered a new seal incised with
the characters “torn shoji” and used it alongside his signature on callig-
raphy and paintings.
The gauze packing his wound was still being changed every other
day when he was dumbfounded to learn that Ikebe Sanzan had resigned
as the managing editor of the Asahi shinbun. His decision had been trig-
gered by a confrontation with Yugeta Akie, who was in charge of exter-
nal affairs. What had begun as Yugeta’s criticism of Morita’s novel had
developed into a violent disagreement about the cultural column over-
seen by Sōseki and managed day-to-day by Morita and Komiya. The
column had been a sore spot at the paper from its inception two years
earlier. Most of the staff—the editors and journalists—considered it
cliquish, monopolized by Sōseki’s protégés who used it to showcase
both their own fiction and, as critics, their teacher’s anti-Naturalist
bias. Yugeta took advantage of general discontent with Morita’s novel
to attack the column, and when Ikebe defended Sōseki, Yugeta accused
him of personal, sentimental considerations. Ikebe lost his temper and
stunned the room by shouting, “In that case, I’ll resign and so should
you!”
One week later, Sōseki submitted his own letter of resignation but in
just a few days was persuaded to change his mind. How serious was he
about leaving the Asahi? Resigning out of respect to Ikebe Sanzan, just
as a retainer commits hara-kiri in fealty to his lord who has been dis-
honored, would have struck him as an appropriate action to take. Why

A D eath in the F amily   203

did he let himself be dissuaded so easily? Was his letter of resignation
merely a test of the degree of esteem in which he was held by the paper?
Undoubtedly, the pleading it elicited was appreciated and may even have
moved him, but that sort of manipulation seems out of character.
In any event, the aggravation that Morita Sōhei had created with his
characteristic willfulness in the midst of Sōseki’s illness had finally been
resolved, but not without lasting consequences. In a letter to his protégé
Nomura Denshi dated November 22, Sōseki wrote, “I asked Morita to
quit. This is a perfect opportunity to cut the impossible, ill-fated connec-
tion that has held us together. Needless to say, he intends to make his
way with his pen.”8
In the early evening of November 29, 1911, not a month after he had
submitted and withdrawn his resignation, his surgical wounds still
unhealed, Sōseki’s twenty-month-old daughter, Hinako, had a seizure
while being fed her dinner and abruptly died. Sōseki was in his study
chatting with Nakamura Shigeru, an Asahi editor who had recently
resigned. According to Kyōko, when three of the older children ran down
the hall shouting for him to come at once, he chose not to interrupt his
conversation, assuming that the baby was having one of her frequent
seizures that always subsided when water was splashed in her face. But
Kyōko had tried the usual treatment, shaken the baby, and called her
name and, alarmed when she failed to revive, had sent a maid to fetch
a doctor in the neighborhood. In his diary entry, Sōseki describes leav-
ing the study at once on hearing about Hinako, but Nakamura’s account
confirms Kyōko’s memory and conveys as well a degree of restraint that
rings true about Sōseki:

We were chatting when we heard a commotion down the hall. A

maid came once or twice and reported something, but Sōseki merely
grunted and didn’t rise from his chair. Fude [his eldest daughter] came
and spoke with him, and this time he jumped up and went down the
hall and didn’t return for a while. I heard anguished weeping that
might have been a maid. Sōseki returned and said, “It’s over; she died;
the poor baby.” He seemed disconsolate but presently resumed our
conversation. He left again and when he returned he said, “Perhaps
you should leave now. . . .” I expressed my condolences and took my
leave.9

204   A D eath in the F amily

 Overall, Sōseki’s version of Hinako’s death and funeral, recorded in
detail in consecutive diary entries between November 29 and Decem-
ber 5, agree almost completely with Kyōko’s memory of them eighteen
years later:

November 29 (Wednesday)

Sunny. Shin [the utai teacher] comes over, and we work on the rest of
“Morihisa.”10

• Nakamura Shigeru visits in the evening. As we were chatting,

three of the children came running down the hall laughing and bade
me come with them. Imagining that Hinako had had another of her
seizures, I went to the six-mat room and found the baby in my wife’s
arms with a hot towel on her face. Her lips were blue. As this was
not a rare occurrence, I assumed she would get over it, but some-
thing about the baby’s appearance had prompted my wife to send for
Dr. Nakayama across the street, and the panicked maid was just
returning. When he arrived he didn’t like the state the baby was in
and administered an injection but to no effect; he examined her and
found her anus dilated and her pupils trembling. “This is very bad,” was
all he said. I couldn’t believe this was really happening. Dr. Nakayama
agreed that it was strange. I wondered if we should try a mustard bath,
and the doctor concurred, so we sent out for some mustard and low-
ered her into a tub of mustard in hot water but nothing happened. We
dried her with a towel and laid her back down. The poor baby. With
her mouth open and her eyes half closed, she seemed to be asleep.
Our Dr. Toyota arrived presently, asking in his pleasant way what was
wrong. When I told him it was all over, he became very grave and
tried mouth-to-mouth breathing again and again, exclaiming each time
how strange this was. I asked if he would fill out the death certificate,
and he agreed. We had no idea about the cause of death, and lest the
coroner complain, we agreed to write “pneumonia.”
• We should have used a folding screen, but we didn’t have one.
As we could hardly abandon her in the six-mat room, we laid her down
in the room adjoining the “living room” with her pillow to the north.
From the funeral supplier, we brought home a desk of white wood, an

A D eath in the F amily   205

 incense stand, a flower vase, a sprig of shikimi [star anise], and some
white dumplings.

I’ve asked Gyōtoku11 to submit the death certificate to the ward

office tomorrow and to bring back a burial certificate to fill out. I’ll
ask my brother-in-law to make arrangements at the temple. Decem-
ber 1 is an inauspicious day, so we’ll wait until December 2.12

In the following days, Sōseki chronicled the burial process in detailed

diary entries.13 On November 30, the whole household participated in
sewing the baby’s burial gown, the sleeves and skirt going to the girls,
including the maids. Fuji, who had been feeding Hinako when she died,
came in with a scroll of paper and asked everyone to cover it with the
characters na-mu-ami-da-butsu (Praise to the Amida Buddha). The baby
was laid in her coffin wearing small straw sandals, a braided hat, and
red wool tabi. A string of Buddhist prayer beads was placed around her
hands. A doll was included. The lid was closed and covered with a white
satin cloth.
The wake was held that night. A monk from the Honpō-ji, the Bud-
dhist temple where the funeral was to be held, led the sutra reading.
Sōseki wrote merely that he declined to sit and went to bed, but Kyōko
amplified the moment: “He said that he disliked wakes and that every-
one should go home and get some sleep. We protested that we were there
to protect the body and carried on in spite of him. He agreed but made it
clear that he did not want a wake when he died. ‘We’re doing this tonight
to experience the deep regret we feel at parting with the little buddha
tomorrow,’ my mother said, ‘but we’re also protecting her lifeless body
to ensure that no mice come out to nibble on it. If no one is there to watch
when your time comes, what would you do if a mouse came along and
gnawed on your nose?’ Sōseki’s reply made everyone laugh: ‘If that hap-
pened, the pain might bring me back to life again.’ ”14
The funeral was held on Saturday, December 2. Dressed in black, the
family left the house at nine; before the coffin was nailed shut, toys were
placed inside. The hearse was a horse-drawn wagon. “Black horse and
a black hood, a bit of the wreath atop the coffin visible beneath it,” Sōseki
noted. After a short service at the Honpō-ji, the funeral party moved to
the crematorium in Ochiai (Komiya was the only disciple to accompany
the family), where they deposited the coffin in the furnace and left with

206   A D eath in the F amily

the key. Normally, the fee was 10 yen, but because Hinako was a child,
it was reduced to six.
The following day, Sunday, the family returned to the crematorium
for the ritual retrieving of the baby’s bones from her ashes. The trip by
rickshaw to Ochiai, northwest across the city through stands of with-
ered, late-autumn zelkova trees and past newly built houses took forty
minutes, and when they arrived and were asked for the key, Kyōko real-
ized that she had forgotten to bring it along. Sōseki was angry; there
was even some question whether it could be retrieved by 11 a.m. when
the crematorium closed. A maid was sent back in a rickshaw and returned
in the nick of time at five minutes before the hour. One of the attendants
unlocked the furnace and slid the door open.15 Sōseki’s focus on the
details of the baby’s bone-gathering is startling, a touch morbid:

Inside, in the dimness, we could see only some gray round things and
black things and white things all lumped together. The attendant
placed two rails in front of the coffin platform and hooked a metal loop
around the end of it and dragged it out. From the mass of material he
removed the head and face area and two or three bones and placed
them on a stand, saying he would bring the rest when he had sifted it
clean on a screen. Using one bamboo and one wooden chopstick each,
we lifted the pieces and placed them in a white urn.16 As we were
attempting to pack away the brain, the attendant returned with the
sifted material, saying, “You should leave that for last.” “Do you want
the teeth separately?” he asked, lifting them out for us. He also
crunched the jawbone into small pieces and lifted them out. It was like
separating kernels of white rice. “This was inside the stomach,” he
explained, showing us something like charred cotton. I wondered if
he was talking about the intestines. One of the attendants stirred the
urn with a chopstick and reduced the volume of bones. Last of all, he
placed the cranium on top and then pulverized it by forcing the lid of
the urn closed. Then with his gloves still on, he wired it shut, placed it
in a wooden box, and wrapped it in a furoshiki. When I got into the
rickshaw on our way home, I placed it on my lap.17

The detachment of this clinical detail is both telling and misleading.

Sōseki’s stoicism in the face of his own, never-ending medical tribula-
tion is bewildering: he indulges in scarcely any of the complaining, not

A D eath in the F amily   207

to mention bitterness, that would be understandable under the impossi-
ble circumstances. And he was, to be sure, capable of indifference where
his children were concerned, particularly, as Kyōko insisted, when he was
suffering his recurrent bouts of mental illness. But the sudden death of his
two-year-old was another matter. In her memoir, Kyōko wrote feelingly:

This was our first time to experience the terrible loss of a child, and
Hinako was not only our youngest but at the most adorable age. She
was taken from us so suddenly, as though plucked away before
we could even try to nurse her back to health. It left Sōseki dazed.
He didn’t say anything, but you could tell that he had been struck a
blow, and he seemed to be grieving deeply in his heart. Now and again
at some reminder he would mutter to himself, “It’s an awful thing to
have a child die on you,” as if he were obsessed by the thought.18

Kyōko’s conjecture is validated by lapses in the almost journalistic

impassivity of the diary:

• While Hinako was living, I didn’t consider her more precious than
the other children. Now that she was dead, she seemed dearest to
me. And the surviving children seemed unnecessary.
• Walking outside, I see a small child, and I wonder how it can be that
this child plays in good health and my daughter is no longer alive.
• Shin comes and we practice Morihisa.
• Yesterday I happened to notice a charcoal scuttle in our main room.
I bought it as a new householder after my return from abroad,
thinking that we should at least have a nice charcoal scuttle. That
was five or six years before Hinako was born. Somehow that scut-
tle survives, easily replaceable if broken, and yet my invaluable and
irreplaceable Hinako is dead. Why couldn’t I have exchanged this
charcoal scuttle for her?
• The funeral yesterday, retrieving bones today, possibly the eve of
the seventh-day celebration tomorrow. How very busy we are! But
looking back, all our efforts have been futile. If they can’t transform
death into life, they are futile. There is nothing so regrettable as this.
• A crack has opened in my stomach. I feel as if my spirit has cracked,
too. The feeling comes to me every time I recall this grief that can-
not heal.

208   A D eath in the F amily

 • According to the morning paper [December 5], government forces
and the revolutionary army in China have agreed to a three-day
armistice and will try to come up with a peace treaty during that
time. From their point of view, Hinako’s death is inconsequential.
Nor will the state of my anus figure in the calculations.19

A novelist who avoids drawing on experience from his own life is hard
to find. Critics have insisted that except in his “only autobiographical”
novel, Grass on the Wayside (1915), Sōseki was that rare phenomenon.
As a critical assertion, this turns out to be inaccurate, useful only as a
means of differentiating Sōseki’s transformative use of his own past
from the unelaborated, true-life confessions employed by writers affili-
ated with the Naturalist school. Hinako’s death is an example of a ter-
rible moment that he was compelled to sublimate in fiction scarcely three
months after her death. On March 21, 1912, in a letter to the Asahi editor
who was visiting when Hinako died, he mentions a story he has recently
completed: “ ‘A Rainy Day’ is deeply moving to me personally. I began it
on March 2 (Hinako’s birthday), and completed it on March 7 (her hun-
dredth-day memorial). It makes me happy to think I have created a fit-
ting remembrance to place on my dead child’s altar.”20
Embedded in a suite of stories entitled Until Beyond the Summer Solstice
(Higan sugi made), “A Rainy Day” is a nearly literal recapitulation of the
baby’s death as Sōseki recorded it in his diary. The fictive father, Matsu-
moto Tsunezō, has lost his youngest of five children (Sōseki had seven).
The moment of death is detailed exactly as in his diary, including the dilated
anus and mustard bath. The burial preparations, the wake, the funeral,
and the chilling account of the bone retrieval are described suffocatingly,
with passages lifted from diary entries. But in one significant respect, the
story diverges from the actual: the principal figure is neither the father
nor the mother but a young woman named Chiyoko, Matsumoto’s niece,
who was in the house spoon-feeding the two-year-old when she died.

Sitting there alone, she exchanged more than once the shortened sticks
of incense for fresh ones. It was still raining. She could no longer hear
the rain pelting the banana leaves, but the beating of the drops on
the eaves of the tin roof reached her as inexpressibly sad and lonely.
From time to time, she removed the cloth covering the baby’s face and
wept, and thus the night passed.21

A D eath in the F amily   209

By shifting the focus away from the father to the niece, creating a sur-
rogate, Sōseki seemed better able to explore the depths of the grief he
undoubtedly experienced himself.
Not that the father’s grief is absent from the story. In the concluding
lines, he confesses that he has turned the narrator away on his first
attempt to visit, on a rainy afternoon, because it was raining on the day
in November when his daughter died, and he can no longer bear to
receive visitors in the rain. Otherwise he says little, but when he does
speak, Sōseki emends his own observations from the diary or adds lines
that sharpen the bitterness he was doubtless feeling. His diary entry after
the wake noted merely that he refused to participate and went to bed,
but Matsumoto’s behavior is more revealing. Just after ten at night, he
brings the priest an offering of cake and money for reading the sutras
and asks him to go home. When his wife inquires why, he replies, “It’s
better for the priest to get to bed early. Besides, Yoiko (the infant’s name
in the story) doesn’t like to listen to sutras.”22
The final pages, which describe the cremation and bone-gathering in
the same unbearably magnified detail as the diary entries, succeed in
conveying fierce grief beneath the surface. “While she was alive it didn’t
strike me this way,” the father confesses, “but now that I’ve lost her, she
seems to be the most precious to me. I can’t help wishing one of the other
children could take her place.”23 Returning from the crematorium in a
rickshaw, his niece realizes with regret that the intensity of her feelings
has somewhat diminished: “It seemed to her that the sadness of the past
two days, so acute it was painful, contained something purer and more
beautiful than what she felt now, and she found herself longing for that
piercing grief.”24 The moment recalls the urgency Sōseki felt about cap-
turing details of his experience at Shuzenji and, more broadly, his Prous-
tian certainty that memory was the key to perceiving the true meaning
of the past.

210   A D eath in the F amily

 +
15

Einsamkeit

People thought of him as a cynical, contrary, sore loser who was

always scowling and a bit frightening, but with the children, when he
was in his right mind, he was at his good-natured best. He liked to
play at sumo with the boys, and at such times he was as innocent as
a child.1 . . . When he was feeling well, he cared a lot about the chil-
dren. Whatever they did, he would just watch with a smile on his face
or play along with them. Or he would just sit there reading his book
and let them carry on as if he didn’t mind in the least.2

Kyōko’s emphasis on Sōseki’s benevolence as a father appears as a miti-

gating preface to her chronicle of a nightmarish time at home during
1913 and 1914 when it seems that his sanity was threatened by a relapse
into mental illness. Was he truly an affectionate father when he was feel-
ing well? Given Kyōko’s unflinching description of his terrifying behav-
ior when ill, it is tempting to credit her assurance of his kindness when
“in his right mind.”
But the children’s recollections when they were grown cast doubt. His
eldest daughter, Fude, seventeen when Sōseki died, recalled him sixty
years later with little affection, as “difficult to approach and frighten-
ing.”3 “My sister [Tsuneko] and I would do some little thing that dis-
pleased him, and he would lock us in his study or hit us—it happened all
the time.”4 The father who lived in her memory

belonged to the world but not to me, not to the family. Every morning
he wrote one installment; after lunch—he ate his meals alone, never
with us—he would take a walk and mail it off. He didn’t smoke or drink
or fool around with other women. He led a regulated life, but he was

   211
 always sick. I wish he had lived longer; I wish there had been less dis-
tance between us.5

Fude maintained that Sōseki was cruelest to herself and her next
younger sister, Tsuneko, warmer to the younger girls, and, in general, a
more loving father to her two brothers. The boys did not share her per-
ception. The philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō, a latecomer to the Thursday
salon, felt that Sōseki’s failure to allow the children to perceive him as
their father while functioning as a father figure to his disciples was “the
tragedy of the family.” His feeling was confirmed when he ran into
Sōseki’s firstborn son, Jun’ichi, in Berlin in 1925:

He was twenty years old at the time. Sōseki died when he was eleven,
and he told me that he remembered his father as an irascible man
whose behavior often seemed insane. I couldn’t persuade him that
Sōseki was more than that. He had lots of stories about being yelled
at and struck for no reason. He even expressed hatred.

Jun’ichi’s younger brother, Shinroku, a second grader when Sōseki died,

conveyed the plight of a child compelled to remain vigilant against an
unpredictable father:

Even when we were playing at sumo wrestling, as I struggled with all

my might, flushed in the face, to bring him down just this once, I was
filled with anxiety about when I would be yelled at. A scolding from
my father was a fear that never left me. I Imagine he felt at those
moments as he wrestled with us just as any normal father would have
felt, and I wonder if it wouldn’t have made him very sad to know that
I wasn’t able to feel any closeness to him deep inside myself, though
it didn’t appear that way. It’s a forlorn and deeply regretful feeling to
think that I continued to deceive him that way until the day he died.6

In his manic state—assuming a diagnosis of bipolar disease is

­accurate—Sōseki was assailed by paranoid delusions that ignited vio-
lent anger and kept everyone in the family walking on eggshells. Kyōko
noticed that something was going wrong in mid-December 1912 when
Sōseki began manifesting once again, as in 1903, a hypersensitivity to
noise, for example, to the maids’ chatter, which drove him wild and

212   E insamkeit
moved him to fire them one after the other, or even to the sound of the
telephone ringing. He would jump to answer the recently installed phone,
and when the caller inquired if he had reached the Natsume house, he
would shout “How would I know!” and hang up. Wrong numbers pro-
voked him violently. One day, Komiya called and asked to speak to
Kyōko (who had communicated that she had something she wanted
urgently to discuss with him). Sōseki was furious: how dare he “ask to
speak to another man’s wife!” For some time afterward, Komiya was
treated to coldness when he appeared at the house. Given his closeness
to the family, this was particularly confounding and hurtful.
Suzuki and Morita were also the objects of sudden fits of unac-
countable anger. But those who suffered most were the immediate fam-
ily. Besides Kyōko herself and the six children, the three maids were
constantly being accused of whispering behind their employer’s back
and being let go. Kyōko recalled coming home from shopping one day
to find all the maids gone and Fude crying hysterically. Sōseki had
instructed the children to remain indoors while their mother was out,
and discovering they had ventured into the garden to play, accompa-
nied by one of the maids, he had flown into one of his rages. He dis-
missed the maid on the spot and, in plain view of the neighbors, struck
Fude when she attempted to defend her. The tension and the terror in
the house led to “yet another conversation” about separating, and while
they did not separate formally, in late February 1913, Kyōko moved into
a small annex at one end of the house.
Sōseki began serializing his next major novel, The Wayfarer (Kōjin),
on December 6, 1912.7 In early March, he suffered a third attack of bleed-
ing stomach ulcers that put him in bed for two months but debilitated
him for longer. On March 28, he discontinued work on The Wayfarer. On
April 6, he resumed despite his dizziness but was able to finish only two
installments before lapsing again, until mid-September. He had worked,
and would work again, despite seriously inflamed ulcers—what stopped
him this time was doubtless the bedeviling combination of physical and
mental illness. There is evidence that he was deeply disheartened by
what had befallen him. Until now, he had maintained, in his writing at
least, a stoic evenness no matter how ill he was. But in one of his memo
books, he noted that he had not spoken up after a maid had spent fif-
teen minutes jabbering into the phone, even though he had expressly
forbidden the maids to make calls: “I didn’t say anything. When the

E insamkeit    213
agony of illness is making you feel you’d like to die right away, it’s hard
to care about anything in particular going on the world around you.”8
While he was compiling the complete works after Sōseki’s death,
Komiya referred to notes like this as “fragments,” to differentiate them
from diary entries. Written at various times in Sōseki’s life and unreli-
ably dated, they tend to be more personal and more internally focused
than the thoughts he set down in his diaries. The fragments that begin
appearing at roughly this time provide a vivid and chilling revelation of
Sōseki’s descent into irrationality. Some of the entries may be read as
simply the carping of a cantankerous man, but other passages recount
extended episodes that sound delusional:

This maid who claims she is a fisherman’s daughter is constantly suck-

ing air into her mouth as if something is stuck in her back teeth. As if
she were sipping hot soup. At first I thought this was a habit, but it’s so
noisy I decided she must be doing it to spite me. One day I came home
and she was telling another of the maids that her teeth hurt. But it
doesn’t appear that she’s intending to go to a dentist, all she does is
continue to make that noise I can’t stand. Slurping hot soup. I could
force her to stop easily enough. But my experience so far has been that
if I stop something that bothers me, they’ll figure out some other way
to injure my feelings, and if I tell them to stop, they’ll find something
else unpleasant. Since I can’t have my way, I began taunting them
back, sucking my own teeth.
One day I had a matter to discuss with [the poetry scholar] Mr.
Sasaki Nobutsuna in Hongō, and there was someone on the train
making that same noise. So I started slurping, and the other passen-
ger stopped. When I got to Sasaki’s place, it turned out we had to go
together to see Ōtsuka, and while I was waiting for him to get ready,
I heard that same noise coming from the adjoining room. I responded
slurp for slurp. Our visit to Ōtsuka proceeded with no unpleasant
noises. The previous evening, Matsune [Tōyōjō] came to visit. Sure
enough, he sucked on his back teeth in that same way. I inquired if his
teeth hurt and he said yes but he didn’t have time to go to the dentist.
But he didn’t look as though his teeth hurt the least bit. That was
Saturday. I went to Sasaki’s on Sunday. Naka [Kansuke] and Abe
[Yoshishige] came on Wednesday. . . . Just as I was telling the maid
to bring us something, Abe suddenly began sucking his teeth.9

214   E insamkeit
 The novel that Sōseki struggled to produce that year, The Wayfarer,
fails to cohere in a manner that may reflect his physical and mental
­suffering at the time: it is filled with strands that lead off in the direction
of intriguing developments but are left dangling. At its center—small
wonder under the circumstances—is the portrait of a scholar-professor
plagued by paranoid delusions. Ichirō is the paradigmatic model of the
Meiji intellectual as Sōseki perceived him: his suffering has its source in
his acute awareness that genuine contact with another person is impos-
sible. The following year, 1914, Sōseki returned to the same theme in
Kokoro, a better novel that may be read as a companion volume. In the
later book, a wife forlornly asks her withdrawn husband, “Is it possible
for a man and a woman’s heart to beat together as one?” In The Way-
farer, Ichirō, with his wife Nao in mind, puts the same question to his
younger brother, Jirō, the narrator:

“Do you understand the heart of another?” my brother asked

suddenly.
“Do you feel you don’t understand mine?” I replied after a pause.
“I understand you perfectly well.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about a woman’s heart.” I
felt something burning in his words, an urgency like fire that struck
me as unnatural.
“What difference does it make whether—”
“You’re a lucky man,” my brother interrupted. “The necessity of
studying this sort of thing hasn’t confronted you yet.”
“I’m not a scholar like you, Brother—”
“Don’t be an idiot!” my brother shouted, “I’m not referring to study
in the abstract as in studying books or explaining psychology. I’m ask-
ing whether you’ve been obsessed by the need to study something
right in front of your eyes, I mean the heart of the person with whom
you should be most intimate!”
I understood at once whom my brother meant.
“I wonder if you’re not making too much of this, as if it were one of
your research projects? You’d do better to be more simple-minded—”
“She won’t allow me to be simple-minded!—She comes after me on
purpose, provoking me to think, using my habit of pondering things
to her advantage—Do you know Meredith?” he asked.

E insamkeit    215
 I said I’d heard the name.
In one of his letters, he wrote, “When I see someone who is satis-
fied with a woman’s looks, I’m envious. And I envy a man who can
be satisfied with a woman’s flesh. As for myself, I can’t be satisfied
unless I’ve seized hold of a woman’s essence, her soul, her so-called
spirit. That’s why love affairs are impossible for me.”10

On a trip to the countryside with his mother, his wife Nao, and Jirō,
Ichirō asks his brother to test Nao’s fidelity. He wants him to spend a
night in an inn with his wife. Jirō is shocked but agrees to take her to the
nearby city of Wakayama, but for the day only. They set out the next
morning and end up in a teahouse as rain begins to fall. Jirō asks Nao
if she truly cares for Ichirō and she begins to cry; Jirō must stifle an
impulse to take her hand and cry with her. He is overwhelmed by a ten-
derness that he is afraid to express.
A storm forces Nao and Jirō to spend the night at an inn after all; Jirō
signs the register self-consciously, adding “Ichirō’s wife” after Nao’s name
and “Ichirō’s brother” after his own. Shortly after they are shown to a
room, the howling storm blows out the lights. The long scene that ensues
is masterly, repeatedly edging toward a taboo intimacy and veering
away:

The room already was gloomy enough with its blackened beams and
soot-covered ceiling, but now it was plunged into total darkness. I had
the feeling my sister-in-law was sitting nose-to-nose with me, so close
that I could smell her if I inhaled.
“I hope you’re not scared—”
“I am scared,” she replied, her voice issuing from the place I had
imagined it would come in the darkness. But her words conveyed no
sense of fear, nor did I detect in her attitude the slightest flirtatiousness
hiding behind a false show of fear. We sat there in the darkness in
silence, without moving or speaking. Perhaps because my eyes detected
nothing, no brightness, the storm outside seemed even louder than
before. . . .
“It won’t be long now, Sister, the maid will be bringing us a light—”
I waited for my sister-in-law’s voice to reach me from the darkness,
but she made no reply. I had the eerie thought that the darkness as
black as lacquer might have the power to suppress a woman’s small

216   E insamkeit
 voice. Before long, I was worrying about this presence that should have
been, must have been, sitting alongside me in the darkness, and I
called out to her again, “Sister?”
Still she remained silent. I imagined her sitting across from me
where I had seen her before the light went out. Reassured by what had
to have been her proximity, I spoke again.
“What is it?” she said as if annoyed.
“Are you there?”
“Of course! I’m a human being. If you don’t believe me, come over
here and feel me with your hand.”
I wanted to confirm her presence with my hand. But I lacked the
courage. Presently, I heard the hiss of a silk obi.
“Are you doing something over there?”
“Yes—”
“What?” I asked again.
“The maid brought in a sleeping robe [yukata], and I want to change
into it, so I’m undoing my obi.”11

The lights go on for just a second, and Jirō notices that Nao has
managed to put on her makeup in the darkness. The maid serves them
supper in their room and lays out their bedding on the tatami, side by
side. Together they worry about Ichirō and his mother and the danger of
a tsunami at the beach where they are staying. “I’d hate to miss a tsu-
nami,” Nao ventures, startling Jirō.

“If I’m going to die, I’m not interested in a carefully planned death
by hanging or cutting my throat. I’d rather be carried away in a flood
or struck by lightning, something violent and unforeseen.”
“That’s the kind of death you read about in novels!”
“Maybe so, but I’m serious. If you think I’m joking, let’s go back to
Waka-no-ura right now, and you can watch me throw myself into the
waves! . . . ”
“Tonight is the first time I’ve ever heard you speak about dying.”
“Maybe it’s the first time I’ve ever said anything, but a day doesn’t
pass when I don’t think about dying. And as I say, if you think I’m lying,
take me to Waka-no-ura—I promise to jump into the waves and drown
myself right before your eyes.”
“You’re all wrought up tonight,” I said soothingly.

E insamkeit    217
 “You’re one to talk. I’m much calmer than you. All men are spine-
less, wouldn’t you agree? When the time comes—”12

This may not sound like an erotic conversation, but in Japan when a
man and a woman discuss suicide in the middle of the night, lying side
by side in an inn, the specter of “love suicide,” the ultimately erotic expe-
rience of dying together, hovers nearby. In any event, it is clear that Nao
is daring Jirō to step out of bounds with her, and just as clear that Jirō
knows he is being provoked. Reiko Auestad noted that Jirō uses the prop-
erly “respectful ‘Big Sister’ ” when addressing Nao, except once, in the line
“You’re all wrought up tonight,” when he switches to the intimate second-
person pronoun anata, revealing that Nao’s provocation has flustered
and perhaps aroused him.13
Jirō is not by any means the only Sōseki character who is insulted by
a woman when he fails to act in what she considers a masculine way:
Sanshirō, for example, is taunted by the girl he meets on the train to
Tokyo when they spend the night at an inn together and he keeps to him-
self on his side of the bed they share; and Kenzō in Grass on the Wayside
is often the object of his wife’s contemptuous “and you call yourself a
man!” (Ishihara Chiaki and Komori Yōichi, among others, read evidence
in this pattern of humiliation of the “re-gendering” of Sōseki men into
women.)
Nothing happens. Nao urges Jirō to get some sleep, and he meekly
complies, climbing inside his own mosquito netting. The next morning,
they awaken to a sky so lucid and blue it makes them feel they have
“escaped the clutches of a demon.”
As soon as they are reunited, Ichirō asks Jirō, “Did you figure out who
Nao is?” and Jirō replies, truthfully, “I didn’t,” and adds, “You have no
reason to doubt her character.”14
Though nothing is made of their overnight encounter, Nao does pay
Jirō an unexpected visit late one night at the apartment where he is
staying. He is not sure why she has come, except to inform him that her
relationship with Ichirō has further deteriorated. Later she confesses
that Ichirō no longer considers her his wife. But even this invitation to
some sort of action, to a declaration of feelings at least, is left hang-
ing. The erotic tension between Nao and Jirō is everywhere subordi-
nated to the chronicle of Ichiro’s existential agony. This was perhaps an

218   E insamkeit
unfortunate choice, since Sōseki might have mined the taboo attraction
between them for a rich catastrophe of consequences.
Ichirō’s repudiation of Nao has granted him the freedom to depart on
a journey to Izu in the company of a fellow scholar and colleague des-
ignated only as “H.” News of Ichirō on the road reaches Jirō indirectly
in a thick letter from “H,” who quotes Ichirō:

“What’s frightening is that I alone must traverse in just a single

lifetime the destiny that all of mankind will arrive at generations from
now. I haven’t even an entire lifetime: I must traverse the same destiny
in any given period of my life whether it be ten years or one year or, for
that matter, a month or even a week, and that is truly terrifying. . . . In
other words, I have taken unto myself the uneasiness of all mankind
and am experiencing minute by minute the terror of that uneasiness.”
“But that is unbearable. You must find some respite!” [“H” said.]
“I don’t need you to tell me that it’s unbearable.”15

In one sense, the fifty-nine-page letter (forty pages in the English trans-
lation) is a faulty ending to the novel, leading the reader into a cul-de-sac
with no access to Jirō’s feelings. At the same time, it conjures, notwith-
standing Ichirō’s madness, a lucid picture of a man forever doomed to be
a wayfarer pursued by the hornets of his own disquiet, muttering as he
rushes along the mountain path a line from Thus Spake Zarathustra, “Ein-
samkeit, du meine Heimat Einsamkeit” (Loneliness, thou art my abode).16
On March 30, 1914, Sōseki wrote his editor at the Asahi that he was
intending next to write a series of short stories. “I will entitle each one
of them separately, but supposing you will need an overall title to
announce the work, I have chosen Kokoro. No additional text will be nec-
essary for the advertisement.”17
The novel that resulted (usually translated as Kokoro, retaining the
Japanese title), is Sōseki’s best-known novel in the West and his most
artfully designed work.18 The story is in three parts: “Sensei and I,” “My
Parents and I,” and “Sensei and His Testament.” Sōseki began at the end,
serializing part 3 beginning on April 20, 1914, and adding the shorter
preceding sections to complete the work on August 1. If this approach
was unusual, it was also oddly significant, as the irony at the heart of
Kokoro is best perceived by reading part 3 first and then parts 1 and 2.

E insamkeit    219
 In “Sensei and I,” a twenty-six-year-old university student on sum-
mer break, apparently as naive and unjaded as Sanshirō and almost cer-
tainly modeled once again on Sōseki’s earnest and fiercely dedicated
disciple Komiya Toyotaka, meets an older man to whom he feels power-
fully drawn and selects him as a life teacher. “I always called him Sen-
sei,” the novel opens, “and that is what I’ll call him here without revealing
his real name.” The narrator’s decision to use “sensei” is thematically
relevant. Although the term can be used broadly to convey respect for
someone senior to oneself, its fundamental meaning is “teacher.” Ironi-
cally, this particular “sensei” has nothing to teach: more precisely, his
life contains a lesson that cannot be learned.
The narrator notices Sensei on a crowded Kamakura beach because
he is accompanied by a Westerner, still an unusual sight at in 1912, con-
spicuous for his “marvelously white skin,” and the more remarkable
because he is clad only in a bathing suit in the Japanese manner instead
of the more modest swimwear preferred by foreigners. The foreigner is a
device: he does not appear again, nor is he mentioned again. His unex-
plained presence suggests that Sensei, like Sōseki himself, is engaged
in the world of Western thought and values inundating Japan at the
time. The narrator feels certain that he has seen the sensei before and
feels compelled to approach him. He returns to the beach at the same
time day after day but lacks the courage to introduce himself until one
day he notices that Sensei’s eyeglasses have fallen out of his robe and
hands them to him. The next day he dives into the ocean after Sensei
and swims out in his direction. Isolating the two figures in the ocean,
beneath a vast expanse of sky, Sōseki creates an encounter that feels
preordained, transcending their boundaries as individuals, allegorical
even, as if whatever transpires between them will be broadly relevant
to everyone. There is also something unmistakably queer about the
moment:19

When we reached the offing, Sensei looked back and spoke to me. On
that broad, blue expanse of sea, we two were alone. Strong sunlight
illuminated the mountains and the water as far as the eye could see.
Flexing muscles taut with freedom and joy, I cavorted in the water.
Sensei, ceasing all movement of his arms and legs, rode the swell on
his back. I followed suit. The deep blue of the sky was dazzling on my
closed lids. “Isn’t this swell!” I shouted.

220   E insamkeit
 Presently, righting himself as though waking on the surface of the
water, Sensei suggested, “Shall we go back?” With my relatively hardy
body, I would have preferred to stay in the water. But I responded at
once to Sensei’s proposal: “Yes of course; let’s swim back.” And we
retraced our course to the beach.20

The student pursues Sensei aggressively even after they return to

Tokyo. Sensei acknowledges that he is lonely and takes pleasure in the
student’s company but questions his reasons for seeking him out and
warns that he may not be able to help him assuage his own loneliness.
The student meets Sensei’s wife and finds her beautiful but somehow sad.
Snippets of conversation between them leave the reader wondering
whether there is a romantic attraction. The subject of death arises, and
Sensei wonders what his wife would do if he should die first:

“What would I do—”

Sensei’s wife faltered. Grief at imagining Sensei’s death appeared
to cast its shadow briefly. But when she looked up, her mood had
brightened.
“I suppose there’s nothing I could do—in any event, death takes
whom it chooses, old or young—”
She spoke as though in jest, and her eyes were on me.21

Part 2, “My Parents and I,” in which the student is called home to the
countryside to spend time with his ailing father, is an entr’acte that dra-
matizes the divide separating them. That summer, July 1912, the Meiji
emperor died, and General Nogi Maresuke followed his lord in death,
committing “fealty suicide.” In his delirium, the narrator’s father mutters,
implying his identification with Japan’s feudal past: “How can I face Gen-
eral Nogi! I will follow him soon!”22 His estrangement recalls Daisuke’s
alienation from his father’s generation in And Then.
As he waits with his family for his father to die, the student receives
a voluminous letter from Sensei. Tearing it open, he scans the pages
uncomprehendingly until his eye lights on a line near the end: “When
this letter reaches your hands, I will no longer be in this world. I will be
long dead.” Too impatient to wait, even though he knows his father is
dying, he hurries to the station, scribbles a brief note to his mother and
brother, boards a train for Tokyo, and proceeds to read the long letter.

E insamkeit    221
 Part 3, “Sensei and His Testament, a confession addressed to the stu-
dent, provides the key to the mystery of Sensei’s life. After moving to
Tokyo following his parents’ deaths, Sensei enrolls in the university and
finds lodgings near the Hongō campus in a pleasant house inhabited by
a war widow, her sprightly, attractive daughter, and a maid. Sensei’s rela-
tions with the women is warm; he even senses that the widow may be
considering him as a suitable husband for her daughter, “Young Miss”
(she is unnamed). Friends who observe them out on the town congratu-
late him for having discovered such a beauty for a wife.
Into this felicitous domestic scene, Sensei brings “K,” a sensitive, highly
principled classmate at the university who happens to be a childhood
friend from the country. The son of a Pure Land Buddhist priest, K had
been disinherited by his adoptive family when he confessed that he was
studying religion and philosophy instead of medicine, the career they
intended for him. Sensei persuades the widow to allow his despondent
friend to move in, and before long, he notices that K and Young Miss
seem to be enjoying each other’s company more than he would like, as
by this time he has fallen in love with her. The day comes when K,
unaware of Sensei’s feelings, stammers a confession that he is hopelessly
in love with her and is suffering unbearably. His agony is the result of
an irreconcilable conflict between his ardor and the abstinence and self-
denial at the heart of Pure Land teaching, a “spiritual austerity” that
has guided his life until now. Listening to K’s halting appeal for under-
standing, Sensei is gripped by jealousy and attacks his friend where he
is most vulnerable, accusing him of hypocrisy: “Anyone without spiri-
tual aspirations is a fool, you told me. . . . What do you intend to do
about those fine principles you’re always spouting!”23
Sensei is aware that he is acting out of “blatant self-interest” but is in
the grips of his own need:

If “K” had been talking about anyone other than Young Miss, I could
have spoken to him consolingly, soothed his parched and heated fea-
tures with a gentle rain of compassion. I believed I was a person who
had been born into this world with that degree of kindness and sym-
pathy. But at that moment I was not myself.24

Sensei sees that K is demoralized but feels threatened nonetheless and

resolves to act preemptively. He asks the widow for permission to marry

222   E insamkeit
her daughter and receives her blessing. He avoids saying anything to
K, who learns what has happened from an innocent remark by the
widow. Several days later, before Sensei has had a chance to speak with
him, he kills himself.
Sensei opens the suicide note addressed to him with trembling hands,
expecting to find unbearable accusations and imagining the contempt
the widow and her daughter will feel for him when they read it. But the
contents are simple and, if anything, abstract. K has written only that
he was ending his life because he was weak-willed and indecisive and
was feeling hopeless about the future. The letter ends with a simple
thank-you to Sensei for having stood by him. “As I scanned the note,
my first thought was ‘I am saved!’ (of course, it was only my reputation
that had been saved, but in this case, my reputation appeared to be of
singular importance to me).”25
The testament concludes with an adjuration to the student to keep
Sensei’s secret from his wife:

I bequeath my past as an example to others of good and bad. But

please agree that my wife will be the single exception. I don’t want
her to know any of this. Since my only desire is to preserve her mem-
ory of my past as pure and unsullied, please lock away inside your-
self as secrets of mine what I have disclosed to you and you alone.26

Thus Sōseki seals the novel, ending it with a long letter as he did in
The Wayfarer. In itself, part 3 is a lucid chronicle of the ultimate price
paid by Sensei as a consequence of his selfishness. But Kokoro opens on
nothing larger because the reader is deprived of the opportunity to
observe the effect of Sensei’s letter on the young student seeking “real
lessons” from life. Or so it may appear.
The question whether lessons have been learned is answered implic-
itly in parts 1 and 2. To comprehend the novel in its ironic completeness
requires reading these appended sections in the light of the final confes-
sion and perceiving that Sōseki is toying with time. The sequence of the
story appears to be linear: student meets Sensei, student spends time
briefly with his parents, Sensei’s letter ends the novel. In fact, the narra-
tor alludes to the testament explicitly as “a long letter he wrote to me
shortly before his death” and is otherwise in possession of information he
could have accessed only from the letter: “Now that Sensei is dead. . . . I

E insamkeit    223
could not know that behind that beautiful romance lay a terrible
­tragedy. . . . ​Moreover, Sensei’s wife had absolutely no way of understand-
ing how devastating this tragedy had been for him. To this day she
knows nothing of it.”
Recognizing that the student has read the testament before he begins
to narrate his story, we look for indications that he has been affected by
what Sensei has disclosed. In his testament, Sensei expresses the desire
that the example of his life, the “moral darkness” into which he ventured,
may provide the student the sort of lesson he is seeking:

You pressed me to unfurl my past in front of you as if it were a scroll

painting. It was at that moment that I found respect for you in my heart
for the first time. Because at that moment, you revealed your determi-
nation to rudely haul a living thing from the innermost recess of my
body. Because you were prepared to split my heart and drink at the
molten torrent of my blood. At that time, I was still alive. I didn’t want
to die. So I deflected your demand, promising to respond another day.
At this moment, I am about to crack open my own heart and flood
your face with my blood. I shall be satisfied if a new life lodges in your
breast when my pulse ceases.27

This is the most sensuous passage in the novel (and has the effect of
confirming the homoerotic bond that connects Sensei and his would-be
disciple). But the hopefulness implicit in it feels like optimism that blooms
in the darkness before the moment of death. In part 1, Sensei warns the
student that his past, when he is finally able to reveal it, may be of little
use to him:

The memory of sitting at my feet to no avail may someday make you

want to trample me beneath your own feet. I want to deflect the respect
you feel in order to avoid your contempt later. I prefer enduring my
loneliness today to having to endure an even greater loneliness in the
future.

“Having to suffer this loneliness,” he continues, articulating the refrain

that resounds across all of Sōseki’s novels, “is the sacrifice we make, all
of us, for having been born into this age of freedom and independence
and self.”28

224   E insamkeit
 Here we have the “life lesson” implicit in Sensei’s past: the terrible
cost of egoism. But there is evidence that the student has failed to learn
from the example that Sensei has provided. Abandoning his failing father
at the end of part 2 is a tangible example. His obsession with Sensei
has driven him to violate a fundamental Japanese taboo: filial piety
requires a child to be present at the deathbed at the moment of his par-
ent’s death.29 In part 1, his conclusions about Sensei’s behavior illustrate
even more dramatically that he has missed the point. Sensei describes
resolving to live his life as if he were already dead and keeping his deci-
sion a secret from his wife. He acknowledges that he has kept his wife
ignorant because he cannot bear tarnishing her image of him. The silence
he has maintained during their marriage—a silence he insists the student
maintain after his death—has consigned his wife to an unending, fruit-
less struggle to comprehend the man she lives with, wondering whether
she is to blame for his refusal to open his heart to her. This is an act of
pernicious selfishness. But the student’s interpretation is stunningly off
the mark: “Sensei died without revealing anything to her. Rather than
destroying her happiness, he chose to destroy his own life.”30 The stu-
dent’s failure to see that Sensei’s resolve to keep his secret is a decision
made without concern for his wife’s suffering demonstrates that he is
unable to distinguish selfishness from self-sacrificing generosity.
Near the end of his “testament,” Sensei recalls an anecdote he wants
remembered: “One day my wife asked, ‘Is there no way a man’s heart
and a woman’s heart can ever beat together as one?’ ‘Perhaps when they
are young,’ I replied vaguely. She appeared to be looking back survey-
ing her past and presently sighed almost inaudibly.”31
The answer to Sensei’s question is implicitly answered in Kokoro: two
hearts cannot beat as one; one man cannot learn from another; the
impossibility of understanding another coupled with our need to assert
ourselves guarantees that what awaits us is the agony experienced by
Ichirō in The Wayfarer and by the sensei who cannot teach in Kokoro, a
life of isolation and loneliness.
More than any other Sōseki novel, Kokoro has been subjected to her-
meneutic scrutiny. In March 1985, Komori Yōichi published a radical
rereading of the novel that inaugurated an ongoing “Kokoro debate” (of
the five hundred articles on the book written since its publication in 1914,
more than two hundred appeared in the first ten years after Komori’s
essay).32 Komori began with an invalidation of the traditional reading

E insamkeit    225
of the novel, which focuses exclusively on part 3, “Sensei and His Testa-
ment,” detaching it from parts 1 and 2 and thereby eliminating as a fig-
ure of importance the student narrator (beginning in the 1950s, only
part 3 appeared in Japanese high school textbooks). The effect of this,
Komori reasoned, was to transform part 3 into a novel itself, in which the
“absolute, paternalistic values” at the heart of an imperialistic ideology—­
ethics, spirit, death—were implicitly affirmed. Viewed inside the frame of
part 3 as if it were the entire novel, Sensei, the sole protagonist, is seen
as attempting to impart to the student the ethics of correct behavior sup-
porting the state; and his suicide, which he explicitly associates with the
fealty suicide of General Nogi (junshi) following the death of Emperor
Meiji, becomes a patriot’s death “for the sake of the spirit of Meiji.” The
rhapsody by the critic Etō Jun is informed by just this reading of the text
in which, implicitly, Sensei and Sōseki himself are conflated:

The Emperor Meiji’s death and General Nogi’s suicide made Sensei
realize that the spirit of Meiji had not entirely died within him. Now
the shadow of the entire value structure of this great era emerged from
his tortured past, smiling at him like a ghost of a loved one. Perhaps
the ghost whispered, “Come to me. ”33

Komori focused on the “untold story” of what happened to the stu-

dent between the time that he read Sensei’s testament and when he
decided to write his own version of what happened before Sensei’s death.
He found implicit evidence in the student’s account, parts 1 and 2, that
he had embarked on a life embodying principles and feelings entirely
antagonistic to the paternalistic value system revealed in part 3. Komo-
ri’s structural analysis begins with the opening paragraph of part 1:
“Whenever I think of him now, I am inclined to call him ‘Sensei.’ I feel
the same way when I take up my pen. I can never bring myself to refer to
him with an impersonal capital letter.”34
Since that is precisely what Sensei does when referring to his dear
friend—“I shall call him ‘K’—,”35 Komori interpreted the line36 as signify-
ing from the beginning the student’s determination to differentiate
himself from Sensei, to declare that Sensei’s way of relating to him, to K,
and to Young Miss was entirely unlike his mode of relating to Sensei and,
more particularly in Komori’s reading, to Young Miss after she became

226   E insamkeit
Sensei’s wife.37 In part 3, Sensei is revealed as cerebral and strategic.
When K confesses his love for Young Miss, he responds:

I watched him carefully, as though he were my fencing partner. There

was not one part of me that was not on guard. . . . In his innocence,
[K] put himself completely at my mercy. I was allowed to observe him
at leisure and to note carefully his most vulnerable parts.38

As Komori points out, his response to K is far from sympathetic; it is

heartless. Similarly, his “love” for Young Miss is more a concept than
a passion, a “platonic love” from which physical desire has been
detached:

I felt for her a love that was close to pious faith. . . . If this strange phe-
nomenon we call love can be said to have two poles, the higher of
which is a sense of holiness and the baser the impulse of sexual desire,
this love of mine was undoubtedly in the grip of love’s higher realm . . . ​
the eyes that beheld her, the heart that treasured thoughts of her,
knew nothing of the reek of the physical.39

In Komori’s reading, in contrast, the student has cast off the dichot-
omy between the mind and body that governed Sensei’s life. Instead, he
has merged his own life into a fully loving relationship, including physical
desire and its fulfillment, with the drama’s other abandoned and lonely
figure, Sensei’s wife, with whom, Komori insists, he has had the child she
longed for hopelessly during her marriage to Sensei. Komori based this
dramatic presumption on a few lines in a scene that revealed to him a
“silent drama.” The significance of the scene depends on the reader’s
understanding that in parts 1 and 2, the student is in control of the nar-
rative, choosing which moments to include and how to reveal them:

“I wish we had a child,” the Missus said, glancing in my direction.

“That would be nice,” I replied. But in truth, at that time, when I had no
children of my own, having a child struck me as merely an annoyance.
“Shall we adopt one?” Sensei said.
“An adopted child, really dear,” said the Missus, glancing at me
again.40

E insamkeit    227
 Komori interpreted the student’s remark “at that time, when I had no
children of my own” to mean that now, in the present when he is writ-
ing, he does have a child who is not adopted, and in an assumptive leap,
he asserts that the child’s mother must be Sensei’s wife. The possibility
of a hidden intimacy between the student and Sensei’s wife is reinforced
implicitly by her use of the familiar second-person pronoun that I have
translated “dear,” the same anata that Jirō let slip when addressing Nao
at the inn. The reader expects that she is addressing her husband with
this word (which can also mean “you,” albeit a familiar “you”), but the
fact that she glances at the student as she speaks creates an ambiguity.41
In a later exchange I have already cited, Komori found a similar ambi-
guity generated by the use of anata. The subject of death arises, and
Sensei wonders what his wife would do if he should die first:

“What would I do—”

Sensei’s wife faltered. Grief at imagining Sensei’s death appeared
to cast its shadow briefly over her. But when she looked up, her mood
had brightened.
“I suppose there’s nothing I could do—don’t you agree, dear. In any
event, death takes whom it chooses, old or young—”
She spoke as though in jest, her gaze intentionally on me.42

Kokoro, then, according to Komori, far from affirming a paternalistic

moral code that Sensei successfully imparts to the student, dramatizes
a battle between values aligned with nationalism that valorize self-sac-
rifice and minimize or even disparage (hetero) sexuality, and a new mode
of life in which “two people enter freely into an alliance in which there
is no separation between mind and body.”43 Keith Vincent elucidated
Komori’s argument:

Komori sought to provide Sōseki’s morbid homosocial masterpiece

with a reconstructed ending that would point the way toward a brighter
modernity associated with heterosexuality. . . . The result is a narra-
tive development from a homosexual/homosocial past associated with
Sensei toward a heterosexual future embodied by [the student].44

Sales of Kokoro, which was published in September 1914, launched a

small publisher that became the distinguished publishing house, Iwanami

228   E insamkeit
shoten. The founder, Iwanami Shigeo (1881–1946) had been teaching as
the head of the Kanda Girls’ Higher School following his graduation from
Tokyo Imperial University in philosophy. In July 1913, he resigned his
position and went into the secondhand book business in a modest store
in Jinbō-chō, the booksellers’ district in Kanda. It is not clear how he
first established contact with Sōseki, but Kyōko recalled that he was
visiting one day when her husband summoned her to the study and
instructed her to bring 3,000 yen in stock certificates that Sōseki was
intending to lend to him. Having just begun to emerge from years of
financial difficulty, the family had been putting money into stocks little
by little under the supervision of Komiya Toyotaka’s uncle, a financier
whom Sōseki had met in London. Kyōko asked what the loan was for,
and Sōseki tried to dismiss her but she insisted: Iwanami had received
a large order for secondhand books from a library and stood to make a
handsome profit if he could fill it but lacked the funds. Sōseki was pro-
posing that he use the 3,000 yen as collateral against a larger loan from
a bank. Kyōko wanted a promissory note. Sōseki was uncomfortable, but
she stood her ground, and he was obliged to ask Iwanami to sign for the
certificates, explaining sheepishly that his wife was demanding it. This
was one of any number of occasions when Kyōko shed her wifely defer-
ence and was assertive to a degree not expected from women of her day.45
Thereafter, Iwanami showed up from time to time to request addi-
tional loans, and Sōseki obliged him. By the time Kokoro was nearing
completion the following year, the ambitious bookseller had enlarged his
business by managing to procure rare books and selling them at prices
well under market, and he was ready to try a publishing venture on
his own. It is unclear, and curious, why one of Japan’s most important
and most popular writers agreed to what amounted to a self-publishing
arrangement, but Sōseki did agree. Iwanami paid him no advance; on
the contrary, he produced and marketed the book using funds borrowed
from the author and repaid him twice yearly out of money generated by
sales, a troublesome process that caused some dissension. There were
disputes about other details. Iwanami, an aesthete who wanted every
element of “his” first book to be the best that money could buy, insisted
that it be printed on the most expensive paper. Sōseki objected on the
grounds that his profits would be diminished by such an extravagance,
but Iwanami had his way. Otherwise, since the publisher was a novice,
the design of the book was left in Sōseki’s hands. In letters to Iwanami

E insamkeit    229
in August and September, he enclosed samples of the colophon he wanted
(in cinnabar ink) and of the inscription in his own hand to be placed on
the first of several flyleaf pages: the Latin version of the Greek attributed
to Hippocrates, Ars longa vita brevis (Art endures but life is short). Later,
Iwanami created his company trademark by installing these words
beneath Millais’s painting The Sower. For the cover, Sōseki used rubbings
of Chinese prehistoric characters set in a random pattern against a cin-
nabar background. Iwanami adopted the same cover for the eighteen
volumes of the first edition and also subsequent editions of Sōseki’s com-
plete works.
In time, Iwanami established a reputation as Japan’s most elite left-
wing publishing house, very much like Gallimard in France, home to
leading thinkers on the faculties of Kyoto and Tokyo Universities, pur-
veyor of major Western works of fiction and nonfiction in Japanese trans-
lation, and proprietor of an array of research volumes, including the
authoritative Japanese dictionary, Kōjien. The company’s famous logo,
“I-wa-na-mi,” spelled out in cursive syllabary script, was written by
Sōseki. Iwanami was and remains the house that Sōseki built.
During this troubled period of mental and physical illness—on Sep-
tember 8, 1914 (just as Kokoro was being published) Sōseki was hospi-
talized for the fourth time with bleeding ulcers, for a month—he tried to
find a measure of balance by devoting time every day to painting with
his friend and painting teacher, Tsuda Seifū. He had tried oil painting
briefly but had given that up by the end of September and was concen-
trating on watercolor and traditional sumi-ink on rice paper. He appears
to have been obsessed, assuring himself and everyone in the vicinity that
he was, after all, “quite a painter” and would someday create something
of genuine value. In a letter to Tsuda dated December 8, he wrote, “I’d
like to paint just once in my lifetime a painting that people would cher-
ish when they saw it. It could be anything, a landscape or an animal or
birds and flowers, so long as it was refined and thoroughly appealing.”46
Kyōko related an anecdote about the paintings—Fude recalled the
same story—suggesting that Sōseki was still mentally unhinged late in
1914. When he finished a painting, he would give it to his children with
instructions not to give it away to anyone else. But when cousins or
friends came to play, they would ask for one and often the children would
allow them to choose. Learning of this, Sōseki ripped the remaining

230   E insamkeit
paintings from the wall, tore them to shreds, and threw them in the gar-
bage at the back of the house.
At the end of October, the family’s dog, Hector (a gift from Sōseki’s
utai teacher, Hōshō Shin), a miscreant well known in the neighborhood
for digging up gardens, was discovered by a maid floating in the pond in
a neighbor’s yard. Sōseki sent a rickshaw man to fetch the body and
was careful not to look when it arrived. Sending out for a wooden grave
marker, he wrote a haiku “for my dog” that conveyed his sadness about
the animal’s death:

Akikaze no I had him buried in ground

kikoenu tsuchi ni sheltered
umete yarinuru from the autumn wind

In his elegiac memoir Inside My Glass Doors, serialized in the Asahi in

January and February 1915, he wrote, with the fatalism that invariably
darkened his thoughts when he turned them to the future,

His grave is to the northeast of where our cat is buried, just yards
away. When I step out on the veranda on the north side of my study
where the chilly autumn sun never shines and survey the back of our
garden, I can see them both clearly beneath the frost through my glass
doors. Compared with the cat’s darkened and partly rotten marker,
Hector’s is still shiny new. But soon enough, they both will be weath-
ered in the same way and both unnoticed.47

E insamkeit    231
 +
16

Grass on the Wayside

Japanese and Western critics like to call Sōseki’s novel Grass on the Way-
side (Michikusa, 1915)1 his “only autobiographical novel,” but that is mis-
leading.2 To be sure, details of the protagonist’s life closely parallel
Sōseki’s experience in the period 1903 to 1905. In the novel, Kenzō, a
young scholar who has just returned to Japan after an extended residence
in a “distant country,” has a job teaching at the university that he resents
because it takes time away from his research and writing, He is oppressed
by expectations that he will help support his brother and elder stepsis-
ter, and he is alienated from his wife, who returns to her father’s house
for the summer, taking their two daughters with her. Most vexing of all,
his foster father reappears in his life for the first time in fifteen years to
importune him for attention and money.
This was not the first time that Sōseki had incorporated his own expe-
rience into his fiction. Beginning with I Am a Cat and Botchan, most of
his works contain episodes from his life and characters based on people
he knew.3 More important, unlike the autobiographical novels that domi-
nated the literary landscape until the 1930s, Grass on the Wayside, far from
aspiring to literal accuracy, is artful. Sōseki is inventing, laboring to con-
form the facts of his life as he recalls them to the shape of the fiction he
wishes to create. Henry James famously contrasted the historian and the
fabulist: “The historian wants more documents than he can use, the fab-
ulist wants more liberties than he can take.” Sōseki the novelist was less
motivated to set down the “historical” details of his own life than to create
a character worthy of exploration, though, to be sure, as with many other
novelists, it may have occurred to him that what he knew about himself
was a promising place to begin “fabricating” a complex character.
Grass on the Wayside reveals two examples of artful manipulation at
work. The first is the ominous appearance in the first installment of the

232  
foster father whom Kenzō has not seen for years. Readers conversant
with details of Sōseki’s life will conclude that the novel opens in April/
May 1903 (the “narrow threads of rain” evoke springtime). Recently
returned from abroad, Kenzō sits among the English books he has
shipped home and commutes to work on foot (Tokyo Imperial Univer-
sity campus was a short walk from the Natsumes’ first residence in Send-
agi). In fact, the figure whom Kenzō recognizes with a shudder as his
foster father, Shimada (Shiobara Shōnosuke in real life) did not resurface
in Sōseki’s life until 1909, six years later than in the novel. Shiobara’s
actual timing was cunning: in 1909, preparing to begin And Then, Sōseki
was a celebrated novelist being paid a handsome salary by the Asahi. A
terse diary entry dated April 11, 1909, confirms that he was indeed
being dunned for money and that he had angrily declined to pay:

My brother shows up with Takada to say that Shiobara is ranting and

raving about something he protests. Don’t ask me! His rapacious greed
exceeds the bounds of common sense. I refuse to pay anything as an
expression of a moral or emotional obligation. Since this is a matter of
rights, I don’t feel I owe him anything. I’m not about to dip into my
assets to maintain my own rights. And threats won’t get a farthing out
of me.4

According to Komiya Toyotaka, the negotiation that ensued was con-

cluded on November 28, 1909, when Sōseki received a signed warrant in
which Shiobara guaranteed, in return for 100 yen duly received, never
again to bother him for money or to intrude in his family affairs in any way.
Sōseki did not hesitate to tamper with the chronology of his own life
because he needed the Shiobara incident for its dramatic impact on the
fledgling writer Kenzō. With the novelist’s intuition, he foresaw that a
story that orbited the Shiobara incident would be well suited to compel-
ling his protagonist to reveal himself in his confrontation with his past. In
that sense, the Shiobara incident as it appears in Grass on the Wayside
is less autobiography than fiction, a narrative strategy.
A second indication that the novel is a confabulation is Kenzō’s rela-
tively stable behavior. From Kyōko’s hair-raising descriptions of Sōseki
in the years 1903 to 1905, corroborated at the time by his students and
friends, we know that he was subject to deep depression and to fits of
rage triggered by paranoid delusions. But symptoms as severe as that

G rass on the W ayside    233

have been eliminated from Sōseki’s “autobiographical” account. He does
acknowledge in the second installment that “most people who knew
[Kenzō] considered him neurasthenic. But he believed that what they
were observing was simply his nature.”5 With this disclaimer, Kenzō
blithely discredits the possibility that he is mentally ill. Not that his
behavior is entirely rational: his “bad temper” keeps the children away;
he is “subject to sudden changes of mood”; he irritably kicks off the
veranda a flower pot that was purchased for the children and sends it
crashing to the ground. At such moments, he is filled with unexpressed
remorse but reviles his wife for behaving “as if he were mad.” Did Sōseki
elect to minimize the severity of his mental condition in his portrait, or
was he in denial? Certainly, the insane “fragments” in his notebook at
the time are untroubled by an awareness that his feelings and the behav-
ior they inspired were aberrant. In any event, as revealed in the pages
of Grass on the Wayside, the character Kenzō is a fabrication, not liter-
ally Natsume Sōseki. Accordingly, there is no guarantee that the auto-
biographical evidence distilled from his story is reliable.
Even so, the biographer is tempted to assume veridicality, to shine the
light of Grass on the Wayside into undocumented or enigmatic corners of
Sōseki’s past, particularly since the characters’ interior thoughts and feel-
ings are rendered with a degree of precision that was new. Consider, for
example, the minute dissection of Kenzō’s and his wife’s mutual estrange-
ment. The shifting point of view, from husband to wife and back again,
distinguishes Grass on the Wayside from the “I-novel” in lesser hands:

His time passed quietly enough. But there was an irritant in the quiet-
ness, something that tortured him without surcease. Obliged to observe
him from a distance and feeling helpless, his wife remained aloof.
Kenzō perceived this as a cold detachment that was unacceptable in
a wife. And she harbored silently the same criticism of him. In her
view, the more time he spent locked in his study, the less they would
have to do with each other outside the realm of daily business. . . .6
. . . She didn’t think much, but she was savagely in touch with the
result of her thinking. “I’m not able to respect him just because he
bears the title of husband, even if I am forced. If he wants respect, let
him become a man of sufficient substance to deserve respect and stand
before me then. . . .”

234   G rass on the W ayside

 Curiously, Kenzō, who was educated, was also more old-fashioned
on this subject. Dedicated to living his life for himself, he had always
assumed without reflection that a wife existed solely for her husband.
“In every sense, a wife should be subordinate to her husband.”
This was the basis of the collision between them.
Kenzō recoiled the minute he sensed his wife attempting to assert
herself as an independent person. “Doesn’t she realize she’s a woman!”
he was likely to feel. “You’ve got some nerve!” he might say in the heat
of the moment.
His wife held in perpetual reserve the phrase “Just because I’m a
woman—” “Just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean I’ll put up with
you walking all over me!” At times, Kenzō could read her mind in her
expression.
“I’m not treating you like an idiot because you’re a woman, I’m
treating you like an idiot because you’re an idiot! If you want respect,
develop some character that deserves it.” Before he knew it, he had
begun to use the same logic she hurled at him. And so they went,
round and round.7

The analysis of alienation in passages like these is lucid. But does it

apply with any accuracy to the relationship between Sōseki and Kyōko
during those terrible years? Grass on the Wayside repeatedly gives rise to
the same question: Did Sōseki attack Shiobara with the same vehemence
that animated Kenzō’s initial refusal to pay Shimada a penny? And what
about the unexpected birth of Kenzō’s daughter in the middle of the night
that produced a “shapeless lump” that was revealed in the light of day to
be a “species of sea monster” inert in its mother’s arms—can that gro-
tesque distortion have been Sōseki’s actual experience of the birth of
his third daughter, Eiko, in 1903?
The novel tantalizes the reader with numerous examples of previously
undisclosed material to wonder about. A painful childhood memory, for
example, of a silver pocket watch that Kenzō’s elder brother had prom-
ised would be his:

Kenzō, who had never owned a watch, coveted this one: for two months
he had waited breathlessly, picturing this silver accoutrement hooked
into his obi and installing it in the very center of his future pride.

G rass on the W ayside    235

 When the invalid died, his widow honored his word and announced
in front of the whole family that the watch would go to Kenzō. Unfor-
tunately, this memento of the deceased was in a pawn shop, and Kenzō
lacked the means to redeem it. He had as good as inherited from his
sister-in-law a right of possession, but the watch itself remained out of
reach.
One day when everyone was gathered for a meal, his elder sister’s
husband, Hida, produced the watch from inside his kimono. It had
been polished and glittered unrecognizably. It was attached to a brand-
new ribbon with a coral bead at the end of it. Hida placed the watch
in front of his elder brother.
“We’ve decided to present this to you.”
His big sister echoed her husband.
“Sorry to have put you to so much trouble. I’ll accept this grate-
fully.” Expressing his thanks, his brother took the watch.
Kenzō observed his three relatives in silence. It seemed that none
of them was aware of his presence in the room. To the end, he main-
tained his silence but felt deeply humiliated. They were oblivious.
Kenzō, who hated them for their treatment of him as if they had been
enemies, couldn’t imagine how they could be so spiteful.
He didn’t assert his right to the watch. He didn’t request an expla-
nation. He simply wrote them off in silence. In his judgment, severing
his bond with his own brother and sister was the most dreadful pun-
ishment they could receive.8

There is no way to know if this is a genuine memory, and deeming it

authentic takes the critic onto thin ice. All that can be said with confi-
dence is that Sōseki has dramatized a plausible clue, one of many, to
Kenzō’s mistrust of his family and his misanthropy in general. Grass on
the Wayside should be read as the disturbing portrait of a man who has
been brought to bay by the circumstances of his life and is bereft of hope
for the future.
The novel concludes on a note already sounded by Sōsuke, the pro-
tagonist of The Gate, when he responded to his wife’s enthusiasm about
spring by reminding her that winter was on its way. Kenzō pays Shimada
100 yen and receives a signed document guaranteeing no further inter-
ference. His wife expresses relief that this matter at least is finally set-
tled, but Kenzō will not allow her any satisfaction:

236   G rass on the W ayside

 “What’s settled is only on the surface. You’re satisfied with that
because you like formalities.”
“Then what would have to happen for it to be truly settled?” his
wife asked resentfully.
“Almost nothing in this world gets truly settled. Once something
gets started, it never ends. It just changes shape so we don’t realize
it’s still around.”

The closing lines evoke the chasm that separates husband and wife:
“He spat the lines out bitterly. In silence, she lifted the baby. ‘There’s a
good girl. We don’t understand a word of what Daddy’s saying, do we!’
She repeatedly kissed the infant’s ruddy cheeks.”9
Grass on the Wayside is the bleakest exposition of a vision conveyed
in The Wayfarer and Kokoro, that communication between two people,
not to mention love, is impossible. Stylistically, it appears to represent a
transition from the earlier novels to what would have been a whole new
stage in Sōseki’s fiction had he survived the unfinished Light and Dark
that followed. His efforts to narrow the gap between the capacity of the
English language for psychological realism and the tenacious vagueness
and subjectivity inherent in Japanese are visible throughout. The result
is a new clarity of focus on the interior of his characters that he contin-
ued to sharpen in Light and Dark.
Grass on the Wayside was serialized from early April to June 1915. In
March, before he had begun work on the book and after mailing in the
last installments of his memoir, Inside My Glass Doors, Sōseki set out for
what turned out to be his last trip to Kyoto. Earlier that year, his friend
and painting teacher, Tsuda Seifū, had moved back to Kyoto and had
invited Sōseki to visit him. Feeling distressed and unsociable as usual, he
was reluctant to accept the invitation, but Kyōko insisted that an oppor-
tunity to sightsee and paint would be good for his physical and mental
health, nagging him until he gave in and took the train on March 19,
intending to stay a week. His hosts were Tsuda and his elder brother,
Nishikawa Issōtei, the seventh-generation head of a school of flower
arranging founded by his family and, like other masters of this gorgeous
art, a painter, a calligrapher, and a well-published connoisseur of the
Japanese fine arts in general.10 Sōseki had not informed his acquain-
tances at Kyoto University or at the Osaka Asahi shinbun that he was
coming, and he requested a quiet, private place to stay. Nishikawa knew

G rass on the W ayside    237

a recently opened inn, the Kita no Taiga (in Kiya-machi sanjō), and
arranged for a sunny room on the second floor with glass doors opening
onto a verandah that overlooked the Kamo River.
The diary that Sōseki commenced11 on the day of his departure is an
elaborate account of five leisurely days in the company of the brothers.
It includes sumptuously detailed descriptions of the temples and estates
belonging to people they knew in the city and the surrounding hills,
as well as notes on the cuisine they savored at restaurants open only to
those who were known there, duck and fish broiled in miso and vegeta-
bles stewed with savory herbs in clay pots, sashimi of carp and sea bream,
shrimp bisque, mountain herbs, and mushrooms. Surprisingly, they pre-
ferred to dine in at night, having shopped earlier for the food they wanted
prepared. A portion of most days was devoted to painting together,
spreading rice paper on the tatami in Sōseki’s room, or practicing cal-
ligraphy or discussing scroll paintings that Nishikawa brought along. It
was an impressive testimony to Sōseki’s status that he was able to pur-
sue his hobby in the company of two renowned artists.
In the evenings, Sōseki sat with his hosts drinking and talking and
doubtless delighting in—to the extent that anything could delight him—
the lively and almost certainly seductive company of a woman well
known in the Gion entertainment quarter, a retired geisha, Isoda O-Tami,
the proprietress of a chaya (teahouse) called Daitomo that belonged to
her family.12 O-Tami was a “literary geisha” who cultivated friendships
with writers, including Koda Rohan and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, who wrote
a book about her, and she was known in the demimonde as a quick wit
and a gifted performer of dramatic passages from puppet-theater texts.13
Before Sōseki left Tokyo, a textile magnate who was a major art col-
lector and patron had urged him to contact O-Tami when he got to Kyoto,
and when he mentioned her name to Nishikawa, who was something
of a bon vivant, he was pleased to arrange an introduction. Her name
appears for the first time on March 20, the day after Sōseki arrived:
“Invited O-Tami for dinner and the four of us sat around chatting until
11 p.m.” Two days later, on March 22: “Back to the inn in the rain. Lonely,
I call O-Tami and ask her to come over. Wishing to feed her, I choose
the food myself: duck, carp roe, shrimp stew, carp sashimi. O-Tami brings
a cake from Kawamura. Issōtei arrives.” The next day, March 23, Sōseki
mentions for the first time that his stomach is bothering him, always
an ominous sign. O-Tami has suggested an outing to view the plum

238   G rass on the W ayside

blossoms in Kitano, but when he phones her on March 24, he learns that
she will be away until the end of the day. Disgruntled, he goes off to a
museum on his own. That evening, he takes O-Tami to a Western restau-
rant for dinner and has a bad meal. They stroll around Shijō kyōgoku,
and he has stomach pains. Back at the inn, he proposes to Seifū an
excursion to Nara and arranges for a sleeping car.
O-Tami visits the next morning. It is cold and Sōseki’s stomach hurts.
He puts himself in her hands:

She orders me to postpone my trip and to call a doctor. I cancel the

sleeping car and go to bed like an invalid. That evening, she returns
with two young geisha, O-Kimi and Kinnosuke. Seifū is here already,
and as the four of us sit talking, I begin to feel better. The doctor arrives
at 11 and orders two to three days of bed rest. A cable informs me my
stepsister’s condition is critical. I’d be just as sick in Tokyo as I am
here, so I resign myself.14

The two young geisha Sōseki mentions for the first time in this entry,
O-Kimi and Kinnosuke (a female nickname in this case, though it is the
same as Sōseki’s given name), had begged O-Tami to introduce them
when they learned that the great sensei was in town. According to
Nishikawa Issōtei, Kinnosuke was unattractive, but O-Kimi was pretty
and a coquette into the bargain. Both clever and lively, they became
regular visitors. Issōtei recalled watching Sōseki sketching in the tablets
they brought with them—yellow daffodils arranged in a vase in the toko-
noma, or purple wisteria, or the willow trees on the opposite bank of the
river as they appeared through the glass doors—and thinking that his
technique lacked finesse. At the time, he did not anticipate that his criti-
cal eye would place him in an awkward position.
March 26 was the sort of terrible day that was a regular occurrence
in Sōseki’s life: “A wordless day, flat on my back, no food or drink. By
the afternoon my stomach feels a little better. The doctor comes.”
The next day O-Kimi, Kinnosuke, and O-Tami visit. They eat and
Sōseki watches them, drinking milk. O-Tami leaves early, but the younger
geisha remain, talking until after one in the morning. The following day,
Sōseki worked on the drawing pads they left with him, writing and draw-
ing and erasing as though in thrall. The doctor visited and administered
a dose of Carlsbad salts.

G rass on the W ayside    239

 On March 30, to thank the brothers for their hospitality, Sōseki hosted
an evening’s entertainment at O-Tami’s chaya, Daitomo, which included
an elaborate dinner and a performance by the Gion’s famous dancing
girls (he had cabled Kyōko to send an extra 100 yen to help cover
expenses). Ignoring suggestions that he take a rickshaw, he went on foot,
wishing to savor the atmosphere of the Gion15 at night. As he watched
the performance, Sōseki developed stomach cramps and had to lie
down on a mattress laid out for him in the banquet hall. He ended up
spending the night at Daitomo. The next day, he was alarmingly ill and
was being attended by O-Tami and his two favorites, Kinnosuke and
O-Kimi. O-Tami cabled Seifū to inform him that Sensei had suffered a
relapse and was in serious condition. The painter interrupted his work
in progress, a plum orchard in the breeze, which he was sketching from
the verandah of his house in nearby Momoyama, and rushed back to
Kyoto.
On April 1, Seifū asked O-Tami to cable Kyōko while he accompanied
Sōseki in a rickshaw back to the inn, where he was put to bed in his
room on the second floor. Seifū recalled feeling apprehensive when Kyōko
cabled back to say she was taking an express train that night, since
Sōseki had explicitly asked that his wife not be informed.
The next morning, April 2, Tsuda took the geisha Kinnosuke with him
to meet Kyōko at Kyoto Station and brought her to the inn. That after-
noon, when she informed Sōseki that she intended to go to the theater
after an early dinner, he snapped, in Tsuda’s presence, “The theater?—
What have you come to Kyoto for? I’m sick in bed, and you spend the
whole day wandering around, and now it’s off to the theater?”16 (The
scene in Light and Dark when O-Nobu leaves her husband in bed fol-
lowing his surgery to join her uncle and his family at the kabuki theater
may have been inspired by this moment.)
Kyōko remained in Kyoto for two weeks until the night of April 16
when Sōseki was well enough to return to Tokyo. While her account of
the Kyoto sojourn17 is rendered in the voice of a dutiful wife, she man-
ages nonetheless to convey resentment and possibly a hint of jealousy.
O-Tami, thirty-six at the time (Sōseki was forty-eight), had spent her
whole life in the company of men she was expected to entertain, not to
mention beguile, and she was famous for her seductive charm. Kyōko was
unlikely to have been overjoyed at the thought of her husband disporting

240   G rass on the W ayside

himself with O-Tami and her young geisha friends, and what she writes,
or does not write, reinforces that impression: “She was most interesting
to talk to and a talented performer of theater pieces. Whenever he was
free, he would have her come to the inn and listen to her stories or ask
her to perform. She must have been fun, an excellent leisure-time com-
panion.”18 There is something guarded about this, intentionally dry.
Kyōko’s description of the two younger geisha is similarly offhand:

The one they called Kinnosuke was good-natured and funny, a geisha
who was proud of her skills as an entertainer, and must have contrib-
uted to the merriment, but the other [the pretty one], O-Kimi-san, was
just the opposite, aloof in the manner of an elegant lady and prim. In
any event, each of these three was a Kyoto type very different from
Tokyo women, and I’m told that he had them visit the inn from time
to time and relaxed with them and enjoyed himself.

Elsewhere, it sounds as if Kyōko is being careful not to sound offended

by what she might well have considered slights. When she learns, for
example, that Sōseki has asked his friends not to let her know that he is
ill: “When Sōseki heard they were debating whether to let me know, he
apparently said, ‘There’s no reason to bring the old lady here.’ When
they asked why, he replied that I’d be asking constantly how he was
doing and the very thought made him shudder.”19 Kyōko continued,

Sōseki loved puns and apparently O-Tami was good at them, too, and
they often traded them back and forth. I heard that he told her when
I was on my way that they’d better stop punning because his old lady
hated puns and she’d get angry at him. . . . It’s true I wasn’t very good
at puns and often didn’t get the point of his.20

At moments in her memoir, Kyōko emerges as outspoken and even dom-

ineering, despite the expectation that she will defer. But in her chronicle
of the Kyoto episode, as if loath to invite pity, she avoids any show of
disapproval, even though, judging from her and others’ accounts, Sōseki
was behaving insufferably.
Home on April 17, Sōseki spent two days writing thank-you letters. His
note to Nishikawa Issōtei on April 18 and their ensuing correspondence

G rass on the W ayside    241

reveal the vanity that he usually was at pains to mask beneath false
modesty. Sōseki’s letter concluded with a request:

I am hoping you will honor me with a critique of the two landscapes I

am enclosing. Please don’t hesitate to be frank. I have made the same
request of Tsuda-kun, and if on appraising the paintings, you are of
the opinion that they are well done, please have them mounted. If you
decide they don’t deserve mounting, I’ll make my peace with that. I’m
extremely busy, so I’ll end here. Natsume Kinnosuke21

In a candid reminiscence written in 1929, Issōtei made it clear that

responding to Sōseki required tact:

Natsume-san’s calligraphy had a flavor and originality, but in my view,

not a single one of his paintings revealed any technical or artistic merit.
In one of his short pieces, he described New Year’s Day utai to the
accompaniment of (Takahama) Kyoshi’s nō drum. In contrast to
the robust beating of the drum, Sensei’s chanting was feeble and irreg-
ular from the beginning, overwhelmed by the drum and quivering
helplessly as though he were in need of a transfusion. To my mind,
his painting was exactly like his chanting. Natsume is probably spin-
ning in his grave, furious to think I could barely wait until he was in
the ground to belittle his work, and I do have a bad habit of criticiz-
ing other people with too little reserve.22

Issōtei claimed that he did not remember the words he used in his
letter, but he had saved Sōseki’s response:

Thank you so much for critiquing the paintings. Just as you say, the
blacks in the first one are too intense and do indeed create a gloomy
feeling. I was delighted to hear that the lower half was interesting, and
I wonder what it is exactly about the upper half, ill defined perhaps.
I’d welcome a bit more explanation about that. . . . As for the other, I
suppose the composition is wrong and creates a feeling of uneasiness?
Fat on top and skimpy below? Seifū-kun said I need to highlight the
flowers lest they recede and create their own imbalance. I think the
blossoms are the wrong shade and also feel that the tree itself is too
small and dominated by the towering mountains above it. Should you

242   G rass on the W ayside

 decide that one or both of these deserves mounting, please do mount
them and allow me to cover the expense.23

The persistence in Sōseki’s letter—clearly he wanted the professional

to join him in assessing every detail of his painting—must have been
bothersome. Issōtei’s initial critique cannot have been altogether com-
plimentary, yet Sōseki could not abandon the possibility that his work
might deserve to be mounted. Issōtei felt that he had to write again, pre-
sumably to criticize Sōseki’s work more candidly, and this time, Sōseki’s
letter indicates that he had taken offense:

May 8: 6–7 p.m.

Now for the first time, I sense that you have allowed the truth to gush
out. I suppose I’d call your criticism a relief in a scathing sort of way.
I have no problem with the substance of it, but your language was a
bit too harsh; I wonder if I’m wrong to feel that you were agitated when
you wrote it?
In view of what you say, it appears that these paintings of mine
have no value at all and certainly aren’t worth mounting. If that is the
truth, please don’t bother. And if by chance, they do warrant mounting,
even though you disparage them, then by all means proceed; I cer-
tainly have no objection. In either case, do as you see fit without wor-
rying about me. . . . Needless to say, there is no need to respond to
this letter.24

Sōseki’s tone, irritated and petulant, is an example of what his friend

Tsuda Seifū had in mind when he spoke of “stepping on the tiger’s tail.”
Receiving his letter, Issōtei regretted having labeled his paintings “imma-
ture” and proposed, not entirely persuasively in the last paragraph of
his essay, that their “unaffected simplicity” distinguished them from self-
conscious attempts to appear slick and professional. In any event,
Sōseki rarely held a grudge and maintained a warm correspondence with
Issōtei into the fall of that year.
Sōseki’s letter to O-Tami was among the first he wrote; he informed
her it was his fourteenth letter of the day. Thanking her for her hospital-
ity, he apologized for having inconvenienced her by getting sick at her
establishment and asked whether she might like an art book of ukiyo-e

G rass on the W ayside    243

reproductions. The letter is polite, slightly formal—signed “Natsume
Kinnosuke”—and gives no hint of the impending outburst.
On May 3, he wrote again to assure her, even though she had not
received it, that he had indeed sent her a copy of Inside My Glass Doors.
In passing, he reveals something that seems to be bothering him:

If the package hasn’t reached you, it must be divine retribution. I’m

sure you remember having promised to take me to the Tenjin Shrine
in Kitano and then going off to amuse yourself in Uji that day without
a word to me. You should know that irresponsible behavior like that
never leads to anything good.25

The admonition is rendered casually enough to be mistaken for joshing.

Sōseki proceeds with a similarly light touch to scold O-Tami for her illeg-
ible handwriting and for using the formal, epistolary style in her letters.
But there is no mistaking the anger in his next missive, dated May 16.
Sōseki begins by thanking her for a package of delicacies she has sent
from Kyoto and then moves into a long-winded reprimand. His indig-
nation seems to have been triggered by what he alluded to in his pre-
vious letter, a broken promise to escort him to Kitano to see the Tenjin
Shrine. The tone of his prolix letter is sanctimonious:

I can’t bring myself to retract having called you a liar. I’m glad that
you apologized, but your insistence that you had no memory of hav-
ing made any such promise strikes me as duplicitous and leaves a sour
taste. You are a kind person and a fascinating person to talk to, and
I am well aware of that. But ever since your disingenuous denial, I
live with the sinking feeling that you are, after all, a professional.26
I’m not writing to discomfit you, nor am I complaining. I harp on this
because I don’t wish to become cold or indifferent to the O-Tami whose
beauty and virtues I have begun to know. Because it would be a shame
if our connection should be severed just as it was commencing. Over
the course of a month, I had many opportunities to observe your fas-
cination and your kindness. But I have the feeling that we separated
before either of us could be influenced by the other with regard to
moral character. And that gives rise to the following concern: Simply
put, if my accusation that you are feigning ignorance is untrue, then I
become the villain of the piece. And if it turns out to be true, then it

244   G rass on the W ayside

 is, conversely, you who turns into the villain. Herein is a hazardous
moment when a confession might be possible, when the villain might
repent and reform and apologize in earnest and we might succeed in
what I call influencing, redeeming each other’s character. But for now,
since I can’t help thinking that you are being deceitful, even if you
claim that you forgot, it appears that you haven’t instilled me with suf-
ficient virtue to influence my character and that I don’t possess suffi-
cient strength to influence yours. I regret deeply feeling that this critical
interaction isn’t happening with someone so dear to me. I’m not speak-
ing here to O-Tami the professional, the proprietress of Daitomo. I say
this as an ordinary friend speaking to an ordinary, an uninitiated,
O-Tami-san. I could just write you off as the proprietress of a chaya
and that would be the end of it. But now that we are off to such a
good start, I don’t want the superficial connection I could have with
a professional, and that is why I am writing about this at such length.
As I am neither your sensei nor your preceptor, a merely civil, largely
indifferent relationship would be possible and less effort for me, but
for some reason, that isn’t what I want with you. I cannot but believe
that something fine and benevolent lurks beneath the surface of your
nature. So please don’t take offense at my rudeness in saying all this.
And please do take me seriously.27

The letter was not simply a scolding; in a condescending and covert

way, it was also the closest thing that has survived to a love letter from
Sōseki to a woman. There is no knowing how O-Tami responded. But
since this was Sōseki’s last letter to her in his collected letters, it is safe
to assume that her reply was not pleasing to him.
Scholars have combed Sōseki’s life for evidence of another woman
and have come up with nothing substantial. This is anomalous, since in
Japan, keeping at least one mistress has been expected of all hetero-
sexual artists and of writers in particular. Dazai Osamu, to take an
extreme case, fathered a child with one of his women, lured two others
to attempt love suicides with him, and finally succeeded in ending his
life with a third. Others sustained lifelong concealed liaisons while mar-
ried to accomplished women to whom they appeared to be devoted. In
Sōseki’s case, not only is there no evidence of a relationship outside his
marriage, it is far from clear that he ever loved another woman. Etō Jun
and others have insisted that he was guiltily in love with his brother’s

G rass on the W ayside    245

wife, Tose, who died, five months pregnant, in July 1891 when Sōseki
was twenty-four (see chapter 4). The standard narrative identifies as his
first love the girl with her hair in “a butterfly chignon” whom he met at
the eye doctor’s office and stammered about in a letter to Shiki.
Another woman, sometimes called Sōseki’s “eternal love,” was Ōtsuka
Kusuoko, the wife of his close friend Ōtsuka Yasuji (the family name was
hers), a professor of aesthetics at Tokyo Imperial University and the
model for the aesthetician Dr. Bewildered in I Am a Cat. The eldest
daughter of the chief justice of the Tokyo Court of Appeals, Kusuoko was
a waka poet, a translator of Gorky and Maeterlink, a pianist, a painter,
and a novelist. Certainly, she appears to have been precisely the sort of
woman to whom Sōseki might have been irresistibly drawn. In the words
of her poetry teacher, “possessing an abundant literary gift, refined, sen-
sitive, she was that rare woman in whom talent and beauty coexist.”
Sōseki would have known her from the time she married his friend in
1895. Between 1907 and 1910 he wrote her six short letters, each having
to do with his efforts on her behalf to persuade the Asahi to publish one
of her novels, which he admired. There was more to their relationship
than business, however.28 In Inside My Glass Doors, writing in early 1915,
five years after her death, Sōseki devoted an installment to a chance
encounter in 1904 or 1905. Walking in the rain near his house in Send-
agi, his heart “heavy with the uneasiness that constantly gnawed at
[him,]” he sees a rickshaw approaching down the deserted street and
imagines that the passenger must be a geisha. As the rickshaw passes,
the woman inside bows to him and smiles, and he recognizes Kusuoko,
“her pale face exceedingly beautiful in the falling rain.”29 Another day,
she calls on him just as he is squabbling with Kyōko, and he secludes
himself in his study lest she see him in an angry mood, leaving her to
chat briefly with his wife. Subsequently, he goes to her house to apolo-
gize: “The truth is, we were fighting. I don’t imagine my wife was very
cordial to you. I thought it would be rude to expose you to my bitter-
ness, so I hid away until you were gone.”30 In light of Japanese reticence
about disclosing family matters, this was an intimate confession and
indirectly a betrayal of Kyōko. Sōseki concludes his elegiac piece with
the haiku that he composed “in tribute” on learning of Kusuoko’s death
in the newspaper on November 13, 1910. At the time, he was in bed at
the Nagayo clinic, having just returned from his own brush with death
at Shuzenji and easily moved by indications of the evanescence of life:

246   G rass on the W ayside

 Aru hodo no Hurl the mums
kiku nage-ireyo all you can gather
kan no naka ni into the coffin31

On the surface, this haiku is about regretting not having been well
enough to attend Kusuoko’s funeral and offer flowers to her memory,
but it also conveys a deeper regret, and considerable anger, at her death.
Remember that the bitter haiku Sōseki composed when Tose died are
cited as evidence of his forbidden feelings for his sister-in-law. Intriguing
as they are, neither of these examples allows certainty that Sōseki was
in love with one, or both, of these women.

G rass on the W ayside    247

 +
17

The Final Year

The new year was a solemn occasion in 1915 because Japan was still
mourning the death of the empress dowager the previous April, but in
1916, the last year of Sōseki’s life, the ban on celebration was lifted, and
New Year’s Day at “Sōseki manor” was a festive scene in spite of the
rain. Beginning at four in the afternoon, friends including the inner circle
of disciples began to gather at the house, bringing liquor and gifts. The
annual dinnertime repast was served, duck pot-au-feu from Kawatetsu
in Kagurazaka. Each tray came with a side dish of chestnuts. Most of
the guests left around nine, but Komiya Toyotaka stayed and joined the
children in the little annex in the garden that had been converted to a
study room to play a New Year’s game of matching verses. Sōseki, who
usually avoided the annex, put in a rare appearance and joined the game.
In the following weeks and months, Sōseki was beset by the same
pattern of intrusions on his time that had plagued him since he had
ascended to prominence on the literary scene. He had constant visits
from editors and publishers; requests from friends, or friends of friends,
for samples of his calligraphy or paintings to be used as the masthead for
a new magazine or framed and hung on the wall; invitations to lecture
from, for example, Waseda University on the three-hundredth anniver-
sary of Shakespeare (declined); a daily shipment of books and manu-
scripts for review; and endless letters to write, many thanking friends
and well-wishers for gifts of food, persimmons and other fruit, chicken,
smoked fish, and shiitake mushrooms, a delicacy that Sōseki especially
relished, since he had never been allowed to eat his fill as a child.
Not that his crowded days were all drudgery. He enjoyed long walks
and dinner out with his disciples. He attended concerts and frequented
museums; he had been interested since the previous year in the painter
Sesshū (1420–1506) and in Ryōkan (1758–1831), the monk who was both

248  
poet and calligrapher, and he was very pleased when Morinari Rinzō,
his former doctor and friend, sent him two samples of Ryōkan’s callig-
raphy. In mid-January, he attended the winter sumo competition at the
newly built national sports arena five days in a row. Nakamura Zekō
had a box, and Sōseki took advantage of his open invitation to use it
but refused to take Kyōko or the children because, as he put it bluntly,
“something that belongs to someone else isn’t to be used by the family.”
This typical example of intractable adherence to his sense of propriety
vexed Kyōko, who complained that it deprived her of the opportunity to
observe him enjoying the sport except in the caricature that appeared in
the Asahi.
On January 28, Sōseki traveled to Yugawara Hot Springs, a resort
town sixty-five miles southwest of Tokyo below Hakone on the Izu pen-
insula. He had been there once before, at Zekō’s invitation, in November
of the previous year. The ostensible reason for this trip was to take the
baths and receive massage for the numbness in his right arm and hand
that had been bothering him for months. Kyōko impassively recalled an
awkward moment, replicated in Light and Dark, in which she proposed
that he take a nurse along with him to look after his needs while he was
there:

He declined, and when I asked why, he replied that a man and a

woman traveling together wasn’t such a good idea. So I suggested that
he take the oldest nurse that he could find and he said he couldn’t
imagine misstepping at his age, but there was never a guarantee
between a man and a woman that some momentary impulse mightn’t
lead to something, and in the end he went off alone.1

A week later, thinking that he must be lonely, Kyōko decided to sur-

prise him with an unannounced visit to the Amano-ya, the model for
the inn where the final scenes in Light and Dark take place. When she
asked to see her husband, the doorkeeper informed her awkwardly that
he was “with the Nakamura Zekō party,” the first she had heard that
Zekō was also there, and was shown to a room where she found Sōseki
at lunch with Nakamura and another man she didn’t recognize, who was
accompanied by a geisha, “the sort you see in Shinbashi,” Kyōko wrote
disparagingly. Nakamura greeted her politely, and the stranger and the
geisha rose and left the room without a word. “Where are his manners!”

T he F inal Y ear   249

Sōseki grumbled to cover the silence, “running off with his food all over
the table—” The man turned out to be Tanaka Seichirō, who had been a
director of the Southern Manchuria Railway when Zekō had hosted
Sōseki on a trip across Siberia and into Korea in the autumn of 1909.
Later, Tanaka explained that since no one had introduced Kyōko as
Sōseki’s wife when she appeared, he had assumed she was the propri-
etress of a drinking establishment (like O-Tami-san!) and thought it bet-
ter to leave the room with his companion. Although she cannot have
been happy about the surprise that awaited her, Kyōko conveyed no sus-
picion in her memoir that the party was prearranged: “I don’t know
whether Natsume was lonely and contacted Nakamura-san, or whether
Nakamura-san decided to look in on Natsume and stayed on for a few
days.” She did, however, allow herself to observe drily, “Nakamura-san
should have introduced me, but so should Natsume! He was being true
to form when he sat there like a holy man above the fray.”2
Recalling the episode years later, Kume Masao, a writer and briefly a
Sōseki disciple, remembered Sōseki commenting with a chuckle in a
manner that casts a different light on the party at the inn:

“Zekō was too lusty for his own good,” Sensei said with a smile. “He
tells me he’s coming to check on my health, and he invades Yugawara
with five or six beauties in tow, young ones and old ones, and does
me the honor of driving me to distraction every night for three nights.”3

Sōseki may have been exaggerating, or Kume may have fabricated or

misremembered the details, and the meaning of “driving me to distrac-
tion” is unclear. The question that remains—the same question that occurs
when considering the Kyoto sojourn the previous year—was whether
Sōseki merely enjoying himself flirtatiously, which seems clear, or whether
he misbehaved. Infidelity was not necessarily “misbehavior” in the social
contract between husband and wife in Japan in 1916. Even so, the
absence of any unambiguous evidence of philandering in Sōseki’s life
makes the question all the more intriguing. He was, of course, a roman-
tic deep at heart, often bitterly unhappy in his marriage, and both his
fiction and quoted remarks convey what amounts to a longing for pas-
sion and a taste for the illicit, the licentious, and the ribald. A great talker
when he was in the right mood, he knew how to flirt—consider the scene
in Light and Dark (installment 145) between Tsuda and his nurse, almost

250   T he F inal Y ear

certainly based on his own experience at the Nagayo clinic. There is evi-
dence, too, that he had an eye for the ladies. To cite just one example,
Komiya recalled that at the kabuki theater, Sōseki divided his attention
between the stage and the women in the audience, commenting on this
or that beauty as she picked at her lunch from a lacquer box and specu-
lating whose mistress she might be. But he was also subject to powerful
constraints, a fierce adherence to moral principles and “proper” behav-
ior and, not to be minimized, a lifelong insecurity about his physical
being, a variety of self-disgust that was the obverse side of his narcis-
sism. To put it crudely, it is not easy to imagine Sōseki undressing in the
presence of a woman other than his wife. In the end, the biographer
leaves Sōseki’s week at the hot springs understanding that Kyōko has
been offended yet again but unable to say what really happened.
Among “the mountain of books, manuscripts, and letters” awaiting
him in his study when Sōseki returned to Tokyo was the debut issue of
a coterie magazine, New Trends in Thought (Shinshichō). It had been
founded by five aspiring writers who had become friends at the First
Higher School and had studied English or French literature at Tokyo
Imperial University. Naruse Shōichi had contributed the princely sum
of the 100 yen he had received for his translation of Romain Rolland’s
The Life of Tolstoy (1911), and the others had chipped in what they could
afford. Three of them, Kikuchi Kan, Kume Masao, and Matsuoka Yu­zuru
(who married Sōseki’s oldest daughter, Fudeko, in 1918), went on to
establish themselves as serious novelists but remain largely untranslated.
The fourth, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, sometimes called the Maupassant of
Japan, became a major figure in the canon of Japanese writers in Western-
language translations, justly acclaimed for his ironic depictions of char-
acters, in Joyce’s incomparable phrase, “driven and derided by vanity.”4
These writers, eight to ten years younger than Komiya and his friends,
revered Sōseki and had been coming to Thursday salon meetings since
the end of 1915. Together with several others, Akagi Kōhei, Uchida Hyak-
ken, and Watsuji Tetsurō, they constituted a second generation of disci-
ples who, unlike their more fortunate elders, were fated to bask in Sōseki’s
attention for only the single year of his life that remained.
Akutagawa had already published a story, “Rashōmon,” in Imperial
Literature, but it failed to attract attention. It was later turned into a movie
by Kurosawa Akira. The debut issue of New Trends included pieces by
Yeats and Anatole France and a second Akutagawa story, “The Nose,”

T he F inal Y ear   251

in which a Buddhist priest who should know better subjects himself to
physical indignities in order to alter the shape of his nose and is left poi-
gnantly wishing he had left well enough alone. Sōseki read the story
and promptly wrote a letter to Akutagawa. The letter is archived in the
Museum of Modern Japanese Literature attached to the University of
Tokyo, and so is the envelope it came in. It is a vertical envelope meant
to be opened across the top. This one is torn open vertically from top to
bottom, as if Akutagawa had been so excited when he saw the return
address that he could not wait to read what was inside. Its contents must
have exceeded his wildest dreams:

Greetings. I have read your piece and Kume-kun’s and Naruse-kun’s

in New Trends. I thought yours was extraordinary. It achieves a cer-
tain serenity, manages to be comical in an entirely natural way with-
out seeming frivolous, and therein is its elegance. The freshness and
originality of your material are unmistakable; your language is focused
and well wrought. Create twenty or thirty such stories and see what
happens—you’ll be celebrated as a member of our literary establish-
ment without peer. All by itself, “The Nose” may not attract much
attention, or it may be noticed but passed over in silence. Pay no mind,
just keep moving forward. Banishing the crowd from your thoughts is
the best medicine.5

In the September edition of New Fiction, Akutagawa published “Yam

Gruel,” and Sōseki wrote again in praise. The following month, on a rec-
ommendation from Sōseki to his friend Takita Chōin, the editor in chief
of the Chūō kōron, “Handkerchief” was published in that literary monthly,
an accomplishment equivalent to placing a story in the New Yorker.
Sōseki’s letters to Akutagawa hint that he is thinking of him as his
literary heir. In the past, he had praised the work of other disciples,
Suzuki Miekichi’s in particular, but the tone of his letters to Akutagawa
is different, more certain, and suggests that he foresaw that this young
writer was destined for fame. Certainly, his unqualified admiration
launched Akutagawa on a glorious career that was cut short by his sui-
cide in 1927. The month before he died, in a self-derisive suite of fifty-
one vignettes entitled The Life of a Fool, Akutagawa encapsulated the
importance to him of Sōseki’s brief presence in his life. Vignette 10 is
entitled “Sensei”: “He was reading [Sensei’s] book beneath a great oak

252   T he F inal Y ear

tree. Not a leaf stirred on the oak in the autumn sunlight. Far off in the
sky, a scale with glass pans hung in perfect balance. He imagined such
a vision as he read [Sensei’s] book.”6
Early in 1916, Kyōko observed with concern that Sōseki was looking
older; his hair and beard were noticeably grayer, and he tired easily. The
pain in his right arm and hand continued to bother him. On April 23, a
test for sugar in his urine confirmed that he had diabetes (he had been
prediabetic for years). He was diagnosed by a new doctor, Manabe
Kaichirō, who had been a student at Matsuyama Middle School when
Sōseki had taught there and had become an eminent clinician and a
friend. In 1916, the sole “treatment” for diabetes was dietary; now, in
addition to the restrictions he already endured in consideration of his
stomach, he was obliged to give up additional foods he loved, including
rice (in Light and Dark, Uncle Okamoto, a diabetic, indulges in self-pity
as a Japanese man who had to forsake rice in favor of tofu and toast).
The added burden of diabetes appears to have weakened Sōseki’s usual
stoicism in the face of medical calamity. On May 6, in a letter to an itin-
erant Zen monk, he wrote, “As always, I am distressed by my deplor-
able health. I have the feeling I was born into this world in order to be
sick. As I shall be working on a novel again, I shall be busy for some
time.”7 On July 15, he complained to a scholar studying English litera-
ture at Columbia University: “I am, and always have been, sick. The only
difference is that I am sometimes in bed and sometimes up.”8
Sōseki’s stomach had sent him to bed again on May 7 and kept him
there until he felt well enough to get up on May 16. He began writing
the novel that would be his last, Light and Dark (Meian) on May 19 or 20
and worked continuously until illness stopped him on November 22.
In a letter dated May 21 to Yamamoto Matsunosuke, editor of the Asa-
hi’s arts and letters page, he explained that he had been feeling poorly,
in and out of bed, and apologized for his “slightly delayed start” on the
new novel. “But don’t worry,” he continued, “the way things are going, I
should be able to complete an installment each day.”9
Kyōko remembered that in the summer of 1916, Sōseki was writing
well and in unusually high spirits; July and August provided a moment
of respite from his chronic distress. He was enjoying the summer, which
was uncommonly cool that year, and he was even enjoying the hard work
he put in every day at his desk from eight or nine until noon, careful to
limit his hours for fear of aggravating his stomach condition yet again.

T he F inal Y ear   253

His letters are filled with expressions of a rare feeling of content, as in a
note on August 5 to a new disciple, the twenty-seven-year-old philoso-
pher and cultural anthropologist Watsuji Tetsurō:10

Greetings. This is turning out to be a very amiable summer, even the

novel I’m writing every day is costing me no pain. I lie down on a fold-
ing cot I put next to the banana tree in the garden. It’s a grand feeling.
Perhaps due to my physical condition just now, I’m not having to labor
over my writing. On the contrary, it brings me pleasure. To my way of
thinking, all pleasure in the end reduces to the physical. I wonder if
you’d agree?. . . On Thursdays, I’m always here in the afternoons and
evenings. Recently, the gang from New Trends is usually around. Drop
in, why don’t you.11

Notwithstanding his insistence that the writing was going well, craft-
ing a book as minutely observed and unremittingly intense as Light and
Dark in daily installments was beginning to take a toll. By the end of
July, Kyōko noticed that he was losing weight and covered in a rash. His
upper right arm and right hand were bothering him again, and his stom-
achaches were recurring. Fudeko recalled that he became tense and
even more disagreeable as he worked on the new novel. On August 21,
Sōseki wrote the first of two long letters addressed to both Kume Masao
and Akutagawa, who were living in the same boardinghouse in Chiba,
east of the city across Tokyo Bay:

I received a postcard from you both, so I’m going to indulge myself

and write a letter. As usual, I work on Light and Dark in the mornings.
I feel a mixture of pain and pleasure but proceed as if mechanically. I
am grateful above all for the unexpectedly cool weather. Even so,
writing something like this every day, nearly one hundred installments
so far, leaves me feeling vulgarized, so for several days I have made
it part of my daily routine to compose Chinese poetry in the after-
noons, assigning myself one poem a day if possible. Seven characters
a line, hard to come up with. But when I tire of it I stop, so I have no
idea how many I’ll complete. . . . 12 Are you studying hard? Writing
something? I imagine you two intend to represent a new era of writing.
That’s certainly how I imagine your future. Please do become impor-
tant. But be careful not to be in a heedless rush. The critical thing is to

254   T he F inal Y ear

 move forward audaciously like an ox. . . . The cicadas began shrilling
today—autumn can’t be far away.13

Between August 14 and November 20, Sōseki completed seventy-five

verses in Chinese, nearly one-quarter of his lifetime output in that genre.
He was also spending significant time on calligraphy and sumi-ink paint-
ings. Earlier in the year, he had given up utai. In April, he wrote Nogami
Toyoichirō that he was withdrawing from an amateur recital at which
he had been invited to perform selections from “Aoi no ue”:14

April 19: Greetings. Thank you for your invitation to the recital. Unfor-
tunately, I have lately given up practicing and do not intend to partici-
pate in this sort of thing for the time being. Kindly assign the “Aoi no ue”
to someone else. After thinking about it, I realize I simply cannot spare
the time it would take to become anywhere near proficient at utai, and
so the wisest course seems to be to give it up. Moreover, I am altogether
fed up with ——’s recent attitude, his insincerity, and so the timing seems
just right. I have ended by speaking thoughtlessly myself and apolo-
gize for muddying the water so unpleasantly. In haste, Kinnosuke15

Sōseki was referring to Hōshō Shin, his teacher for eight years, whose
name was omitted in the letter as it appeared in the Complete Works,
because he was still alive. The nature of Hōshō’s offense is unknown, but
their relationship had never been entirely amiable. Sōseki might have
been using a contretemps as an excuse to discontinue his utai practice
because he was no longer up to its physical demand on him.
Sōseki’s second letter to Kume and Akutagawa, on August 24, just
three days after the first, is longer still, more rambling, and plaintive:
behind the words one senses a lonely Sōseki loath to end the letter to the
gifted young writers:

I shall write you another letter. Yours to me was so animated it made

even this derelict want to write more to you. In other words, the youth-
ful ardor you communicated has reinvigorated an old man.
Today is Thursday. But this afternoon (it’s 3:30 now), no one is com-
ing. Even Takita Choin-kun, who calls Thursdays the Sabbath and
invariably appears in my study with that round, ruddy face of his, has
written to say he won’t be coming today. So here I am, alone with the

T he F inal Y ear   255

 raucous crickets, reading manuscripts I’ve been asked to read and
writing letters. I’ve been obliged to read something called “From the
Madhouse,” a collection of portraits of assorted lunatics. Some people
write whatever occurs to them. . . .
I admire how much reading you both do. Especially since you read
in order to condemn. (I’m not joking, I’m praising you.) In my view,
inasmuch as our soldiers defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War,
there’s no reason our writers should have to go pale and breathless in
fear and awe of the Russians. I’ve been preaching this to anyone who’ll
listen for some time, but this is the first time I’m bringing it up to you,
so you might as well listen.
Let me know if you come across a good book. And lend it to me
when you’re finished. I’m such a mess these days, I can’t even remem-
ber books I’ve already read. When Akutagawa mentioned D’Annunzio’s
Flame of Life and called it a masterpiece, I said I’d never heard of it.
Then I glanced at the bookshelf behind the desk where I sit, and there
it was. I had certainly read it but I had no memory of what it was
about. If I’d looked inside, I’d probably have discovered my comments
in pencil, but I decided it was too much trouble . . .
I put my pen down a minute and considered what I should write
next; if I keep going, I suppose I could write about all manner of things,
but since there’s nothing so satisfying about that, I guess I’ll stop here,
though it does feel as if I’ve left something out.
Oh yes—
It’s critically important that you become oxen. We all wish to be
horses, but it’s nearly impossible to become entirely an ox. Even a cun-
ning old geezer like me at this moment is only a sort of half-breed
spawn of an ox and a horse.
You mustn’t hurry. You mustn’t muddy up your mind. Come out
fighting and persist. The world knows how to bow its head in the pres-
ence of persistence, but fireworks are accorded only an instant’s mem-
ory. Push hard until you die. That’s all there is to it. . . . An ox proceeds
phlegmatically, with its head down . . .
It’s time to take a bath.
Natsume Kinnosuke.16

Toward the end of the summer, Sōseki’s physical decline began to be

apparent in the holograph of Light and Dark: his hand wavers, the

256   T he F inal Y ear

characters grow fainter, and revisions scrawled between the lines
increase conspicuously. Nonetheless, he was resolved to follow the
novel wherever it should lead him, though he was often heard to lament
his inability to conclude it.
Since the spring of 1914, Sōseki had been corresponding with two
itinerant Zen monks staying at the Yōfuki-ji temple in Kobe, Kimura
Genjō, an acolyte aged twenty-one (twenty-eight letters) and Tokizawa
Keidō, twenty-five (fourteen letters). In August, Sōseki wrote on their
behalf to his friend the publisher Iwanami Shigeo, quoting a letter from
Kimura that reveals an unaffected eagerness to learn that he doubtless
found appealing:

August 14. Greetings. I have received the following letter from a young
Zen monk. “As I’m less busy these days, I’m thinking I’d like to look
into the subject of [Western] philosophy, but I don’t know the first
thing about it and have no idea what books to read. I wonder if I might
ask you for a recommendation? Also, I’ve heard there are various
schools of philosophy—when you have a moment, kindly let me know
which would be the best to pursue.” I’d like to send this person some
books. Do me the favor of selecting several and sending them along.
I’ll reimburse you later.17

The monks had expressed an interest in coming to Tokyo, and in late

September, sick as he was and preoccupied with Light and Dark, Sōseki
invited them to visit for a week of sightseeing. This was unlike him, an
inconvenience he would never have contemplated if spending time in
conversation with genuine Zen practitioners had not intrigued him. His
letters before the trip reveal how cordial and considerate he could be
when the spirit moved him, though he is cautious about overcommitting
himself. His language is avuncular:

[To Kimura]: . . . I understand you’ll be coming to Tokyo next month

with Tomizawa-san. I spoke to my wife last night, and she agreed that
we could manage. I’ll see if I can find a more comfortable place in the
neighborhood, but even if you stayed there instead of with us, [I’d see
to it that] you wouldn’t have to worry about any expenses. As I am still
writing every day until noon, I may not have time to show you around.
But I am free in the afternoons and evenings and will certainly have

T he F inal Y ear   257

 time to talk. If time and this ailing body of mine permit, let’s plan on
visiting one or two places together. Be thinking about where you’d
like to go.18

[To Tomizawa]: Ours is a funny little house, but we’ll do what we can
to make you comfortable. If it doesn’t suit you, you can move to
Zaishō-ji nearby. It’s a nice temple, probably more comfortable than
my place. But moving into another Zen temple won’t give you the expe-
rience of how lay people live, so it might be better for you to stay with
us. Besides, a temple would be cramped. Our place is cramped, too,
but it’s a different sort of cramped and may be easier to endure. I’ll
look around for something better. If you don’t have enough money for
sightseeing in Tokyo, I can give you a little. I don’t imagine monks
have much money; I’m not a wealthy man myself, but I can manage
something for you both. Just understand that I may not have any spare
time to show you around, as I’m working on a novel just now.19

The two monks arrived in Tokyo on the morning of October 23 and

stayed in the annex that the children used for studying for a full week
until October 31. Sōseki went out of his way to accommodate them. He
wrote for permission to show them around the Asahi shinbun, and he
introduced them to his disciples at a Thursday salon on the twenty-sixth.
On the twenty-seventh, Kyōko and Fudeko took them to the movies at
the imperial theater and bought them tickets to go to Nikkō the next day.
On their return, Kyōko took them to the kabuki theater. On days when
she could not accompany them, Sōseki gave them each 5 yen for pocket
money. They returned to Kobe on October 31 and sent gifts and polite
thank-you letters, to which Sōseki responded at once. His letter to
Tomizawa, dated November 15, one of the last letters he wrote, conveys
a vitality that is remarkable for a man who is already gravely ill and has
less than a month to live. The letter concludes on a note of abject humil-
ity that feels ingratiating but is doubtless heartfelt:

It’s a painful thing to say, but I am a foolish man who has realized for
the first time at the age of fifty [forty-nine by Western reckoning] that
I must seek the Way. Wondering when I will achieve this, I am dis-
mayed to think how very distant it still seems. You two are specialists

258   T he F inal Y ear

 in Zen, still a mystery to me, but as you have labored to practice the
Way while I have squandered my fifty years, I can hardly say how
much more fortunate you are than I, how much more distinguished
your purpose is than mine. I commend and venerate your under-
standing. You two are far more precious as human beings than the
group of young men who gather at my house. I realize this is due in
part to their environment—if I were greater, the young men who
gather around me would be become greater. The thought fills me with
regret about my own inadequacy.20

In a postcard written on November 16, Sōseki complained yet again,

to Naruse Shōichi, the translator of Romain Rolland, about his unend-
ing novel:

Akutagawa-kun has become very popular. I imagine Kume-kun’s turn

will come soon. They both are here constantly. Kikuchi [Kan] is work-
ing hard as a journalist and hasn’t had time to visit. I’m dismayed to
report that Light and Dark keeps getting longer. I’m still writing. I’m
sure this will continue into the New Year. Please read it when it comes
out as a book.21

Sōseki did not live to see the New Year. On November 21, he com-
pleted installment 188, the last he would write. At that point, he had
accumulated a lead of twenty installments. The paper published install-
ment 188 on December 14, six days after his death. Readers knew that
the concluding six installments appeared posthumously.
Seven hundred and forty-five pages long in the first edition published
by Iwanami the following year, Sōseki’s last novel, unfinished, was two
hundred pages longer than his next longest, I Am a Cat (1905), and more
than twice the length of anything else he wrote.22 Light and Dark is a
novel of manners, a study of urban life among the emergent bourgeoisie
on the eve of World War I. The encounters between the newly married
couple at its center and the web of characters who encircle them pro-
duce moments of heated emotion—jealousy, rancor, recrimination—that
will surprise English readers conditioned to expect indirectness and del-
icacy, not to mention reticence, of Japanese social behavior. One quality
that emerges vividly is a compulsion verging on desperation, common

T he F inal Y ear   259

to the husband and his young wife, Tsuda and O-Nobu, to preserve
appearances. In that sense, Light and Dark may be read as a minute
study of the paralyzing constraints on self-expression endured by indi-
viduals entangled in family and other social relationships in Japan’s
upper-middle class.23
The drama, what little there is of it, has to do with social status deter-
mined by wealth. The young husband, Tsuda Yoshio, aged thirty-three,
is explicit: “Believing as he did, to put it extremely, that love itself was
born from the glitter of gold, he felt uneasily the necessity of somehow
or other maintaining appearances in front of his wife.”24 Tsuda has mis-
represented his family’s wealth to O-Nobu and now, unable to meet
expenses, must rely on a monthly stipend from his father, who threatens
to cut him off. O-Nobu is forced to misrepresent her circumstances to
her uncle and his family, who have been led to believe that she has mar-
ried well. The ring that glitters symbolically on her finger appears to Tsuda’s
sister to be beyond his means, provocative evidence to her that O-Nobu
is responsible for his extravagance.
Money and status are familiar themes in the fiction written by
Sōseki’s realist contemporaries in the West, particularly in the United
States: W. D. Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, Edith Wharton’s House
of Mirth, and just about anything by Henry James, but certainly Portrait
of a Lady, are just a few of countless examples. The deep revelation of
character that Sōseki achieved in Light and Dark is also reminiscent of
the Western realism of this period: Tsuda and O-Nobu are rendered
with a precision that had no precedent in Japanese literature. If this is
true of Tsuda, an emotional dullard (the critic Hirano Ken described
him as a tsumarananbō, a “nonentity”), it is startlingly true of O-Nobu.
Coquettish but not exactly beautiful (Sōseki alludes to her “small eyes”
thirteen times), O-Nobu is quick-witted and cunning, a snob and narcis-
sist no less than her husband, passionate, arrogant, spoiled, insecure,
vulnerable, naive, idealistic, and, perhaps above all, gallant. Sometimes
she reminds us of a Japanese version of Emma, or Gwendolen Harleth,
or even Scarlet O’Hara (if one can imagine a less than ravishing Scar-
lett). In any event, under Sōseki’s meticulous scrutiny, O-Nobu emerges
as a flesh-and-blood heroine whose palpable reality has few equals in
Japanese fiction. It was this unprecedented degree of interiority that
moved Etō Jun, Sōseki’s biographer, to hail the appearance of Light and
Dark as the “birth of the modern Japanese novel.”25

260   T he F inal Y ear

 Rendering the psychological observation at the heart of Light and Dark
required Sōseki to evolve even further the new language he had been
developing for that purpose. The natural genius of Japanese is a procliv-
ity for ambiguity, vagueness, and even obfuscation; Sōseki needed a
scalpel capable of dissecting a feeling, a compound moment, and even,
as here, a glance:

The glance [O-Nobu] cast in O-Hide’s direction at that moment was

lightly touched with panic. It wasn’t a look of regret about what had
happened or anything of the kind. It was awkwardness that followed
hard on the self-satisfaction of having triumphed in yesterday’s battle.
It was mild fear about the revenge that might be exacted against her. It
was the turmoil of deliberation about how to get through the situation.
Even as she bent her gaze on O-Hide, O-Nobu sensed that she was
being read by her antagonist. Too late, the revealing glance had arced
suddenly as a bolt of lightning from some high source beyond the reach
of her artifice. Lacking the authority to constrain this emergence from
an unexpected darkness, she had little choice but to content herself
with awaiting its effect.26

“We don’t analyze a glance this way,” a Sōseki specialist at Waseda

University declared, “We direct a glance, aim a glance, and that’s as far
as we go!” The professor was suggesting that the focus of this passage
was anomalous. Light and Dark is full of similar passages, realism unfa-
miliar to readers at the time expressed in radically unfamiliar ways.27
Sōseki’s goal was to reveal his characters at a depth hitherto
unachieved, and clearly his emphasis was less on a story—”plot, nefari-
ous name!” James declared—than on surrounding the protagonists with
“satellite characters” whose function is to draw them to the surface.
The plot of Light and Dark is a paltry matter: the novel’s seven hundred
languorous pages proceed in an atmosphere of insistently quotidian, if
highly charged, stasis. Tsuda undergoes surgery for an anal fissure. Dur-
ing the week he spends recovering in bed, he is visited by a procession of
intimates: O-Nobu; his younger sister, O-Hide; his friend Kobayashi, a
ne’er-do-well who might have stepped from the pages of a Dostoyevsky
novel; and his employer’s wife, Madam Yoshikawa, plump, conniving, a
meddler with a connection to Tsuda unknown to the others, who recalls
Madam Merle. In the novel’s longest scene, which approaches fifty pages,

T he F inal Y ear   261

Madam Yoshikawa manipulates Tsuda into acknowledging that he still
thinks about Kiyoko, the woman who left him abruptly for another
man shortly before his marriage to O-Nobu. For reasons of her own, left
unclear, Madam Yoshikawa reveals to Tsuda that Kiyoko is recuperating
from a miscarriage at a hot springs resort south of Tokyo and urges him
to visit her there, volunteering to pay his travel expenses.28
In the final fifty pages, Tsuda journeys to the spa for an encounter
with Kiyoko. Light and Dark terminates with a scene in her room at the
inn, during which Tsuda probes unavailingly for some indication that
she retains feelings for him.
In search of a theme, Japanese and Western critics have leaped at
the doctor’s diagnosis in the opening installment, that curing Tsuda’s
condition will require “a more fundamental treatment.” This has been
read to mean that the crises Tsuda encounters in the course of the novel
will heal in some basic way his social, emotional, and moral infirmity.
But the text offers no corroboration of such a reading. Tsuda suffers, often
as the result of wounds to his vanity, but like many other narcissists, his
pain afflicts him but generally fails to move him toward a deeper under-
standing of himself. By the time we reach the end of the book, we are
likely to feel certain that Tsuda’s focus on himself has destined him to
remain, as it were, in the dark. If there is an overarching theme in Light
and Dark, it is the impossibility of recovery from the suffering in isolation
caused, in Sōseki’s view, by attachment to the self. In that sense, the novel
is vintage Sōseki, an exploration of the conflict between self-interest and
love in which the victory inevitably goes to the former.
Like Sōsuke in The Gate, Tsuda is in quest of self-knowledge to allevi-
ate the uneasiness he carries inside himself. Madam Yoshikawa tempts
him with the possibility that the mystery woman Kiyoko may hold the
key to what he seeks. But the prelude to his actual meeting with Kiyoko
suggests that enlightenment for Tsuda was not Sōseki’s intention. His
journey to the spa deep in the mountains where Kiyoko is staying is long
and fraught with obstacles, the most overtly symbolic of which is the
dark boulder lying in the road in front of his carriage. His experience on
arrival at the inn augurs badly: the building is dark, mostly underground,
and labyrinthine. Shortly after arriving, he loses his way back to his room
in the endless corridors, and his encounter with himself in a mirror just
before Kiyoko’s first appearance at the head of the stairs above him is
not encouraging:

262   T he F inal Y ear

 He looked away from the water and encountered abruptly the figure
of another person. Startled, he narrowed his gaze and peered. But it
was only an image of himself, reflected in a large mirror hanging along-
side the sinks . . .
He was eternally confident about his looks. He couldn’t remember
ever glancing in a mirror and failing to confirm his confidence. He was
therefore a little surprised to observe something in this reflection that
struck him as less than satisfying. Before he had determined that the
image was himself, he was assailed by the feeling that he was looking
at his own ghost.29

The meeting Tsuda finally arranges with Kiyoko, the last scene that
Sōseki was able to write before he collapsed, is a masterpiece of indi-
rection and provocative hints that lead nowhere. We sense that Kiyo-
ko’s apparent serenity may be counterfeit, that she is not so indifferent
to Tsuda as she seems; we are aware as well of her contained anger. But
Tsuda’s confusion when he ponders on the way back to his room the
meaning of her smile is understandable. Choosing not to reveal her,
Sōseki has managed to install Kiyoko as a mystery generating tension
at the heart of the novel.
Light and Dark is also in the shadow of a second, related, mystery or, at
least, ambiguity: the nature of Tsuda’s illness. Here I lay claim to uncov-
ering a “dark drama” with a structuralist analysis no more far-fetched
than Komori’s assumptive reading of Kokoro. Ostensibly, Tsuda is suf-
fering from hemorrhoids (although the word for “hemorrhoid” never
appears). Why, in that case, is he seeing a doctor whose specialty seems
to be sexually transmitted diseases, a fact that is revealed only implicitly
in a scene in the clinic’s waiting room:

The members of this gloomy band shared, almost without exception,

a largely identical past. As they sat waiting their turn in this somber
waiting room, a fragment of that past that was, if anything, brilliantly
colored suddenly cast its shadow over each of them. Lacking the cour-
age to turn toward the light, they had halted inside the darkness of
the shadow and locked themselves in.30

Awaiting his turn, Tsuda recalls unexpected encounters with two men
at the doctor’s office within the past year. One was his brother-in-law,

T he F inal Y ear   263

Hori, a playboy, who seemed uncharacteristically “nonplussed” to see
him. The other was an “acquaintance” with whom he engaged, over din-
ner after leaving the doctor’s office, in a “complex debate about sex and
love,” which had subsequently resulted in a rift between them.
These passages, together with the fact that the medical details Sōseki
provides never point conclusively at hemorrhoids, lead this reader to
speculate indirectly that the undisclosed “friend” may have been Seki,
the acquaintance for whom Kiyoko eventually left Tsuda. Was Seki
infected? Might his illness have been responsible for Kiyoko’s miscar-
riage? What about Tsuda himself, was he immune to the allure of Tokyo’s
pleasure quarter, where he might well have contracted an STD? The fol-
lowing exchange with O-Nobu is an invitation to wonder:

“You stopped off somewhere again today?”

It was a question that O-Nobu could be counted on to ask if Tsuda
failed to return at the expected hour. Accordingly, he was obliged to
offer something in reply. Since it wasn’t necessarily the case that he
had been delayed by an errand, his response was sometimes oddly
vague. At such times, he avoided looking at O-Nobu, who would have
put on makeup for him.
“Shall I guess?”
“Go ahead.”
This time, Tsuda had nothing to worry about.
“The Yoshikawas.”
“How did you know?”31

Sōseki is not quite finished baiting his hook. In his first meeting with
Madame Yoshikawa, “about to explain that his doctor’s specialty was
in an area somewhat tangential to his particular ailment and that as
such, his offices were not the sort of place that ladies would find inviting,
Tsuda, at a loss how to begin, faltered.”32 The effect of this detail is to
call attention to a vague discrepancy involving Tsuda’s illness and his
doctor’s specialty. Finally, in the waiting room, we are told that Tsuda’s
friend, “supposing that he was afflicted with the same sort of illness as
his own, had spoken up without any hesitation or reserve, as if to do so
was perfectly natural.”33 This sentence in Japanese contains its own ambi-
guity. The verb I have translated as “supposing” (omoikomu) can mean to
assume something not unlikely to be mistaken, “to convince oneself.”

264   T he F inal Y ear

To be sure, both lines may be read as negating the possibility that Tsuda
suffers from venereal disease. At the same time, it seems obvious that,
at the very least, Sōseki is playing them contrapuntally against seeds of
doubt he has intentionally planted.
Entangling Hori and Seki and Tsuda would be structurally satisfy-
ing, but there is no hard evidence, only the absence of definitive detail,
on the one hand, and oblique suggestion, on the other. In this way, by
controlling ambiguity, Sōseki keeps observant readers on the edge of
their hermeneutic seats.
If Tsuda is doomed to continue wandering in the fog of his attachment
to Kiyoko, O-Nobu also inhabits a world of illusion, choosing to believe
that her superior cleverness will enable her to have her way in life. Her
formula for happiness, reiterated with the passion of a credo, sounds
simple enough: “It doesn’t matter who he is, you must love the man you’ve
chosen for yourself with all your heart and soul, and by loving him, you
must make him love you every bit as deeply, no matter what.”34
In an ironic scene in which she attempts to persuade her sister-in-law,
O-Hide, who is married to a philanderer, that love must be unconditional,
absolute, and exclusive, she exposes her naïveté and, by implication, the
sense of entitlement that issues from her own egoism. She is aware that
Tsuda’s love—assuming he loves her at all—is a far cry from what she
expects. In the cruelest moment in the novel, tormented by the knowl-
edge that there is, or has been, another woman in her husband’s life,
O-Nobu appeals to him to allow her to feel secure:

“I want to lean on you. I want to feel secure. I want immensely to

lean, beyond anything you can imagine. . . . Please! Make me feel
secure. As a favor to me. Without you, I’m a woman with nothing to
lean against. I’m a wretched woman who’ll collapse the minute you
detach from me. So please tell me I can feel secure. Please say it, ‘Feel
secure.’ ”
Tsuda considered.
“You can. You can feel secure.”
“Truly?”
“Truly. You have no reason to worry.”35

Observing that O-Nobu’s tension has eased, Tsuda feels reprieved and
turns to placating his wife, “abundantly employing phrases likely to

T he F inal Y ear   265

please her.” The reader is stunned to observe that this transparent ploy
is effective:

For the first time in a long while, O-Nobu beheld the Tsuda she had
known before their marriage. Memories from the time of their engage-
ment revived in her heart.
My husband hasn’t changed after all. He’s always been the man I knew
from the old days.
This thought brought O-Nobu a satisfaction more than sufficient to
rescue Tsuda from his predicament. The turbulence that was on the
verge of becoming a violent storm had subsided.36

In contrast to some scenes that feel excessively interpreted, there are

critical moments like this when we discover that the narrator has slipped
out of the room. But we do not need the narrator to explain what seems
clear enough, that O-Nobu’s gullibility is evidence that Sōseki shares Tsu-
da’s contempt for her. At the very least, he is ambivalent about his hero-
ine. Ironically enough, the “new woman” he created in O-Nobu is not
only a paragon of female autonomy demanding to be taken seriously;
she also represents a threat to the homosocial world of “manly com-
rades” with whom Sōseki appears to have felt at home. The source of
the misogyny that runs through his work like an underground river may
well have been the emerging heterosocial norm, the heterosexuality that
O-Nobu champions.
Since its publication in 1917, Light and Dark has inspired endless
conjecture about how Sōseki intended to conclude his novel. The only
notes he left are a four-page outline of the characters and their relation-
ships to one another. The sole reference to the future in the text is
O-Nobu’s prediction to Tsuda that “the day is coming when I’ll have to
summon up my courage all at once . . . courage for my husband’s sake.”37
This has been taken to mean that O-Nobu would travel to the hot springs
to do battle with Kiyoko for Tsuda. The novelist Ōoka Shōhei (Fires on
the Plain) confabulated a confrontation in which O-Nobu accuses her
rival of violating the sisterhood of women, much as the archetypal wife,
O-San, pleads with the archetypal courtesan, Koharu, in Chikamatsu’s
eighteenth-century puppet play, Love Suicide at Amijima. Unlike Koharu,
who sympathizes with O-San, Kiyoko ripostes with her own grief about
being married to a libertine (Seki) and suffering a miscarriage as a result

266   T he F inal Y ear

of his sexual disease (Ōoka is the only Japanese reader I know who
endorses my reading). Under the stress of this impasse, Tsuda begins to
hemorrhage and collapses. Observing O-Nobu tend to him lovingly,
Kiyoko departs.38 Among the writers who have tried to “conclude” the
novel with a full-length sequel, only Mizumura Minae has understood
the deep pessimism that is Sōseki’s primary color. Her 1989 Sequel
(Zoku Meian) begins boldly with the final installment of Light and Dark
and develops the game of cat and mouse that Sōseki began. At moments,
Kiyoko appears on the verge of lowering her defenses; she even declares
provocatively, “I’m afraid of what will happen if I stay here.” Eventually,
Tsuda badgers her into explaining why she turned away from him:
“When all is said and done, I don’t trust you,” she admits. “For example,
here you are, you came all this way. . . . I can’t help wondering if I might
have been betrayed in this same way if we’d gotten together.” These
astringent words, coming from the woman for whom he longs, should
have overcome Tsuda with chagrin, for he is guilty as charged, of betray-
ing his wife. But as always, he is insulated against this kind of pain by
his own self-regard and therefore feels only irritation and anger. Just
then, O-Nobu arrives, but there is no confrontation between the women,
only a moment of excruciating awkwardness. Kiyoko bids the couple
“Farewell!” and returns to the inn, leaving them to suffer in silence.39
Thus Mizumura’s sequel concludes on a note that seems congruent with
the outcome already encoded in Sōseki’s text: Tsuda will not succeed in
freeing himself from the egoism that blinds him, and O-Nobu will con-
tinue to pursue an exalted version of love that she will not ultimately
attain. This is a refrain repeated throughout Sōseki’s works: it is the
contradictory, terrifying, ultimately unaccountable complexity of human
consciousness microscopically examined that made Light and Dark a
landmark in twentieth-century Japanese fiction.

After mailing installment 188 to the paper on the afternoon of Novem-

ber 21, Sōseki attended a wedding banquet at the Seiyōken, the temple
of Western cuisine in Tokyo. He had originally refused the invitation—
he scarcely left the house these days—but the bride’s mother had begged
Kyōko to urge him to attend, and he had finally agreed. It was a long
dinner; following a speech by the university chancellor that lasted an
hour, Sōseki’s favorite rakugo performer, Yanagiya Ko-san, presented his
signature piece, “The Udon-Noodle Man.” Seated at a separate table,

T he F inal Y ear   267

Kyōko watched in alarm as Sōseki, beyond the reach of her control, his
face alight with pleasure as he listened, dug into the bowl of roasted pea-
nuts in front of him. On the way home, she delivered a scolding, but he
insisted he felt fine. That night, his stomach began to bother him. The
following morning, November 22, he had trouble getting up, dragging
himself out of bed only after the children had left for school. He asked
Kyōko for an enema and finally went into his study to work. When the
maid took him his midday medicine, he was slumped forward on his
desk, groaning in pain. On a sheet of manuscript, he had written “[install-
ment] 189,” but the page was otherwise blank. The maid summoned
Kyōko, and she asked whether she should lay out his futon in the study.
Sōseki nodded and said, “This dying business is easy. I’m suffering here,
but I’m also thinking about my farewell poem.”40
That afternoon, Sōseki’s study became his sickroom. In the evening,
he asked for something to eat, and Kyōko gave him three slices of toast.
He scolded her for slicing the bread too thin but shortly vomited it up. A
local doctor was called and he assumed, mistakenly, that the traces of
blood in the vomit had come from Sōseki’s throat. Sōseki asked Kyōko
to summon Dr. Manabe.41
For five days, with Manabe and two gastroenterologists in attendance,
Sōseki slept most of the day as if in a daze, living on small portions of
ice cream and sips of juice. The night of November 27, he sat bolt upright
in bed saying that his head felt weird and shouted, “Throw water on me!
Douse me in water!” When Kyōko, terrified, filled a flowerpot with water
and emptied it on his head, his eyes rolled up and he fell back in a
swoon. The next morning, his abdomen was distended, and the doctors
agreed that he had suffered a hemorrhage in his stomach or duodenum.
That day, for the first time, Kyōko informed a small group of people
outside the family that Sōseki was seriously ill. Komiya, Morita, Suzuki,
Matsune, Abe Yoshishige, Nogami Toyoichirō, Uchida Hyakken, and
several others came to the house. The disciples took turns, two at a time,
staying with him during the night. Dr. Manabe canceled his lectures at
the university to watch over his patient. A nurse who had cared for Sōseki
in the past was also employed.
Sōseki seemed unaware of how ill he was. He asked for his scrap-
book and that morning’s installment of Light and Dark clipped from the
newspaper. Kyōko offered to paste it for him, but he insisted on doing it

268   T he F inal Y ear

himself because she was “too careless with the glue.” In lucid moments,
he wanted to begin work again, but the doctors would not hear of it.
Sick as he was, Sōseki was far from docile: overhearing a conversation
with Suzuki Miekichi about what brand of saké he would like to have,
he called Kyōko to the study and forbade her to provide saké just because
his disciples were staying in the house.
On December 2, Sōseki hemorrhaged again while straining on a bed-
pan and lost consciousness for the second time. He was revived with
repeated injections of camphor and saline solution but remained close
to death. Nakamura Zekō came to see him but was turned away because
Dr. Manabe feared the excitement of a visit might be fatal. On Decem-
ber 4, 5, and 6, Sōseki seemed to rally, and the Asahi ran a misleading
article that he was on the road to recovery. On December 7, his heart
weakened and he was given camphor injections every two to three hours.
The children had heard that taking a photograph can sometimes cure a
person, and to humor them, an Asahi photographer was asked to take
Sōseki’s picture on December 8; Kyōko remembered how frightened she
was when she saw that the face in the picture looked like a death mask.
On the night of December 8, Sōseki hovered; his pulse was erratic,
now sluggish, now racing, but somehow he survived. On the morning of
December 9, Kyōko asked Dr. Manabe if the children should stay home.
Because it was Saturday, a half day at school, the doctor said they could
go, but by midmorning he had changed his mind, and they were sum-
moned home. Fude arrived last, breathless, almost too late: her rickshaw
had overturned on the way from school, and she had had to run the rest
of the way. When Sōseki’s fourth daughter Aiko, twelve years old, entered
the study and saw her father, she burst into tears. Kyōko shushed her,
but Sōseki murmured, his eyes closed, “There, there—It’s all right to cry.”
Nakamura Zekō arrived again and insisted on being allowed to see his
friend. “Natsume,” Kyōko said, “It’s Nakamura-san!” “Nakamura who?”
Sōseki asked. “Nakamura Zekō-san!” “Ah,” eyes closed, “that’s good—”
Later that morning, Sōseki was writhing on his mattress. The doctors
gave him one last saline injection, and he sat up abruptly, tore open his
kimono and cried, clawing at his chest, “Water! Splash water on me, I
can’t be dying now!” The nurse sprayed a mist of water in his face from
her mouth, and Sōseki fell back on the pillow and lay still. “Call every-
one in quickly,” Dr. Manabe ordered. Friends, disciples, and colleagues

T he F inal Y ear   269

from the newspaper who had been waiting in the parlor filed silently into
the study. Kyōko passed around a writing brush soaked in water to those
who wished to enact the ritual of the “final water.” Tsuda Seifū moist-
ened Sōseki’s lips with the brush and collapsed on the bed in tears. Dr.
Manabe had been standing over Sōseki, his fingers on the pulse in his
wrist and a watch in his other hand. Now he placed Sōseki’s hand gen-
tly on his chest and listened with his stethoscope, listening and reposi-
tioning it for what seemed a long time while the crowded room held its
breath. At last, he bowed and said, “The end has come. Please excuse
my inadequacy.” Turning to Kyōko, he prompted her, “The eyes—” Kyōko
placed her hand on Sōseki’s lids and closed them. The time was 6:45 p.m.,
December 9, 1916.
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke was not present at his sensei’s deathbed. He
had just moved to Kamakura to take up a new job as an English instruc-
tor and was unaware of the gravity of Sōseki’s condition. His friend
Kume Masao cabled him from Tokyo. This was the cable in the narra-
tor’s coat pocket in Akutagawa’s second vignette about Sōseki, “Sensei’s
Death”:

13: In the wind after the rain, he walked down the platform of the new
station. The sky was still dark. Across from the platform three or four
railway laborers were swinging picks and singing loudly. The wind tore
at the men’s song and at his own emotions
He left his cigarette unlit and felt a pain close to joy. “[Sensei] near
death” read the telegram he had thrust into his coat pocket.
Just then the 6:00 a.m. Tokyo-bound train began to snake its way
toward the station, rounding a pine-covered hill in the distance and
trailing a wisp of smoke.42

Mysteriously, Akutagawa did not appear that day or the next. He

arrived at the house midday on December 11; he was cloaked in a black
frock coat, unshaven, his hair unkempt, and a wild look in his eyes. He
attended the funeral the next day but was absent from the subsequent
formalities.
At the wake that night, Morita proposed that a mold be taken for a
death mask, and when no one objected, he went to fetch a well-known
sculptor with a scribbled letter of introduction from Ōtsuka Yasuji. The

270   T he F inal Y ear

sculptor arrived with an apprentice and went to work, coating Sōseki’s
face with oil, covering it with a fine mesh, and pouring plaster over it.
When the mesh was stripped away, strands of Sōseki’s beard, unshaven
for weeks, stuck to the plaster and were torn out. Morita was horrified
and regretted having proposed a death mask. In accordance with Kyōko’s
decision, only two bronze masks were cast from the mold, one for the
family and the second for the Asahi (eventually used in constructing the
Sōseki android), and then the mold was destroyed. Though Morita said
nothing, Kyōko sensed that he was offended.
The autopsy indicated that even before the lethal peanuts he had
wolfed down on November 22, the fatal inflammation may have been
triggered by a dinner of thrush marinated in fermented rice that Sōseki
had devoured, bones and all, four days earlier, on November 18. The
thrush, a delicacy, had been sent to him as a gift by a haiku poet who
had studied with Lafcadio Hearn and Shiki and later, at the university,
with Sōseki. Reading the cause of his death, the aristocrat and longtime
Sōseki devotee Matsune Toyōjō was struck by the coincidence that Bashō
had died at the same age as Sōseki, forty-nine, of a stomach ailment
said to have been caused by a meal served to him a few days earlier by
one of his disciples.
The service was held on December 12 at 10 a.m. at the Aoyama Funeral
Hall. The funeral party, shivering in the cold, stayed up in the parlor most
of the previous night for the final leave-taking. Nervous about the time,
Zekō hurried everyone through the dawn ritual of installing the body
in the coffin and arranged for the hearse, a horse-drawn carriage, to
arrive so early that they had to wait an hour at the hall. Zekō was beside
himself when he discovered that the funeral wreath sent by the South-
ern Manchurian Railroad had not arrived.
The rivalry among the inner circle for primacy in Sōseki’s esteem and
affection survived his death. Morita recalled that his protegés, Matsune
and the others, had made their way to Aoyama on the train. Komiya,
however, was treated as if he were a relative and rode along in the car-
riage with the family. Later, Morita reported, Suzuki Miekichi groused
that Komiya was always “looking out for himself.”
There were two reception desks at the hall. Akutagawa sat at one
along with three others, and Kume was at the second with Akagi and
Watsuji. Takita Choin, the editor in chief of Chūō kōron, arrived with his

T he F inal Y ear   271

face flushed and puffy; Murayama Ryūhei, the president of the Asahi
shinbun, was dressed in formal kimono with crest and hakama. When
Mori Ōgai arrived, he surveyed the faces at the table, removed his high
hat, and bowed, placing a large calling card in front of the awestruck
Akutagawa. It read simply Mori Rintarō.
The sermon was a Buddhist text in verse delivered in the Rinzai style
with shouts like claps of thunder designed to startle the audience into
awareness. Akutagawa recalled feeling detached and empty until he saw
Komiya approach the altar to offer incense, leading Sōseki’s youngest
child, Shunroku, by the hand. He began to cry, and looking behind him,
saw that tears were running down Kume’s cheeks.
Sōseki was cremated that afternoon at the Ochiai crematorium. Kyōko
and Sōseki’s brother, Wasaburō, returned the next day to retrieve the
bones; the disciples went along. The remains were buried in a plot that
Sōseki had purchased in Zoshigaya Cemetery when Hinako died.
On December 14, the “seventh-day eve,” Kyōko hosted a small party
at home to thank the writers in the inner circle for their support during
the final days. She served a simple meal, and each of the guests was
presented with a verse written in Sōseki’s hand and reproduced on a
square of fabric, one of the haiku he composed while in the hospital in
Osaka:

inazuma no night after night

yoiyoi goto ya of lightning
usuki-kayu and thin gruel

Less a curious than a sad choice, however apposite, the haiku evoked
the long, dark hours Sōseki had spent alone with his illness.
The last doctor to attend him, Manabe Kaichirō, recalled in his remi-
niscence a “foreign poem” he had read as a child in which a bell that
rang at the bottom of the sea was unheard beneath the crashing waves
until a great man died and the tides paused. “My feeling of love for Sen-
sei,” he wrote, “resided in the sea inside me but was silenced until now
by the constant commotion of life in the trivial world. When the great
man died, the surf stilled, and I could hear the bell of my longing tolling
Sensei’s death.” Sōseki was always afraid when he turned his mind to
what felt to him like the bottomless darkness of eternity that would swal-
low him up without a trace. Surely that existential fear was partly

272   T he F inal Y ear

responsible for driving him to write feverishly until death halted his pen.
“Aah, Masaoka,” he cried out to Shiki as a young man of twenty-three,
“when my casket has been closed and all things are in repose and my
bleached bones are raked smooth, will anyone remember the time when
Sōseki lived?43 Perhaps the answer would have gratified and soothed
him: Sōseki’s death knell still reverberates in Japan.

T he F inal Y ear   273

 Notes

1. Beginnings
1. Ishihara Chiaki points out that adoption was commonplace at the time and
not necessarily a tragedy, as adopted children were able to inherit the estates
of their adoptive parents. In fact, both the third son and third daughter in
the family, Wasaburō and Chika, were also put out for adoption for a period
of time (Chiaki Ishihara, Sōseki no kigōgaku [Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1999], 45).
2. Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū (Complete Works), 18 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami
shoten, 1965–1986), 8:481–83 (hereafter cited as SZ).
3. Taihei o-Edokagami 泰平御江戸鑑 (1842).
4. SZ, 8:467.
5. Ibid., 467.
6. A hakama is a sort of apron worn over a kimono and fastened with a cord
around the hips.
7. SZ, 8:461–62.
8. This venerable shop appears in several of Sōseki’s novels, and it still stands on
the same corner beneath a large sign that proclaims, “Fine saké since 1678.”
9. SZ, 8:444–46.
10. Ibid., 481.
11. According to the old calendar, a boy born on February 9, 1867, was likely
to become a thief, a danger that could be mitigated by using the character
for gold, “Kin” (金), in the given name, hence KIN-no-suke.
12. Michikusa means “grass alongside the road.” See chap. 16, n. 1.
13. SZ, 6:404–5.
14. SZ, 1:339–40.
15. SZ, 8:481.
16. Ibid., 482–83.
17. SZ, 6:554–55.
18. koshu (戸主).
19. Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū, 28 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1996),
26:457 (hereafter cited as SZ2).
20. Quoted in Etō Jun, Sōseki to sono jidai, 4 vols. (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1993),
1:132.

   275
 2. School Days
1. Natsume Sōseki, Spring Miscellany, trans. Sammy I. Tsunematsu (Rutland,
Vt.: Tuttle, 2002).
2. Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū, 18 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1966),
8:117–18 (hereafter cited as SZ). The topic assigned was kigen-setsu, a national
holiday commemorating the ascension to the throne of Emperor Jinmu, the
first emperor of Japan. The first character, “ki,” is correctly written 紀. The
teacher had incorrectly written 記, also pronounced “ki.” The anecdote is an
early indication of the literacy Sōseki had acquired even before he reached
his teens.
3. Terakoya were schools run by feudal domains and housed in Buddhist tem-
ples where the children of samurai were drilled in classical Chinese maxims
they memorized by rote.
4. For the nonspecialist, a slightly laborious explanation seems called for. Chi-
nese and Japanese are unrelated languages. Chinese word order is generally
subject-verb-object, whereas Japanese verbs come at the end of a sentence
and are heavily agglutinated, like classical Greek verbs. Beginning in the
eighth century, documents at the Imperial Court were written in pure Chi-
nese, a written language that had to be painstakingly acquired. Gradually,
an ingenious notation was developed to allow readers to transform the
Chinese into Japanese while reading down a sentence, skipping some words
or phrases and then returning to them, adding inflections at the end and vari-
ous conjunctions along the way. The altered Chinese sentence that resulted,
a Chinese-­Japanese hybrid, could also be written—this was kanbun (literally,
“Chinese text”). There were various kinds of kanbun, ascending in difficulty
as more purely Chinese elements were employed. By the time he got to col-
lege, Sōseki was a master of all kanbun styles.
5. SZ, 16:500.
6. In the fall of 1909, Zekō hosted Sōseki on a six-week railroad tour of Man-
churia and Korea, based on which Sōseki produced a memoir/travelogue
entitled Travels in Manchuria and Korea.
7. SZ, 8:136.
8. For more details, see “Flunking,” an interview, in SZ, 16:500–504.
9. Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū, 29 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1994),
26:485.
10. SZ, 8:136.
11. SZ, 16:604.
12. Ibid., 503.
13. Ibid.
14. SZ, 14:506.
15. SZ, 8:372.
16. SZ, 11:440.
17. SZ, 12:93–109.

276   2 . S C H O O L D A Y S
18. Stephen Dodd suggests that the Whitman critique is an early revelation of
the vividness of the notion of homosexual love in Sōseki’s imagination,
observing that he focuses on the Calamus section of Leaves of Grass, poems
that “offered one of the first sustained discourses in the West on the variabil-
ity of sexual desire” (p. 480). Dodd notes that Sōseki was deeply moved by
Whitman’s phrase “the manly love of comrades” and adduces one of the
few poems he quoted in English,

O you whom I often and silently come where you are that I
May be with you,
As I walk by your side or sit near, or remain in the same room
with you,
Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is
playing within me.

Dodd quotes Sōseki’s comment on the poem, “highlighting the gender of

the poet’s object of desire”: “[This] poem has not been composed with refer-
ence to a woman. To say that one can love a woman but one cannot love men
would be to go against Whitman’s principles.” Curiously, Dodd omits the first
line of Sōseki’s gloss: “Anyone who does not understand this domain cannot
understand Whitman’s poetry” (Stephen Dodd, “The Significance of Bodies
in Sōseki’s Kokoro,” Monumenta Nipponica 53, no. 4 [1998]: 481; SZ 8:106).

3. Words
1. The general. Mildly mocking.
2. Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū, 18 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1966),
16:599–600 (hereafter cited as SZ).
3. Ibid., 601.
4. The sensei. As with “the General,” gentle mockery.
5. SZ, 16:601.
6. In the Meiji period (1868–1912), booklets coaching Japanese poets on how
to comply with Chinese prosody were widely read, and Sōseki and Shiki
were adept at composing within the strictures of prescribed prosody.
7. SZ, 16:600–601.
8. Ibid., 600.
9. SZ, 14:11–13.
10. Ibid., 18.
11. Homosexuality was rampant at First Special Higher School and in Tokyo
Imperial University dormitories. At First Special Higher, although evidence
of dalliance with women might result in a “clenched-fist” drubbing from
student leaders, homosexuality was usually tolerated. This suggests that the
homosocial system identified by Keith Vincent and others was still ascen-
dant at the turn of the century.

3 . W O R D S    277
12. SZ, 14:9.
13. SZ, 14:11.
14. Keith Vincent, “The Novel and the End of Homosocial Literature,” Proceed-
ings of the Association of Japanese Literary Studies 9 (2008): 232.
15. SZ, 16:600.
16. SZ, 14:6.
17. The two characters in the name mean literally, “gargle (with) stones, 漱石.” It
appears in a Tang-dynasty fable designed to illustrate stubbornness and
pride. A civil servant intending to become a recluse declares that he will “pil-
low his head on the river and gargle with stones” (Ch., 枕流漱石). He has mis-
takenly inverted a Chinese expression meaning to renounce the world—­“to
pillow [his] head on stones and gargle with river water.” When someone cor-
rects him, he argues that his mistake was intentional. The fable was included
in a collection of Chinese stories that students in the Meiji period used as a
classical Chinese primer. In taking the name, Sōseki was aligning himself
with the Chinese literati tradition and representing himself as a contrarian.
18. SZ,16:598.
19. Ibid.
20. Komuro Yoshihiro, Sōseki haiku hyōshaku (Tokyo: Meiji shoten, 1983).
21. SZ, 12:565.
22. SZ, 14:21–22.
23. SZ, 11:441–42.

4. The Provinces
1. Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū, 18 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1966),
16:632 (hereafter cited as SZ).
2. Ibid., 605.
3. Quoted in Ara Masato, Sōseki kenkyū nenpyō (Tokyo: Shūei-sha,1984), 158.
4. SZ, 14:65.
5. Ibid., 29.
6. Natsume Kyōko, Sōseki no omoide (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1926), 8–14
(hereafter cited as Kyōko). Ten years after Sōseki died, in 1926, Kyōko dic-
tated a full-length memoir to her son-in-law, the novelist Matsuoka Yuzuru.
The resulting book is a treasure house of information and insight into the
life of the man she lived with for eighteen years. Not all of it is to be taken
literally, however: Kyōko had her own agendas; sometimes she relies on
hearsay; and sometimes her memory fails her. Even so, on balance, her book
is an invaluable resource.
7. SZ, 14:30.
8. Terada Torahiko, Matsune Toyojirō, and Komiya Toyotaka, Sōseki haiku
kenkyū (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1923), 267–68.
9. SZ, 14:77–78.

278   3 . W O R D S
10. Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū, 29 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1996),
29:70–84.
11. SZ, 14:68.
12. Ibid., 72.
13. Kyōko, 20.
14. The “100 verses by 100 poets.” Cards are turned up showing the top or bot-
tom half of a thirty-one syllable tanka (short poem) by a famous poet, and
the holder of the matching half takes the trick.
15. SZ, 14:81.
16. Suga Torao (1864–1943) graduated from Tokyo Imperial University two
years ahead of Sōseki with a degree in German language and literature, the
first to be awarded in Japan. The year after Sōseki arrived in Kumamoto,
Suga returned to Tokyo to begin teaching at the Tokyo First Higher School.
Suga was a skilled calligrapher; the Buddhist name on Sōseki’s grave marker
is in his hand.
17. Kyōko, 37.
18. Ibid., 34.
19. Ibid., 490.
20. Kyōko, 58. Sōseki’s eldest brother, Daiichi, was briefly “engaged” to marry
Ichiyō. The proposal was initiated by Sōseki’s father, who knew Ichiyō’s
father when they both were working for the police. Naokatsu terminated the
negotiation when Ichiyō’s father failed to repay a loan. The thought of Sōseki
and Higuchi Ichiyō as brother- and-sister-in-law is a beguiling fantasy.
21. SZ, 18:17–19.
22. SZ, 14:99.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 99–100.

5. London
1. Quoted in Komori Yōichi, Sōseki wo yominaosu (Tokyo: Chikuma shōbō,
1995), 60.
2. Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū, 18 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1966), 14:
72 (letter to Saitō Agu) (hereafter cited as SZ).
3. Ueda Mannen (Kazutoshi), later acknowledged as the “father of Japanese
linguistics.”
4. Kamei Shunsuke, Komori Yōichi, and others have attributed the mental
anguish and eventual breakdown that Sōseki suffered in London to his
disappointment and shame at having failed—in his own unforgiving view of
himself—to achieve his goal.
5. SZ, 14:149.
6. Ibid.,152.
7. Ibid.

5 . L O N D O N    279
 8. Etō Jun, often a discerning critic, conjectured that the German Mildes “might
have been a Jewish family.” As evidence, he cited “ the spinster’s dark hair
and dark eyes, her mother’s style of life, including repeated international
marriages, and a certain density or intensity of feeling (nōmitsu na) that per-
meated the atmosphere in the household” (Etō Jun, Sōseki to sono jidai, 4 vols.
[Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1993], 2:93). This seems a fine example of a commonly
found Japanese blend of naiveté and ignorance that is almost charming.
9. Kano, Ōtsuka, Suga, and Yamakawa.
10. SZ, 13:39.
11. SZ, 12:20.
12. SZ, 14:155.
13. Ibid., 156–58.
14. Ibid., 156.
15. SZ, 14:174.
16. SZ, 13:32.
17. Any foreigners living in Japan with pride in their hard-earned command of
Japanese have sampled the same variety of humiliation.
18. SZ, 13:173.
19. Ibid., 43.
20. Ibid., 34.
21. Sōseki’s reverential attitude on the occasion of the queen’s death may be
taken as signifying that he was an imperialist, or at least impressed by or
sympathetic to, the notion of “empire.” Additional evidence is to be found
in his observations about the South Manchurian Railroad (1909) and, nota-
bly, in Sensei’s response to the death of the Meiji emperor in Kokoro (1914).
22. SZ, 13:163–66.
23. The first character in Sōseki’s given name, Kin, means “gold.”
24. SZ, 13:167.
25. SZ, 14:176–77.
26. SZ, 13:42–43.
27. Ibid., 57.
28. Ibid., 179.
29. Ibid., 104.
30. SZ, 14:206.
31. SZ, 13:60.
32. Photograph in Sammy I. Tsunematsu trans., Spring Miscellany and London
Essays (North Clarendon, Vt.: Tuttle, 2002).
33. SZ, 13:75.
34. SZ, 14:194.
35. SZ, 9:10–11.
36. SZ, 14:196. Sōseki constantly deprecates his own perseverance and indus-
try in a manner that recalls Samuel Johnson punishing himself for sloth and,
in view of his obsessive diligence and vast output, is no less ironic.
37. SZ, 14:204.

280   5 . L O N D O N
38. In 1908, Ikeda, a professor of chemistry at Tokyo Imperial University, dis-
covered the chemical basis for a new taste he named “umami,” marketed as
“Aji-no-Moto.”
39. SZ, 14:89.
40. SZ. 13:42.
41. See Kamei Shunsuke, Sōseki wo Yomu (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1994), 237–51.
See also Komori Yōichi, Sōseki wo Yominaosu (Tokyo: Chikuma shōbō, 1995),
58–64.
42. SZ, 14:163.
43. Ibid., 189.
44. SZ, 13:70.
45. SZ, 12:18–19.
46. Ibid., 209.
47. Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū, 29 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1996), 29:132.
48. Ibid., 105.
49. Hototogisu (The Cuckoo) was a magazine founded by Shiki and his disciples
in 1896 as a showcase for haiku. Takahama Kyoshi, a haiku poet in his own
right whom Shiki had hoped would succeed him, became the editor in 1898
and expanded the format to include fiction and nonfiction in addition to
poetry. After Shiki’s death, Takahama figured importantly in Sōseki’s life as
friend/disciple and editor. Most of Sōseki’s early fiction, including the serial
version of I Am a Cat, first appeared in Hototogisu.
50. SZ, 14:210.
51. SZ, 11:530–31.
52. SZ, 14:210.
53. Engawa, a narrow porch that encircles a house.
54. SZ, 14:205.
55. SZ, 9:14.

6. Home Again
1. See Etō Jun, Sōseki to sono jidai, 4 vols. (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1970), 2:270.
2. Kyōko’s father had been forced to resign as special secretary to the Upper
House shortly after Ōkuma Shigenobu, the prime minister he had served
(too faithfully, from the opposition’s point of view), was replaced in Novem-
ber 1898 by the second Yamagata cabinet. He had subsequently lost what
savings he had in the volatile new stock market and had become involved
with unsavory money lenders. The stress and shame were doubtless respon-
sible for a rapid decline in his health.
3. Natsume Kyōko, Sōseki no omoide (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1994), 122 (here-
after cited as Kyōko). This episode recalls the scene in Botchan when the narra-
tor finds a list of everything he has eaten for dinner detailed on the backboard
the next day, proof to him that he is being spied on.

6 . H O M E A G A I N    281
 4. For the account that follows, see Kyōko,125–43.
5. “Neurasthenia” (shinkei-suijaku) was a catchall term used broadly at the time
to describe any form of emotional disturbance that included irritability. It
might be translated “nervous prostration.”
6. Kyōko, 127.
7. Sōseki’s symptoms over the course of his life suggest that he may have
suffered from bipolar disease. Writing about the poet Robert Lowell, Kay
Redfield Jamison includes in her descriptions of mania and depression
symptoms like irascibility, feelings of inadequacy, a world that appears grim
and gray, paranoia, delusions, and hallucinations, all of which Sōseki exhib-
ited frequently (Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire [New York: Knopf,
2017]).
8. Kyōko, 133.
9. Ibid.,131.
10. Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū, 18 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1966),
13:107 (hereafter cited as SZ).
11. SZ, 13:104.
12. SZ, 14:227.
13. Komagome, Sendagi-chō 57 (currently Mukōgaoka in Bunkyō-ku). Sōseki’s
contemporary, Mori Ōgai, had lived in this house for more than a year, from
October 1890 to January 1892. Although the house is long gone, a plaque
with text written in Nobel Laureate Kawabata Yasunari’s calligraphy marks
the site. (The house itself has been preserved intact at the Meiji Mura
Museum near Nagoya.)
14. SZ, 14:175.
15. Ibid., 184.
16. Naka Kansuke, “Sōseki sensei to watakushi,” in Sōseki zenshū, 29 vols.
(Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1996), 29:295–96 (hereafter cited as SZ2).
17. Kobayashi Masaki’s film Kwaidan (1964) was a compilation of four of
Hearn’s ghost stories: “Black Hair,” “Woman of the Snow,” “Earless Hōichi,”
and “In a Cup of Tea.” The film won the Special Jury Prize at the 1965 Cannes
Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign
Picture.
18. Hearn’s modern counterpart, the polymath Donald Richie (1924–2013), had
more than a smattering of spoken Japanese, though he was far from fluent,
but like Hearn, he could neither read nor write the language. A journalist,
author, composer, filmmaker, and cultural critic, Richie published forty
books on Japan and wrote hundreds of film reviews during his sixty-six
years of residence in the country. He is justly credited with having intro-
duced Japanese cinema to the West, enabling Western audiences to under-
stand, with his acute and highly informed commentary, what they were
seeing. From the beginning, his writing conveyed perspective and a degree
of irony that Hearn never achieved.

282   6 . H O M E A G A I N
19. It is amusing to recall that in the 1950s, an entire generation of American
high school sophomores developed an indelible aversion to serious litera-
ture after being force-fed Silas Marner.
20. SZ, 14:221.
21. Kaneko Kenji diary, in Togawa Shinsuke, Sōseki tsuisō (Tokyo: Iwanami sho-
ten, 2016), 105.
22. Ibid.
23. Sōseki’s students at the First Special Higher School were also a disappoint-
ment. On June 25, he wrote to Kano Jūkichi to apologize for having over-
slept the previous day and missed the faculty meeting on grades as a result,
adding, “In any event, none of the third form students (my class) passed
the exam I gave them” (SZ, 14:225).
24. SZ, 14:227.
25. To this day, a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony can be heard
almost every week of the year somewhere in Japan.
26. Quoted in Etō, Sōseki to sono jidai, 2:307.
27. SZ2, 29:157, 158.
28. Ibid., 158.
29. Quoted in Itō Sei, Nihon bundan shi, 13 vols. (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1966), 9:13.
30. SZ2, 29:170–74.
31. On May 12, a party was held to welcome the three new members of the fac-
ulty. According to Kaneko Kenji, Lloyd and Ueda Bin conducted themselves
charmingly, but Sōseki was silent and intimidated students with his “bril-
liant, judgmental eyes” (Ningen Sōseki [Tokyo: Ichirosha, 1948]).
32. Morita Sōhei, Sōseki sensei to watakushi, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Tōzai shuppansha,
1947), 1:73–74.

7. I Am a Cat
1. Japanese has (at least) six masculine pronouns for “I.” The Japanese word
in the original title, wagahai, obsolete today, is neither overbearing nor
obsequious but modest, slightly deferential, a down-to-earth sort of choice
that might have been used by a merchant. Since the English “I” is colorless,
I would replace it with “Yours Truly,” a choice that feels ineffably right: Yours
Truly Is a Cat.
2. I have translated Kusamakura as Grass for a Pillow.
3. An aging writer trapped in a loveless marriage, who was unmistakably
Tayama himself, accepts a young woman who is a college student as his
disciple and moves her into the house with his family. He develops a pas-
sion for the girl, which he chronicles in detail. As her mentor, his feelings are
especially taboo and shameful, violating as they do the sacrosanctity of
the teacher-student relationship. When the girl develops a relationship with
a fellow student, the writer goes wild with jealousy, cross-examining her to

7 . I A M A C A T    283
 determine whether a line has been crossed. Eventually, unable to bear her
presence in the house, he sends her home to the country. In the concluding
scene, shocking to readers at the time, the girl departs and he races upstairs
and buries his face in her bedclothes.
4. See William F. Sibley, “Naturalism in Japanese Literature,” Harvard Journal
of Asiatic Studies 28 (1968): 157–69.
5. In February 1908, Tayama Katai, established as a major writer since Bed-
clothes, angered Sōseki by suggesting that he had borrowed his approach to
Sanshirō from Hermann Sudermann’s novel Katzensteg (translated as Cat
Walk). In his rebuttal, Sōseki wrote that Sanshirō might be an inferior work
but was certainly no imitation, and then launched his own attack:

Rather than worrying about fabrications, why not worry about fabri-
cating characters that seem undeniably alive and plots that seem
undeniably natural? The author who fabricates such characters and
plots is a species of creator and deserves to be proud of his creations.
On the other hand, a work that’s fabricated cunningly but artificially
(like Dumas’s Black Tulip, for example) we know is unacceptable with-
out having to wait for Tayama-kun to point it out. But even if there’s
no trace of artifice, writing facts and real-life characters that lack the sub-
stance that moves us to acknowledge their existence is unacceptable to
exactly the same degree (Natsume Sōseki, “Tayama-kun ni kotau,” in
Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū, 18 vols. [Tokyo: Iwanami shoten,
1966], 11:184–86, italics mine [hereafter cited as SZ]).

6. Natsume Sōseki, I Am a Cat, trans. Aiko Itō and Graeme Wilson, 3 vols.
(Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle, 1979).
7. SZ, 1:437.
8. SZ, 1:534.
9. SZ, 12:190.
10. SZ, 16:666.
11. SZ, 1:235.
12. Ibid., 130.
13. SZ, 1:124–25.
14. SZ, 1:148–50. The antipathy to women that underlies this “comic” moment
is found throughout Sōseki’s oeuvre. Keith Vincent argues persuasively that
Sōseki’s sometimes veiled distaste for the female reflects his discomfort with
the shift from a homosexual/homosocial past to the heterosexual future he
associated with the coming of modernity to Japan.
15. SZ, 1:386.
16. Ibid., 524–25.
17. Ibid., 526.
18. Ibid., 534.

284   7 . I A M A C A T
 8. Smaller Gems
1. Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū, 18 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1966),
2:162 (hereafter cited as SZ).
2. Ibid., 170. Etō Jun argued that Sōseki’s emphasis on the sinfulness of adul-
tery was an attempt to mitigate the guilt he continued to feel about his
attraction to his brother’s wife, Tose.
3. SZ, 2:141.
4. Ibid., 14:421. Sōseki concludes with a poignant allusion to his chronic ill-
ness: “If I had a native place with mountains and rivers and a home and,
not least of all, some money, I daresay I’d feel content. But that isn’t to be:
before long I’ll be dying of my stomach illness.”
5. Sōseki’s English translators have chosen to leave the title in the original Jap-
anese, Botchan (see Botchan, trans. J. Cohn [Tokyo: Kōdansha International,
2005]). Botchan, which means “sonny-boy,” is a term of affection often spo-
ken while tousling a youngster’s hair and can be used to connote a cosseted
young man who remains a child. I might be tempted to borrow from the
Yiddish Boychik.
6. In his Theory of Literature (1907), Sōseki declared Austen “the master of real-
ism: Her ability to arrive at the essence of a moment using familiar, every-
day language is unmatched by any male author.” He demonstrated with an
excerpt from chapter 1 of Pride and Prejudice, in which Mrs. Bennet natters
on about the wealthy bachelor about to move into Netherfield Park to her
husband, whose affectionate skepticism escapes her entirely, and
comments:

What Austen is depicting here is not simply a meaningless conversa-

tion between an ordinary couple. Nor is she merely focused on con-
juring before our eyes a contemporary slice of life. No one who can
read will fail to observe that within this passage she has brought the
character of the husband and wife to life so vividly that they leap off
the page (SZ, 9:365–70).

7. Ishihara Chiaki proposes an alternative reading. He characterizes the pro-

tagonist as the prototypical second son—jinanbō—a “symbol” that recurs
throughout Sōseki’s works and is a reflection of Sōseki’s own pain as the
second son after his two elder brothers died. In Japan, the second son is
commonly stereotyped as “happy-go-lucky” because he is exempt from the
expectation that he will take over the family and ensure a prosperous future.
Ishihara conversely emphasizes “the grief of the second son.” He asserts that
the second son’s only place in the family is as a “spare”—he uses the Eng-
lish word—a stand-in for the first son in case he is unable to take his place
as head of the family. The second son is accordingly a “marginal man”
deprived of any identity inside the family except as a substitute and impelled
to seek an identity elsewhere. Ishihara argues that Botchan seeks his

8 . S M A L L E R G E M S    285
 identity in the anger, the brashness, the boastfulness, and the defiance that
characterized his father as a “child of Edo,” an Edokko. In Ishihara’s read-
ing, Botchan’s hidden motive for proudly recounting his tale of failure at a
provincial middle school is to demonstrate that he possesses the tempera-
ment of an Edokko, inherited from his father, and the values of an Edokko,
handed down by his adoring maid, Kiyo, an inheritance that makes pos-
sible the reconnection to the severed bloodline of a lost family. Ishihara
concludes that Sōseki’s novella is not about the adventures of an Edokko
in Shikoku but about Botchan’s pilgrimage in search of the Edokko—the
family—inside himself. He points to the opening line as a clue to Botchan’s
longing: “Since I was a child, the recklessness I inherited from my father has
caused me nothing but trouble” (SZ, 2: 241, italics mine). Interestingly, the
thematic relevance of the line, Botchan’s insistence on his inheritance, is
masked in the English translation: “From the time I was a boy, the reckless
streak that runs in my family has brought me nothing but trouble” (13).
See also Ishihara Chiaki, Sōseki no kikōgaku (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1999),
45–70.
8. The most recent translation, by Meredith McKinney (2008), retains the Jap-
anese title, Kusamakura, which signifies nothing to an English reader. In his
earlier translation (1965), Alan Turney pulled an obscure phrase from the
text for his English title, The Three-Cornered World. These are mystifying
choices, since the original Japanese translates easily enough, “Pillow of
Grass” or, even better, “Grass for a Pillow,” which evokes the traveler’s expe-
rience and sometimes means simply “on the road.”
9. SZ, 2:387.
10. Ibid., 526.
11. Ibid., 488.
12. Ibid., 395. Perhaps it was partly the painter’s insistence on detachment that
made Grass for a Pillow Glenn Gould’s favorite book (replacing The Magic
Mountain). He read the English translation in 1967 and became obsessed;
he is said to have read the entire book aloud to his cousin over the tele-
phone in two nights. The two books at his bedside when he died were the
Bible and his heavily annotated copy of Grass for a Pillow (Damian Flan-
nigan, “The Three-Cornered World of Glenn Gould and Natsume Sōseki,”
Japan Times, February 14, 2015).
Thomas Mann details the notion of artistic detachment with his won-
derful eloquence. Here is the young artist, Tonio Kroger:

—only the stimulation of our corrupted nervous system, its cold ecsta-
sies and acrobatics, can bring forth art. One simply has to be some-
thing inhuman, something standing outside humanity, strangely
remote and detached from its concerns, if one is to have the ability or
indeed even the desire to play this game with it, to play with men’s
lives, to portray them effectively and tastefully . . . For the fact is:

286   8 . S M A L L E R G E M S
 all healthy emotion, all strong emotion lacks taste. As soon as an
artist becomes human and begins to feel, he is finished as an artist
(Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Stories, trans. David Luke
[New York: Bantam Classics, 1988], 199–200).

13. SZ, 2:464.

14. Ibid., 396.
15. Ibid., 547.
16. SZ, 16:543–55.
17. SZ, 14:491–92.
18. SZ, 15:570 (letter to Yamada Kosaburō).
19. SZ, 9:16. Sōseki’s word of thanks to his mental illness may have been face-
tious, but he was on to something whether he knew it or not: in her book on
Robert Lowell, the psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison writes of the “well-
established link between bi-polar disorder and creativity” (Robert Lowell:
Setting the River on Fire [New York: Knopf, 2017]).

9. The Thursday Salon

1. This anticipated the famous note that the short story master Akutagawa
Ryūnosuke pasted to the lattice door in front of his house: “Hard at work;
apologies to visitors” (忙中謝客).
2. The other side had a powerful coterie of its own, the Ryūdo-kai, named after
a French restaurant in Ryūdo-chō where meetings were held. Members
included Tayama Katai, Shimazaki Tōson, Kunikida Doppō, and Iwano
Hōmei. Whereas Sōseki and his disciples were affiliated with Tokyo Impe-
rial University and published in the Asahi shinbun (and for a time controlled
the arts in that paper), Tayama and his cohorts were associated with Waseda
University and published in the Yomiuri shinbun.
3. Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū, 18 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1966),
14:876 (hereafter cited as SZ).
4. Quoted in Nakajima Kunihiko, Natsume Sōseki no tegami (Tokyo: Daishūkan
shoten, 1994), 142.
5. Kin-yan sensei. Here, as in some of his letters to Shiki, Sōseki is referring to
himself coquettishly. To the first syllable (character) of his given name, “Kin,” he
has added the diminutive “yan,” the Kyoto-dialect version of “chan.” The effect
is soft, like a dog rolling over on its back to have its belly rubbed, strikingly
at odds with the unapproachable persona he projected in the classroom.
6. SZ, 14:317–20. Suzuki’s letter met with a fate that was cause for hilarity
inside Sōseki’s circle. Several days after it had arrived, Sōseki was in his
study with a friend when the house was robbed. The guest’s cap and Sōseki’s
rubber raincoat were discovered missing, and so was the thick white enve-
lope containing the letter. The next morning, the gardener found it trailing
across the garden all the way to the fence. Where it stopped, the thief had

9 . T H E T H U R S D A Y S A L O N    287
 deposited the traditional memento, a bowel movement, and had used the
last foot of the letter as toilet paper. According to Komiya, Suzuki first
learned of this from Kyōko, who remembered the look of distress on his face.
Thereafter, whenever the subject came up in Sōseki’s presence, he would
scowl and fall silent, no doubt, Komiya thought, feeling sorry for Suzuki.
7. SZ, 14:326.
8. Ibid., 390–91.
9. Ibid., 391.
10. Sōseki is referring to himself in the third person.
11. SZ,14:392.
12. Natsume Kyōko, Sōseki no omoide (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1994), 176.
13. SZ, 14:400–401.
14. Ibid., 388 (postcard to Morita Sōhei).
15. Ibid., 493.
16. Ibid., 348.
17. Morita Sōhei, Sensei to watakushi, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Genjitsusha, 1947), 1:123
(hereafter cited as MS).
18. SZ, 14:480.
19. MS, 1:221.
20. The small house he was renting had been occupied during the year before
her death in 1896 by Higuchi Ichiyō, a coincidence that earned Morita a
measure of envy and even respect from his fellow writers in the salon.
21. In the following account, I have relied heavily on Teruko Craig’s excellent
translation of Hiratsuka’s autobiography, In the Beginning, Woman Was the
Sun (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 89–139.
22. Morita had asked Raichō to bring his love letters to her so that he could
burn them. He got the idea from D’Annunzio’s novel of a love suicide, The
Triumph of Death, which he read raptly.
23. Hiratsuka, In the Beginning, 120.
24. SZ, 14:687.
25. Ibid., 727.
26. Ibid, 740.
27. Ibid., 741.
28. SZ, 1:27.
29. Quoted in Itō Sei, Nihon bundan-shi, 13 vols. (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1978), 9:217.
30. SZ, 14:490.

10. A Professional Novelist

1. See Stephen Dodd, “The Significance of Bodies in Sōseki’s Kokoro,” Monu-
menta Nipponica 53, no. 4 (1998): 496.
2. Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū, 18 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1966),
14:532–33 (hereafter cited as SZ).

288   9 . T H E T H U R S D A Y S A L O N
 3. Natsume Kyōko, Sōseki no omoide (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1994), 185 (here-
after cited as Kyōko).
4. Beginning in January 1897, serialization in the Yomiuri shinbun of Ozaki
Koyo’s novel The Gold Demon created a national sensation.
5. SZ, 14:506. The letter was addressed to Takida Tetsutarō, an editor at Chūō
kōron who had been chosen to convey the offer to Sōseki.
6. SZ, 11:11–20.
7. Futabatei Shimei (Hasegawa Tatsunosuke, 1864–1909) was a brilliant trans-
lator of Turgenev and other Russians and a novelist in his own right. Float-
ing Clouds (Ukigumo), was an early attempt at realism that failed. Twenty
years later, in 1906, Futabatei serialized a second novel in the Asahi, A Face
Remembered (Sono omokage), which was popularly received but disappointed
him. After a third attempt the following year, Mediocrity (Heibon), Futabatei
abandoned fiction and accepted a job as foreign correspondent for the Asahi
in St. Petersburg. He died aboard ship in the Bay of Bengal on his way home
in 1909. A gifted writer, Futabatei was ultimately unable to break free of the
conventions of nineteenth-century “frivolous writing” that stood between
him and the realism he longed to achieve.
8. Ikebe Sanzan was the formidable managing editor of the Tokyo Asahi shin-
bun. He was born and raised in the seditious Kumamoto area of southern
Kyushu, and his father died fighting in the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 along-
side the martyr Saigō Takamori. Over the years, he proved to be one of
Sōseki’s most steadfast supporters.
9. Murayama Ryūhei was the publisher of the Asahi.
10. SZ,14:557–58.
11. In 1906, Sōseki had been unimaginably productive, completing the second
half of I Am a Cat, as well as Grass for a Pillow, Botchan, The Heredity of Taste,
and The 210th Day.
12. SZ, 14:559–60.
13. SZ, 11:584–85.
14. Recent critics have read political and social-sexual significance in Sōseki’s
valorization of a figure like Saigō Takamori. A martyr to the imperial cause,
Saigō stands as a symbol of imperialism. In his stoic, samurai way, he also
epitomizes the macho ideal at the heart of the man-and-man homosocial
system that was being replaced by the dominant heterosexuality associated
with the coming of modernity. Accordingly, ascribing integrity and honor to
him is seen as reactionary.
15. SZ, 11:493–96.
16. Quoted in Etō Jun, Sōseki to sono jidai, 4 vols. (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1970),
4:38.
17. He wrote with a Pelikan fountain pen, one of two he had just purchased at
Maruzen. As always, he used sepia ink, preferring it to blue or black, which
he disliked. Sōseki’s disciples treated his writing instruments with venera-
tion. When he grew tired of a pen or wore it out, they retired it respectfully

1 0 . A P R O F E S S I O N A L N O V E L I S T    289
 and gave it a title as though it were royalty: Sōseki wrote The Poppy with
“Pelikan the First.”
18. SZ, 14:589.
19. Ibid., 587.
20. Ibid., 626.
21. Ibid., 632–33.
22. Invitations to the second soirée went to Mori Ōgai, a writer whose original-
ity placed him shoulder to shoulder with Sōseki, Izumi Kyōka, and Tokuda
Shūsei. Koda Rohan, Shimazaki Tōson, and Kunikida Doppō were among
those invited to the third evening.
23. On May 22, 1911, Sōseki attended a performance of Hamlet at the Imperial
Theater. He arrived late and left early but saw enough to convince him that
Tsubouchi’s translation was unperformable:

It is regrettable that Professor Tsubouchi, in attempting to be exces-

sively faithful to Shakespeare, has been unfaithful to his Japanese
audience. He has created this contradiction by coining outlandish
Japanese words to express exactly what Shakespeare says. A funda-
mental quality of Shakespeare’s plays is the impossibility of render-
ing them in Japanese. In the moment he resolved daringly to translate
them nonetheless, he cast us Japanese aside. . . . Professor Tsubouchi
must decide whether to translate Shakespeare faithfully and give up
performance or to perform the plays and become an unfaithful trans-
lator. (SZ, 11:287–88)

24. SZ, 3:27–28.

25. Ibid., 388.
26. Ibid., 419–22.
27. SZ, 14:604–5. Sōseki’s summary judgment comports with Komori Yōichi’s
explanation for Fujio’s death. According to Komori, Fujio had to die because
she ignored the agreement between her father and Munechika’s father that
she would marry Munechika and instead chose Ono for her future husband.
He argues that her lack of compliance challenged the values that functioned
as the basis of identity inside the “homosocial system” that united the males
in her family. Her choice of a poet (Ono) as a future husband was espe-
cially bewildering from the masculine perspective. Inside a homosocial soci-
ety, women were expected to be pragmatic and materialistic, not poetic.
Manly communication was achieved in kanbun; Fujio and Ono’s “purple”
overheated dialogues were repugnant. In sensibility and all her choices,
Fujio was “the other,” outside the homosocial pale: her sensibility and all
her choices were incomprehensible. For that reason, her mother, who was
aligned with the men in the family, characterized her as the “enigma.” See
Komori Yōichi, Sōseki wo yominaosu (Tokyo: Chikuma shōbō, 1995), 178–83.
28. SZ, 3:428–29.

290   1 0 . A P R O F E S S I O N A L N O V E L I S T
29. Sōseki probably meant that The Poppy was entirely outside the domain of
the confessional fiction in ascendance at the time.
30. SZ, 15:295–96.
31. Kyōko, 202.
32. SZ, 14:585.
33. The Sōseki Manor Museum, a model of the house constructed to scale,
opened at the original site, now Sōseki Park, in September 2017.

11. Sanshirō
1. Matsu no uchi is the period when pine wreaths and garlands were displayed.
After 1945, the interval was whittled down to three days.
2. This episode was later described by a number of the writers present, but I
have relied on Kyōko’s recollection (Natsume Kyōko, Sōseki no omoide
[Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1994], 210–15).
3. Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū, 18 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1966),
2:334 (hereafter cited as SZ),.
4. Nogami Toyoichirō, “Sōseki sensei to utai,” in Sōseki zenshū, Sōseki zenshū
geppō, (Monthly newsletters for the 1929 edition of the Collected Works), 129.
5. Abe had graduated from the philosophy department of Tokyo Imperial Uni-
versity in 1906 and soon embarked on a career as philosopher, professor,
and politician. He was one of the group of four disciples known as “the
princes of the Sōseki circle.” (The others were Komiya, Morita, and Suzuki
Miekichi.) The Japanese literature scholar Reiko Abe Auested, a professor
at the University of Oslo, is his granddaughter.
6. Nogami, Sōseki zenshū geppō, 128.
7. Director Kurosawa Akira borrowed Sōseki’s concept for his 1990 film Dreams,
replicating even the one-line preface to each sequence, “This is what I
dreamed.”
8. SZ, 14:714.
9. Ibid., 711.
10. Ibid.
11. Morita Sōhei, Sōseki sensei to watakushi, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Genjitsusha, 1947),
2:60–65.
12. Among the books Sōseki carted home from England was the complete works
of Turgenev. Mineko and her effect on Sanshirō recall Zinaida, the heroine
of First Love.
13. SZ, 4:256.
14. Incidentally, Henry James, who met Ruskin as a young man in 1869, was
also a student. In The Art of Fiction (1885), referring to “the community of
method of the artist who paints a picture and the artist who writes a novel,”
James emphasized the connection between the author and “his brother of

1 1 . S A N S H I RŌ    291
 the brush,” a notion that Sōseki had come to on his own and likely had in
mind in the scene with Sanshirō and the painter.
15. SZ, 4:65–66.
16. Ibid., 134–35.
17. Mineko’s choice of a husband outside her circle of acquaintance recalls
Komori’s vision of Fujio. Her otherness bewilders her friends: from their per-
spective, she is certainly a “stray sheep.”
18. SZ, 4:15.
19. Ibid., 87.
20. Ibid., 56.
21. Ibid., 57–58.
22. Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū (SZ2), 29 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten,
1997), 29:406.
23. The diary also exemplifies a dynamic in Japanese relationships that the
psychiatrist Doi Takeo labeled amae, an infantile dependence on the benev-
olence of a senior figure, an expectation of indulgence that is normally
gratified.
24. Kinkikan, Tokyo’s first movie house (1891–1918).
25. Komiya was in love with someone else, who turned out to be promised to
another (rather like the heroine in Sanshirō). In fact, two of the young writ-
ers in the salon, Kume Masao and Matsuoka Yuzuru, were rivals for Fudeko’s
hand. She married Matsuoka in 1918, two years after her father’s death.
26. Terada’s doctoral dissertation was on the acoustics of the shakuhachi, a long
bamboo flute.
27. Another occasion when Sōseki blew up at the maids, accusing them of plot-
ting again him, and dismissed them all?
28. On the playwright and novelist Leonid Andreyev. Komiya studied him in
German translation.
29. An assistant professor of physics at Tokyo Imperial University since Janu-
ary, Terada left in March to study geophysics in Berlin. He continued his
research the following year in Stockholm, Paris, England, and the United
States, returning to Japan in 1911.
30. Serge Elisséeff (1889–1975) was a Russian fluent in eight languages who was
admitted to Tokyo Imperial University in Japanese literature and became
the first Westerner to graduate in Japanese literature in 1912 and subse-
quently the first Western graduate student. While in Tokyo, he was on the
periphery of the Thursday salon. After teaching in Petrograd, he served as
the chief interpreter at imperial Japan’s embassy in Paris. In 1934, Harvard
offered him a professorship in Far Eastern languages; he was the first direc-
tor of the Harvard-Yenching Institute and founded and chaired the depart-
ment until his retirement in 1956. His most famous student, Edwin
Reischauer, described him as “the father of Far Eastern Studies in the U.S.”
31. Serialized between June 27 and October 14, 1909.

292   1 1 . S A N S H I RŌ
 12. A Pair of Novels
1. Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū, 18 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1966),
4:524 (hereafter cited as SZ).
2. Ibid., 564–65.
3. Ibid., 568.
4. Ibid., 610.
5. Ibid., 620.
6. Ibid., 622.
7. SZ, 4:345.
8. Ibid., 313–14.
9. SZ, 376. The reference to William James, whom Sōseki had been reading
since his London days, is significant. Needless to say, the emphasis on con-
sciousness and, more generally on psychology, that distinguishes And Then
is a testimony to James’s influence.
10. SZ, 4:438.
11. Ibid., 536.
12. Ishihara Chiaki develops an alternative interpretation of And Then by apply-
ing to Daisuke his concept of the second son as a “spare” or “marginal” man.
Like Sōseki himself, two of Daisuke’s elder brothers have died, making him
the “second son” to his surviving brother, Seigo. Consequently, in Ishihara’s
reading, Daisuke has been excommunicated from his own family: whereas
all the male heirs have first names that begin with the character for “integ-
rity,” “Sei”—Seinoshin, Seigo, Seitarō—the first character in Daisuke’s name,
“Dai,” means “substitute.” Ishihara argues that in the process of his excision
from the family, a consequence of his superfluity, Daisuke has been “re-
genderized” as a female. (He asserts that the same fate befell Sunaga in Until
Beyond the Summer Solstice and Kenzō in Grass by the Wayside). Ishihara finds
ample evidence of this: like a mistress, Daisuke is a “kept man,” allowed to
live in a separate house on a stipend provided by the family with only the
degree of freedom the family grants him. In addition, his father is planning
for him, as if he were a daughter, a “strategic marriage” into a wealthy family.
Ishihara reads explicit proof that Daisuke’s gender has been altered in a
scene in a bathhouse when he admires himself in a mirror:

He carefully brushed his teeth, taking pleasure, as always, in their

regularity. He stripped and scrubbed his chest and back. Whenever
he moved his shoulders or lifted his arms, his flesh exuded a thin layer
of oil, as if it had been massaged with balm that was carefully wiped
away. This, too, gave him satisfaction. . . . Stroking his full cheeks two
or three times with both hands, Daisuke peered into the mirror. His
motions were precisely those of a woman powdering her face. And in
fact, he took such pride in his body that had there been the need, he

1 2 . A P A I R O F N O V E L S    293
 would not have hesitated to powder his face. (Natsume Sōseki, And
Then, trans. Norma Field [Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies,
University of Michigan, 1997], 3)

What is this, Ishihara asks, if not a male impersonating a female? He

concludes in an argument as assumptive and far-fetched as it is clever, that
And Then is not, as it is usually regarded, a love story. Instead, it is the
chronicle of an individual attempting, by loving Michiyo, to regain a male
self in opposition to the logic of his family, which has castrated him (Ishi-
hara Chiaki, Sōseki no kikōgaku [Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1999], 60–65, 177–80).
13. SZ, 4:659.
14. Ibid.,763–64.
15. Ibid., 773.
16. Ibid., 774–76.
17. American readers may find it hard to imagine Yasui allowing the truth to
emerge without a word to his close friend, but in the context of Japanese
social reticence, that was, and still would be, entirely natural.
18. SZ, 4:789–90.
19. Ibid., 794–95.
20. Ibid., 854.
21. SZ, 14:810.
22. Sōseki’s own copy of Zarathustra in English translation is heavily
annotated.
23. Morita Sōhei, Sōseki sensei to watakushi, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Genjitsusha, 1947),
2:160.
24. SZ, 4:864.

13. Crisis at Shuzenji

1. Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū, 18 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1966),
14:816 (hereafter cited as SZ).
2. Ibid., 822.
3. Sōseki’s choice of doctors says something about his social standing: Dr.
Nagayo Shōkichi, Japan’s preeminent gastroenterologist, had trained in
Munich for seven years and was not available to just anyone.
4. SZ, 13:483–84.
5. July 3 letter to Togawa Shūkotsu, SZ, 14:838.
6. SZ, 13:501.
7. “Natsume Sōseki ron,” Shinchō, July 1910, 15.
8. Ibid., 5.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 9.
11. SZ, 13:524.
12. Ibid., 525.

294   1 2 . A P A I R O F N O V E L S
13. Ibid., 526.
14. Natsume Kyōko, Sōseki no omoide (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1994), 232 (here-
after cited as Kyōko).
15. Ibid., 233.
16. SZ, 8:308–13.
17. See Morita Sōhei, Sōseki sensei to watakushi, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Genjitsusha,
1947), 2:185–90.
18. SZ, 13:559.
19. Ibid., 560.
20. Ibid., 571.
21. For example, a text that no young Japanese could hope to decipher: Lie xian
zhuan (Lives of the Immortals, 列仙伝).
22. SZ, 13:288.
23. Quoted in Etō Jun, Sōseki to sono jidai, 4 vols. (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1993), 4:364.
24. Ibid., 566.
25. Shibukawa Genji, another Asahi editor, had been admitted to the Nagayo
clinic himself with some sort of stomach illness. He was released long before
Sōseki.
26. SZ, 15:6–7.
27. SZ, 13:579.
28. Hereafter, “Recollecting” (Omoidasu koto nado).
29. SZ, 8:280.
30. Ibid., 282.
31. Ibid., 284.
32. Ibid., 285–86.
33. Ishihara Chiaki includes the phrase in what he calls a “Sōseki mythology”
promulgated by his disciples, notably Komiya Toyotaka (Ishihara Chiaki,
Sōseki no kikōgaku [Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1995], 7–11).
34. SZ, 8:327–28.
35. SZ, 12:711.
36. Kyōko, 267.
37. Ibid., 266.
38. Ibid., 282.
39. Morita, Sōseki sensei to watakushi, 2:219.
40. SZ, 15:33.
41. Quoted in Etō, Sōseki to sono jidai, 4:383.
42. SZ, 15:54.
43. Quoted in Etō, Sōseki to sono jidai, 4:386.
44. Morita, Sōseki sensei to watakushi, 2:221.
45. SZ, 11:263.
46. In 1994, shortly after his Nobel Prize for Literature had been announced,
Ōe Kenzaburō caused a stir by declining to accept Japan’s highest cultural
award, the Imperial Order of Culture. “I won’t recognize any authority, any
value higher than democracy,” Ōe sanctimoniously explained. Although the

1 3 . C R I S I S A T S H U Z E N J I    295
 stakes were higher in this case, the incident evokes the doctoral degree affair,
especially since everyone knew that the government had been caught off
guard by the awarding of the Nobel Prize and had added Ōe’s name to the
list of Order of Culture recipients at the last minute. Ōe almost certainly con-
siders himself Sōseki’s direct heir, and one must wonder whether his own
defiance was inspired by his predecessor’s position. (Incidentally, critics on
the Left asked why, in Ōe’s case, it was acceptable to receive an award from
the hand of the Swedish king but not from the Japanese emperor.)

14. A Death in the Family

1. Remember that Hiratsuka’s father had extracted a promise from Morita that
he would never again write about their disastrous affair.
2. Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū, 18 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1966),
13:612 (hereafter cited as SZ).
3. Morita Sōhei, Sōseki sensei to watakushi, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Genjitsusha, 1947), 2:227.
4. SZ, 13:635.
5. SZ, 11:344.
6. SZ, 12:718.
7. SZ, 13:664.
8. SZ, 15:105.
9. Quoted in Ara Masato, Sōseki kenkyū nenpō (Tokyo: Shūei-sha, 1984), 705,
n. 28.
10. Throughout this period of mourning, Sōseki refers repeatedly to practicing
difficult passages from the nō play Morihisa, about a slain warrior who rises
from the dead to recriminate against his assailants in life. At times like this,
he seems to have taken refuge in the demands of utai.
11. Gyōtoku Jirō was a student of Sōseki’s at the Fifth Higher School in Kuma-
moto and subsequently a disciple.
12. SZ, 13:668–69.
13. Ibid., 670–74.
14. Natsume Kyōko, Sōseki no omoide (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1994), 307–8 (here-
after cited as Kyōko).
15. Onbō means crematory and cemetery workers who were treated like untouch-
ables in the Edo period. The job was hereditary.
16. This is the origin of the taboo against using two sets of chopsticks to lift a piece
of food: retrieving bones at the crematorium is the only instance when two
(family members) may both use their chopsticks to grip and lift a bone together.
17. SZ, 13:673.
18. Kyōko, 310.
19. SZ, 13:672–78.
20. SZ, 15:120.
21. SZ, 5:189.

296   1 3 . C R I S I S A T S H U Z E N J I
22. Ibid., 192.
23. Ibid., 199.
24. Ibid., 193.

15. Einsamkeit
1. Natsume Kyōko, Sōseki no omoide (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1994), 299 (here-
after cited as Kyōko).
2. Ibid., 310.
3. Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū, 29 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1999–
2004), 29:530 (hereafter cited as SZ2).
4. Ibid., 520.
5. Ibid., 530.
6. Ibid., 536, 537.
7. Natsume Sōseki, The Wayfarer, trans. Beoncheon Yu (Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle, 1967).
8. SZ2, 13:747.
9. Ibid., 754.
10. SZ2, 5:466–68.
11. Ibid., 505–6.
12. Ibid., 512–13.
13. See Reiko Abe Auestad, Rereading Sōseki (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998), 4.
14. SZ2, 5:527.
15. Ibid., 710–11.
16. Ibid., 720.
17. SZ2, 15:341.
18. Natsume Sōseki, Kokoro, trans. Edwin McClellan (Washington, D.C.: Regn-
ery, 1957).
19. In his 1971 work, The Anatomy of Dependence, Doi Takeo declared that he
knew of “no literary work that portrays so accurately the nature of homo-
sexual relations in Japanese society as Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro (quoted in
Keith Vincent, Two-Timing Modernity [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Asia Center, 2012], 89).
20. SZ2, 6:10–11.
21. Ibid., 96.
22. Ibid., 142.
23. Ibid., 252.
24. Ibid., 248.
25. Ibid., 267.
26. Ibid., 288.
27. Ibid., 54.
28. Ibid., 41.
29. Recall the youngest son’s distress in Ozu Yasujirō’s Tokyo Story when he fails
to return home in time to be with his mother at her death.

1 5 . E I N S A M K E I T    297
30. SZ2, 6:34.
31. Ibid., 282.
32. Komori Yōichi, “Kokoro wo seisei suru Ha-to [heart],” Seijō kokubungaku,
March 1985). For a useful summary of details of the debate, see Sakaki
Atsuko, Recontextualizing Texts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia
Center, 1999), 29–54.
33. Etō Jun, “A Japanese Meiji Intellectual: An Essay on Kokoro,” in Essays on
Natsume Sōseki’s Works (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, 1972),
65. Translated by Keith Vincent in Two-Timing Modernity, 95–96.
34. SZ2, 6:5, italics mine.
35. Ibid., 194.
36. Fascinatingly, Edwin McClellan in his translation omits this telltale line:
“Whenever the memory of him comes back to me now, I find that I think of
him as ‘Sensei’ still. And with pen in hand, I cannot bring myself to write
of him in any other way” (McClellan, trans., Kokoro, 1). Since McClellan’s
Japanese was famously fluent, he cannot have misread the line and must
have chosen to delete it. Perhaps he saw the implication of an invidious com-
parison and wanted to avoid it. A similar deletion in a key scene that fol-
lows reinforces that possibility (see n. 41). Meredith McKinney approximates
the line awkwardly: “It would also feel wrong to use some conventional
initial to substitute for his name and thereby distance him” (Natsume
Sōseki, Kokoro, trans. Meredith McKinney [New York: Penguin, 2010], 3).
37. In May 1988, Miyoshi Yukio, by then professor emeritus at Tokyo University
(and my teacher there from 1963 to 1965), disputed Komori’s structuralist
reading in a stodgy article with a wonderful title, “Was (Dr.) Watson a
Betrayer?” (Watosan wa haishinsha ka). The contemporary reader, he argued,
experiencing Kokoro in daily installments, could not be expected to know that
Sensei would refer to his friend with the initial “K” until much later in the
novel. Komori and others easily refuted his objection by characterizing the
opening lines as a classic example of foreshadowing, which the reader could
indeed be expected to recall when coming later upon Sensei’s “I shall call
him K.”
38. McClellan, trans., Kokoro, 213–14.
39. McKinney, trans., Kokoro, 148–49.
40. SZ2, 6:25, italics mine.
41. Once again, McClellan obliterates the (intended?) nuance of the scene:

“It would be so nice if we had children,” Sensei’s wife said to me. “Yes,
wouldn’t it,” I answered. But I could feel no real sympathy for her. At my
age, children seemed an unnecessary nuisance.
“Would you like it if we adopted a child?”
“An adopted child? Oh, no,” she said, and looked at me (McClellan trans.,
Kokoro, 17).

298   1 5 . E I N S A M K E I T
42. SZ2, 6:96, italics mine.
43. See Vincent, Two-Timing Modernity, 102.
44. Ibid., 102–5. I suppose my reading relegates me to the group of old-guard
reactionaries that includes Miyoshi and Etō and his close friend Edwin
McClellan. I am not entirely persuaded that the student is now living with
Sensei’s wife and has had a child with her, but I concede the narratological
evidence that points toward that possibility. This is not the only example of
Sōseki’s burying thematic hints of importance so deeply they are likely to
go undetected by the reader (see Light and Dark in particular). If I were to
object to anything in Komori’s critique, echoed by Ishihara Chiaki, it would
be their attempt to imagine an epilogue in which the student proclaims that
he has learned from Sensei and will not repeat his mistakes. This assumes,
in the absence of textual evidence, that Sōseki intended the student’s behav-
ior following his “mentor’s” death to represent a victory, a positive shift
from man-and-man homosocial society to modernity represented by het-
erosexual society in which women were to be taken seriously. In view of
Sōseki’s antipathy, the uneasiness with heterosexual love that appears
throughout his oeuvre, it seems unlikely that he would celebrate the stu-
dent’s emancipation into modernity.
45. The independence that Kyōko demonstrated in her memoir when she was
not deferring, as well as her intermittently outspoken criticism of her hus-
band, earned her notoriety as an undutiful wife.
46. SZ2 15:308.
47. SZ2 8:424–25.

16. Grass on the Wayside

1. Michikusa is a tough word to translate. Literally it means “grass that grows
alongside the road,” hence McClellan’s choice (Grass on the Wayside, trans.
Edwin McClellan [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969]). As an idiom,
with “stopping to eat grass—” implied, it connotes stopping and spending time
on the way to a destination, “tarrying” perhaps. Neither choice seems to work
as a title for the novel in question any better than the Japanese Michikusa.
2. See, for example, Edwin McClellan, Two Japanese Novelists (Rutledge, Vt.:
Tuttle, 2004), 59.
3. There is abundant evidence that Sōseki drew heavily on his own experi-
ence in writing I Am a Cat. In a letter to Suzuki Miekichi written on the last
day of the year 1905, Sōseki refers to the episode about the mischievous
students at the boys’ school behind Sneeze’s house:

I’m thinking it would provide me some good material if they would

come to the house to protest. The dormitory is right next door, and
when the students come back at night, they make a ruckus that

1 6 . G R A S S O N T H E W A Y S I D E    299
 disturbs everyone in the neighborhood. They’re at it tonight. Next
time I’ll grab a couple by the scruff of their necks. I’m thinking what I
could do to make the principal show up. If there aren’t scraps and com-
motions, material for Cat gets scarce (Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū,
18 vols. [Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1966], 14:349 [hereafter cited as SZ]).

4. SZ, 13:370.
5. Ibid., 296.
6. SZ, 6:312.
7. Ibid., 493–94.
8. Ibid., 584–85.
9. Ibid., 592.
10. The range of Issōtei’s art and his refined tastes were echoed in the postwar
years by Teshigahara Sōfu, the founder of the Sōgetsu school of flower
arrangement, and by Teshigahara Hiroshi, his son, who was, in addition, a
potter and a director.
11. See SZ, 13:759–63.
12. Dating from the Edo period, a chaya was a combination restaurant and
entertainment venue to which geisha were summoned to entertain male
guests at elaborate dinner parties. Since an immovable double standard
made it impossible for a geisha to marry well, her fondest hope was finding
a patron willing to set her up in her own establishment.
13. See O-Tami’s memoir about this period, published in 1917 in the February
edition of the magazine Shibugaki, “Notes on Encounters in the Capital”
(Raku nite, o-me ni kakaru no ki).
14. See SZ, 13:762–64.
15. Gion is the Kyoto equivalent of Tokyo’s Ginza. It contains bars, cabarets,
and teahouses and still is the best place to sightsee geisha, an endangered
species.
16. Seifū Tsuda, Sōseki and Ten Disciples: Stepping on the Tiger’s Tail (Tokyo:
Meibundō, 1967).
17. See Natsume Kyōko, Sōseki no omoide (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1994),
352–64.
18. Ibid., 355.
19. Ibid., 358.
20. Ibid., 360.
21. SZ, 15:454.
22. SZ (geppō) 15:118.
23. SZ, 15:463.
24. Ibid., 464.
25. Ibid., 462.
26. Sōseki uses “professional” to denote unflatteringly a woman whose métier
is creating an environment designed to be entertaining to men.
27. SZ, 15:66–467.

300   1 6 . G R A S S O N T H E W A Y S I D E
28. The rumors were that Sōseki had his heart set on Kusuoko, who was said
to have requited his love, and then relinquished her to his friend, very much
as Daisuke cedes Michiyo to Hiraoka in And Then (Kosaka Susumu, Sōseki
no ai to bungaku [Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1974]).
29. SZ, 8:472.
30. Ibid., 473.
31. Ibid.

17. The Final Year

1. Natsume Kyōko, Sōseki no omoide (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1994), 371 (here-
after cited as Kyōko).
2. Ibid., 372.
3. Kume Masao, The Wind and the Moon (Tokyo: Kamakura bunkō, 1947).
4. In 1935, Kikuchi Kan, the editor in chief of Bungei shunjū, an important lit-
erary monthly that he founded, established the Akutagawa Prize in his
friend’s name. It remains the most prestigious literary prize in Japan and
has been the gateway to serious consideration as a major writer.
5. Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū, 18 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1966),
15:536 (hereafter cited as SZ).
6. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories, trans. Jay
Rubin (New York: Penguin, 2006), 191.
7. Ibid., 553.
8. Ibid., 565.
9. Ibid., 554.
10. In 1912, his last year in the philosophy department at Tokyo Imperial Uni-
versity, Watsuji elected to write his graduation thesis in English so that the
Russian-German philosophy professor Raphael von Koeber could read it.
11. SZ, 15:569.
12. Keith Vincent has suggested that “writing in Chinese poetry was for Sōseki
associated with a lost homosocial world. The novel, by contrast, was asso-
ciated with the modernity he saw all around him” (“The Novel and the End
of Homosocial Literature,” Proceedings of the Association of Japanese Literary
Studies 9 [2008]: 235).
13. SZ, 15:575–76.
14. A “possession play” attributed to Mokuami Zeami (1363–1443) and based
on a terrifying scene from The Tale of Genji (and one of Mishima Yukio’s
Five Modern Noh Plays). In 1938, in Cambridge as an exchange professor on
a government stipend similar to Sōseki’s, Nogami lectured on Zeami and
introduced Aoi no ue to the anglophone world.
15. SZ, 15:549.
16. Ibid., 578–80.
17. Ibid., 573.

1 7 . T H E F I N A L Y E A R    301
18. Ibid., 591.
19. Ibid., 592.
20. SZ, 15:603–4.
21. Ibid., 605.
22. Natsume Sōseki, Light and Dark, trans. John Nathan (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2014). For an earlier translation, see Light and Darkness,
trans. V. H. Viglielmo (Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle, 1972).
23. The word for self-restraint, enryo, appears a remarkable sixty times. The
companion term, temae, “deference,” appears twenty times.
24. Natsume Sōseki, Light and Dark, trans. John Nathan, 249 (SZ, 8:374).
25. The book has had detractors from the time it appeared. Several prominent
American scholars of Japanese literature have disdained it. Donald Keene,
a pioneer of Japanese literature studies, wrote: “I confess it bores me from
beginning to end. It is not only exasperatingly uninteresting in its plot, but
ponderous in tone; moreover, it is that rarity among Japanese artistic works,
a prolix and explanatory novel that relies little on the traditional practice
of suggestion” (Dawn to the West [New York: Columbia University Press],
347). Jay Rubin, one of Murakami Haruki’s preferred translators, pronounced
it “one of the most tedious exercises in the language, a tired old white ele-
phant” (Natsume Sōseki, The Miner, trans. Jay Rubin [Stanford, Calif.: Stan-
ford University Press, 1988], afterword, 181). Even that paragon of gentile
taste, Edwin McClellan, excluding it from his study of Sōseki, called it “the
most tedious of Sōseki’s later novels” and added, “There is not a line in it
that touches me” (McClellan, Two Japanese Novelists: Sōseki and Tōson [Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1969], 59).
26. Light and Dark, 274 (SZ, 7:413).
27. For a linguistic analysis of the structure of Light and Dark, see Reiko Aues-
tad, Rereading Sōseki (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998), 149–66. Auestad
demonstrates that Sōseki resorted to an unfamiliar (unnatural) sentence
structure in an attempt to create an omniscient (“non-focalized”) narrator
capable of critical, objective, and multiple points of view.
28. Madam Yoshikawa suggests that a trip to visit Kiyoko will be “the best pos-
sible treatment for O-Nobu” and explains ambiguously, “Just watch, I’ll
teach O-Nobu-san how to be a better wife to you, a more wifely wife” (Light
and Dark, 311 [SZ, 7:479]). Some Japanese critics have interpreted this to
mean that O-Nobu must be taught, however painfully for her, that her
emphasis on the quality of the love she receives from Tsuda is an unseemly
attitude for a wife, who instead should focus on helping her husband main-
tain favor with his relatives (see Ōe Kenzaburo, Saigo no shōsetsu [Tokyo:
Kōdansha, 1994], 161). Komori Yōichi argued that Sōseki felt compelled to
dispatch Fujio in The Poppy because she had chosen the man she wished to
marry in defiance of the males in her family. Viewed inside the framework
of Komori’s argument, O-Nobu’s transgressions are more egregious: she mar-
ried Tsuda without even consulting her family; and while she is concerned

302   1 7 . T H E F I N A L Y E A R
 with appearances, she is capable nonetheless of asserting herself bravely,
outrageously, in accordance with her own desires. In the context of a homo-
social system, she manages to violate all the rules that are supposed to
govern acceptable wifely behavior and is thus a candidate for humiliation
and other forms of punishment.
29. Light and Dark, 387 (SZ, 7:608–9).
30. Ibid., 54 (SZ, 7:52).
31. Ibid., 48 (SZ, 7:43).
32. Ibid., 46, (SZ, 7:39).
33. Ibid., 54, (SZ, 7:53, italics mine).
34. Ibid., 177 (SZ, 7:253).
35. Ibid., 326 (SZ.7:506–7).
36. Ibid., 328 (SZ, 7:509).
37. Ibid., 339 (SZ, 7:525).
38. Ōoka Shōhei, Shōsetsuka Natsume Sōseki (Tokyo: Chikuma shōbō, 1988),
425–29.
39. Mizumura Minae, Zoku Meian (Tokyo: Chikuma shōbō, 1990), 260–61.
40. Kyōko, 392.
41. The following account of the last days is based on Natsume Kyōko’s recol-
lections corroborated and augmented by Kume Masao, Morita, Komiya,
Matsune, Akutagawa, and others.
42. Akutagawa, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories, trans. Jay Rubin, 192.
43. SZ, 14:21–22.

1 7 . T H E F I N A L Y E A R    303
 Selected Bibliography

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Ara Masato. Sōseki kenkyū nenpyō. Tokyo: Shūeisha, 1984.
Etō Jun. Natsume Sōseki. Tokyo: Keisō shōbō, 1965.
——. Sōseki to sono jidai. 4 vols. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1970.
Ishihara Chiaki. Sōseki no kigōgaku. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1995.
Ishihara Chiaki and Komori Yōichi. “Sōseki Kokoro no genkō o yomu.” Bun-
gaku 3, no. 4 (October 1992): 2–12.
Itō Sei. Nihon bundanshi. 13 vols. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2010.
Karatani Kōjin, Koike Seiji, Komori Yōichi, Haga Tōru, and Kamei Shunsuke.
Sōseki wo yomu. Tokyo: Iwanami semina–bukkusu 48, 1994.
Komiya Toyotaka. Natsume Sōseki. 3 vols. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1953.
Komori Yōichi. “Kokoro ni okeru hanten suru ‘shuki.’ ” In Kōzō to shite no katari,
415–40. Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 1988.
——. “Kokoro wo seisei suru Shinzo (ha-to).” Seijō kokubungaku. March 1985.
Komori Yōichi, Ishihara Chiaki, and Karatani Kōjin. Sōseki wo yominaosu. Tokyo:
Chikuma shōbō, 1995.
——. “Taidan: Nihon ni tojirarenai sekai de tsūyō suru Sōseki no tankyū o.” Sōseki
kenkyū, no. 1 (1993): 4–34.
Miyoshi Yukio. “Watosan wa haishinsha ka: Kokoro saisetsu.” Bungaku 56 (May
1988): 7–21.
Miyoshi Yukio and Karatani Kōjin. “Taidan: Sōseki to wa nani ka.” Kokubun-
gaku: kaishaku to kyōzai no kenkyū 34–35 (April 1989): 6–22.
Mizumura Minae. Zoku Meian. Tokyo: Chikuma shōbō, 1990.
Morita Sōhei. Sōseki sensei to watakushi. 2 vols. Tokyo: Genjitsusha, 1947.
Nakajima Kunihiko and Nakajima Yūko. Natsume Sōseki no tegami. Tokyo:
Taishūkan shoten, 1994.
Natsume Kyōko. Sōseki no omoide. Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1994.
Natsume Sōseki. Sōseki zenshū [Complete Works]. 18 vols. Tokyo: Iwanami sho-
ten, 1965–1986.
——. Sōseki zenshū. 29 vols. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1999–2004.
Noami Mariko. Natsume Sōseki no jikan no sōshutsu. Tokyo: Tōkyō daigaku shup-
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Ōoka Shōhei. Shōsetsuka Natsume Sōseki. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1988.

English Sources
Auestad, Reiko Abe. Rereading Sōseki: Three Early Twentieth Century Japanese Nov-
els. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998.
Dodd, Stephen. “The Significance of Bodies in Sōseki’s Kokoro.” Monumenta Nip-
ponica 53, no. 4 (winter 1998): 473–98.
Fowler, Edward. The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishōsetsu in Early Twentieth-­Century
Japanese Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Fujii, James. Complicit Fictions: The Subject in Modern Japanese Prose Narrative.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Hibbett, Howard. “Natsume Sōseki and the Psychological Novel.” In Tradition
and Modernization in Japanese Culture. Edited by Donald Shively, 305–46.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971.
James, Henry. The Art of Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Jameson, Frederic. “Sōseki and Western Modernism.” Boundary 218 (Fall 1991):
123–41.
Karatani Kōjin. Origins of Modern Japanese Literature. Edited and translated by
Brett de Bary. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993.
McClellan, Edwin. Two Japanese Novelists: Sōseki and Tōson. Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle,
2004.
Miyoshi Masao. Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel. Berkeley:
­University of California Press, 1974.
Natsume Sōseki. And Then. Translated by Norma Moore Field. Rutland, Vt.:
­Tuttle, 2011.
——. Botchan. Translated by J. Cohn. Tokyo: Kōdansha International, 2005.
——. The Gate. Translated by Francis Mathy. London: Peter Owen, 1972.
——. The Gate. Translated by William F. Sibley. New York: New York Review of
Books, 2013.
——. Grass on the Wayside (Michikusa). Translated by Edwin McClellan. Chicago:
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 Index

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to images.

Abe Yoshishige: career of, 291n4; and torrid moments in, as new to
death of Sōseki, 268; and going-away Japanese fiction, 168; writing of, 163,
party for Morinari, 106, 196–97; as 166, 233
“prince of Sōseki circle,” 291n4; And Then, Daisuke character in:
Sōseki’s interest in utai and, 156; and emotional dysfunction of, 173–74;
Sōseki’s mental illness, 214 final madness of, 171, 174; insomnia
“About Masashige” (Sōseki), 12 of, 173; learned cynicism of, 174; as
adoption: as commonplace at time, Meiji intellectual caught between
275n1; of other Natsume children, feudal and modern worlds, 171–72,
275n1 173–74; psychological quirks of, as
adoption of Sōseki: adoption by Shiobara Sōseki’s own, 172; as second son,
family, 1; first set of adoptive parents, 293–94n12
1; reasons for, 1–3. See also Shiobara Aoi no ue (Zeami), 255, 301n14
family architecture, Sōseki’s early interest in,
Ainsworth, William, 107 16–17
Akagi Kōhei, 251, 271 Areopagitica (Milton), Sōseki’s difficulty in
Akutagawa Prize, 301n4 teaching, 34
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke: correspondence Arthur (king of Britain), Sōseki stories on,
with Sōseki, 252, 254–55, 255–56; 108–9
and death of Sōseki, 270, 271, 272; Asahi shinbun: affiliation of Sōseki and
early stories by, 251–52; on First disciples with, 287n2; circulation of,
Special Higher School students, 94; as 138, 145; and death of Sōseki, 269;
follower of Sōseki, 251, 252–53; Life of editors of, and Thursday Salon, 156;
a Fool, 252–53; and New Trends in Ikebe’s resignation from, 203; and
Thought magazine, 251; Sōseki on, Morita’s Autobiography, 199, 200, 204;
252, 259 and Morita’s Black Smoke, 131–32;
The Anatomy of Dependence (Doi), 297n18 and Ōtsuka Kusuoko, Sōseki’s
Andrews, Charles, 51 interventions on behalf of, 246;
android Sōseki figure, x Sōseki’s tour of, for visiting Buddhist
And Then (Sore kara, Sōseki), 167–74; monks, 258
Asahi shinbun serial reprint of, x; Asahi shinbun, Sōseki as salaried writer
autobiographical elements in, 301n28; for: and cultural column, editing
isolation caused by individualism as of, 182; negotiation of contract,
theme in, 167, 170–71; plot of, 167–71; 137–41; press coverage of, 145; and
suppressed passion of disrupted past resignation, submission and retraction
as source of dramatic tension in, 176; of, 203–4; salary, 138, 140; serial

   309
Asahi shinbun (cont.) Black Smoke (Morita). See Baien (Black
publication of The Poppy, 144, 153; Smoke, Morita)
serial publication of “Recollecting and “Blighted Leaves” (Morita), Sōseki’s
Other Matters,” 191; serial publication critique of, 125–26
of Sanshirō, 156, 165; serial reprints of “Bloody Tower” (Sōseki), 107–8
Sōseki novels, x; and Sōseki’s health Botchan (Sōseki): autobiographical
crisis in Shuzenji, 185, 187, 188, 189– elements in, 42, 110, 232, 281n3; and
90, 190–91; and Sōseki’s health crisis Botchan as second son, 285–86n7;
on Osaka lecture tour, 202; Sōseki’s echoes of Sōseki’s paranoia in, 281n3;
introduction essay (“On Joining the plot of, 110; popularity of, 109;
Asahi”), 142–44; and Sōseki’s publication history of, 109, 115;
lecture tour, 200–202; and Sōseki’s Redshirt character in, 42, 110;
resignation of University position, 142; sophisticated style of, x; title of,
and Sōseki’s stay at Nagayo Clinic, 285n5; utai in, 155; writing of, 90,
182; and stress, effect on Sōseki, 109–10
144–45 Brett, Harold and Mrs., 54, 62, 63
Auestad, Reiko Abe, 218, 302n25 Brice, Agnes, 52
Austen, Jane: influence on Sōseki, x, 110; The Broken Commandment (Shimazaki),
Sōseki on, 285n6 124
autobiographical elements in Sōseki’s Bungaku-ron (Sōseki). See A Theory of
fiction, 90; in And Then, 172, 301n28; Literature (Bungaku-ron, Sōseki)
in Botchan, 42, 110, 232, 281n3;
creative reuse of, 232–36; critics on, calligraphy: Masaoka Shiki’s practice of,
209; in Grass for a Pillow, 111; in I Am 23; and naming of Sōseki’s first child,
a Cat, 97–98, 232, 299–300n3; vs. 45; Sōseki’s practice of, 20, 72, 189,
“I-novel”tradition, 232, 234–35; in 193, 238, 242, 255
Light and Dark, 250–51, 253; presence Cambridge, England: Nogami Toyoichirō
in most works, 232; Sōseki’s in, 301n14; Sōseki’s visit to, 51
transformative use of, 209. See also career of Sōseki: desire for literary life, 47;
Grass on the Wayside, autobiographical early aimlessness of, 33, 47; in
elements in journalism, consideration of, 35;
Autobiography (Jijoden, Morita), Yomiuri shinbun offer of daily column,
controversy surrounding, 132, 136–37, 138. See also Asahi shinbun,
199–200, 204 Sōseki as salaried writer for; teaching
Autumn Storm (Nowaki, Sōseki), 115, 135, career of Sōseki
136 Cat Walk (Katzensteg, Sudermann), 284n5
“Avocation and Vocation” (Sōseki), 201 Chamberlain, Basil Hall, 82
character, Sōseki’s deep revelations of: in
Baien (Black Smoke, Morita), 128, 131–32, Botchan, 110; in I Am a Cat, 97; in Light
166; controversy surrounding, 132, and Dark, 260–61, 267; as new to
199–200, 204 Japanese fiction, ix; in Sanshirō, 157;
Baien incident (Morita-Hiratsuka Sōseki on, 284n5; in And Then, 167
suicide pact), 127–30; newspaper character of Sōseki: and admiration of
coverage of, 130; repercussions of, future generations as Sōseki’s prime
130–31; Sōseki’s involvement in, 128, concern, 118; as charming on occasion,
130, 131 xii, 182–83, 250–51, 256; childrens’
Bedclothes (Futon, Tayama), 90, 283–84n1, views on, 45–46, 211–12; and conflict
284n5 of feudal and modern worlds, 142,
bitterness about life: in Botchan, 110; in 289n14; as demanding and superior, xi;
I Am a Cat, 92, 99; in Sōseki, increase effect of childhood on, 1; and
with age, 167; Sōseki on his fame, early interest in, 17; heroic
development of, 114 transcendence of, xii; hypochondria,

310   I ndex
 172; increasing bitterness with age, 114, 257; with Komiya Toyotaka, 109;
167; as irascible and violent, xii, 45–46; Komiya Toyotaka on, 118; with Kume
misanthropy of, 1; morbid fear of Masao, 254–55, 255–56; with Mori
death, 172, 272–73; narcissism of, 98, Ōgai, 119; with Morita Sōhei, 118, 125,
172; poor health and, xi–xii, 202–3, 126, 127; with Nagai Kafu, 119; with
213; self-deprecation, 280n36; and self- Nishikawa Issōtei, 241–43; with
esteem, 5, 120–21; Shinchō magazine Nomura Denshi, 204; with Ōtsuka
article on, 182–83; Shuzenji health Kusuoko, 246; with pair of Zen
crisis and, 193–94; susceptibility Buddhist monks, 257–59; with
to praise, 120–21, 126. See also Shimazaki Tōson, 119; with Suga
autobiographical elements in Sōseki’s Torao, 64, 78, 85, 152; in summer of
fiction; mental illness of Sōseki 1916, 253–54; with Suzuki Miekichi,
chaya, 238, 300n12 114, 119–24, 121, 181, 287–88n6,
Chicken-Liver Society, 196 299–300n3; with Takahama Kyoshi,
childhood of Sōseki: adoption by 49, 70–71, 131, 156; with Tayama
Shiobara family, 1; brief first adoption, Katai, 119; with Terada Torahiko, 65,
1; death of brothers, 8–9; discovery of 179, 202; with Thursday Salon
true parents, 6–7; effect on character, members, 118–19; with Tokuda Shūsei,
1; parents’ reasons for putting Sōseki 119; with Tsubouchi Shōyō, 119; with
up for adoption, 1–3; return to family Yamamoto Matsunosuke, 253. See also
at age 9, 1, 6; smallpox, scarring from, London, Sōseki’s correspondence
5–6. See also education of Sōseki; from; Masaoka Shiki, correspondence
Shiobara family with Sōseki; Natsume Kyōko,
children of Sōseki: abuse of, 75, 208, 211, correspondence with Sōseki
212, 213; rearing of, Sōseki’s views on, Craig, William James, 52–53, 65–66
55, 62; Sōseki’s poor behavior toward, currency, Japanese, Sōseki portrait on, x
xii, 45–46, 211–12. See also individual
entries under Natsume Date Munejiro, 133
China, study of foreign cultures by, 48 Dazai Osamu, 245
Chinese language, Sōseki’s skill in, 15, 24. death: awareness of, as basis of tragedy,
See also kanbun 151; awareness of, in And Then’s
Chinese literature: Chinese poetry by Daisuke, 172; Sōseki’s fear of, 172,
Sōseki, 23–24, 191–93, 254–55, 272–73
301n12; Sōseki’s study of, 10, 11–12, death mask of Sōseki, x, 270–71
23, 189 death of Sōseki, 269–70; age of children
chopsticks, use in retrieval of cremated at, 46; autopsy report, 270; cremation
remains, 207, 296n16 and burial, 272; flare-up of stomach
Chūō kōron magazine, 145, 252 problems leading to, 267–68, 271;
comedy vs. tragedy, Sōseki on, 151 followers’ rivalry and, 271; funeral,
Complete Works of Sōseki, Komiya as 271–72; and Light and Dark, failure to
editor of, 133 finish, 259; notification of followers,
Confucianism: influence in nineteenth 268; parallels to death of Bashō, 271;
century Japan, 16; influence on rapid decline, 268–69. See also final
Sōseki, 72 year of Sōseki’s life
correspondence of Sōseki: with Delaroche, Paul, 107
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 252, 254–55, depression of Sōseki: as bipolar disorder
255–56; with Asahi Shinbun about job symptom, 212, 282n7, 287n19; lack of
offer, 138–40; with followers, in final direction after University and, 33;
year of life, 254–55, 255–56; on poetry as refuge from, 32; Shiki’s
gastrointestinal problems and death and, 20; and suicidal thoughts,
treatments, 181, 183; with Isoda 32; while in London, 68. See also
O-Tami, 243–45; with Iwanami Shigeo, mental illness of Sōseki

I ndex   311
diary of Sōseki: on death of daughter Sōseki’s study of, ix, 16–19. See also
Hinako, 205–6, 208–9; on foster London, Sōseki in; teaching career of
father’s demands for money, 233; on Sōseki
Morita’s Autobiography, controversy “The English Poets’ Concept of Nature”
caused by, 199–200; on reading (Sōseki), 19
Dostoevsky, 92; Sōseki’s first entries Enkaku-ji Zen temple, Sōseki at, 35
in, 13; on Sōseki’s stay with Tsuda “The Essence of the Novel” (Tsubouchi),
Seifū in Kyoto (1915), 238; on stay in 158–59
London, 53, 56, 60, 62, 65–66, 67 Es War (Sudermann), 157
Dixon, James Main, 18–19 Etō gijuku, 15–16
Dixon, John Henry, 69–70 Etō Jun, 37, 226, 245–46, 260, 280n8,
doctorate, Sōseki’s rejection of award of, 285n2, 299n44
195–98, 295–96n46 Eucken, Rudolf Christoph, 18
Dodd, Stephen, 135, 277n18 Europeans: Sōseki on empty flattery by,
Dōgo Onsen resort, 40 63; Sōseki’s descriptions of, 50–51,
Doi Bansui, 68–69 55–56
Doi Takeo, 292n23, 297n19 “The Evanescent Dew: A Dirge” (Sōseki),
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Sōseki’s reading 108–9
of, 92
fiction by Sōseki: ease and pleasure in
Edghill, Mr. and Mrs., 60–61 writing, 90; as emotional necessity,
educational system in Meiji Japan, 10, 12, 142; incorporation of storytelling
13, 19 from Western readings, 72; longing
education of Sōseki: classical Chinese for passion expressed in, 250–51; and
studies, 10, 11–12; elementary school, novelists’ gift, 110; prolific output
10–11; English language studies, 11, beginning in late 1904, 90, 107,
13, 14, 21; at First Special Higher 115, 289n11; rapid rise to acclaim,
School, 13–16, 21–22; and friendship 90; and Sōseki’s mingling of two
with Shiki, 21–22, 25–26; interruption cultures, 72; Sōseki’s odd lack of
by peritonitis, 14–15; and lack of interest in titles of, 156–57, 179–80;
direction after University, 33; middle Sōseki’s students’ reactions to, 108–9;
school, 11; part-time teaching at Etō voice of, as unique, 94; voice of,
gijuku during, 15–16; as poorly Sōseki’s search for, 108; and Western
documented, 11; prizes and awards, realism, 117, 157. See also
11; Sōseki’s intelligence and, 10–11, autobiographical elements in Sōseki’s
13–16; at Tokyo Imperial University, fiction; character, Sōseki’s deep
16–19 revelations of
ego, isolation caused by assertion of. See fiction writing, Sōseki on: critique of
isolation, assertion of individual ego Shiki’s work, 24–25; fierceness
as cause of required for, 114; on reading,
Elisséeff, Serge, 166, 292n30 importance of, 25; on relative
English language: Shiki’s study of, 21; importance of ideas vs. writing style,
Sōseki’s late style as blend of 24–25; and unfolding of characters
characteristics of Japanese and, 237, within environment, 157
261, 302n27; Sōseki’s license while Fifth Special Higher School (Kumamoto):
writing in, 78; Sōseki’s proficiency in, in Sanshirō, 159; Sōseki’s teaching at,
and derision of less-educated 42, 46–47, 48, 79–80, 132, 137
Londoners, 55–57; Sōseki’s study of, final year of Sōseki’s life: activities in,
11, 13, 14, 21 248–49; contentment of summer
English literature: Sōseki’s months, 253–54; correspondence with
contemporaries in, ix; Sōseki’s followers, 254–55, 255–56;
incorporation of storytelling from, 72; correspondence with pair of Zen

312   I ndex
 Buddhist monks, 257–59; and “Form and Content” (Sōseki), 201
declining health, 253, 254, 256–57; “fragments”: Komiya on, 77, 214; and
and declining memory, 256; and Sōseki’s mental illness, 214, 234
followers’ literary endeavors, 251–52; Fudeko’s diary, 61–62
hosting of visiting Zen Buddhist Fujishiro Teinosuke, 70, 79–80, 92
monks, 257–58; trip to Yugawara Futabatei Shimei, 138, 146, 289n7
Hot Springs, 249–50; and utai, Futon (Bedclothes, Tayama), 90, 283–84n1
dropping of, 255; and writing of
Light and Dark, 253, 254, 256–57, 258, gastrointestinal distress, chronic, 67, 145,
259; and Zen Buddhism, renewed 156, 181, 285n4; echoes of in Light and
interest in, 258–59. See also death of Dark, 261; flare-up during final year of
Sōseki life, 253, 254; flare-up during Osaka
finances of Sōseki’s family: initial lack of lecture tour, 201–2; flare-up during
money after return from London, 79; publication of Kokoro, 230; flare-up
loans to friends, 229; monthly during stay with Tsuda Seifū in Kyoto
expenses in 1907, 138; during Sōseki’s (1915), 238–41; flare-up during writing
London assignment, 49–50, 51, 52, of The Gate, 181; flare-up during
54–55, 58, 67, 74; stock investments, writing of The Wayfarer, 213; flare-up
229 in London, 67; flare-up leading to
First Special Higher School: English- death, 267–68, 271; tests and stay at
speaking competition at, 8, 21–22; Nagayo Clinic, 181–83, 184. See also
homosexuality at, 277n11; Sōseki as Shuzenji, near-death experience at
student at, 13–16, 21–22; Suga Torao The Gate (Mon, Sōseki), 174–80; Asahi
at, 64 shinbun serial reprint of, x; critics on,
First Special Higher School, Sōseki as 182; echoes of Sōseki’s stay at
teacher at, 79–81, 84, 85, 283n23; Buddhist temple in, 35, 179; ending,
followers of Sōseki from, 251; Sōseki’s awkwardness of, 179–80; ending,
isolation and, 131; and students as final pessimism of, 180, 236; as
Thursday Salon members, 117–18, masterpiece of restraint, 174; plot
133, 134 of, 174–79; suppressed guilt of
The Fledgling’s Nest (Suzuki), 181, 199 disrupted past as source of dramatic
“The Flowering of Modern Japanese tension in, 174–79; title of, 179–80;
Culture” (Sōseki), 201 writing of, 181
“Flunking” (Sōseki), 16 The Gate, isolation of Sōsuke and O-Yone
followers of Sōseki: and death of Sōseki, in, 174, 176; assertion of individualism
268; from First Special Higher School, as source of, 167; and heightened
117–18, 133, 134, 251; lifelong intimacy, 176–77
devotion of, 119; and New Trends in “gathering in the whispering rain”
Thought (Shinshichō) magazine, 251, evenings, 146, 290n22
254; and New Year celebrations geisha: social status of, 300n12; Sōseki’s
(1915), 248; second generation of, 251; dalliances with, during stay in Kyoto
Sōseki’s advice to, on secret to literary (1915), 238–41. See also Isoda O-Tami
success, 254–55, 256; Sōseki’s fatherly Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (Hearn), 83
treatment of, 212; Sōseki’s interest in The Golden Demon (Konjiki-yasha,
utai and, 156; successful literary Ozaki), 44
careers among, 251; veneration of Gotō Shinpei, 13
pens used by Sōseki, 289–90n17; Gould, Glen, 286n12
voluminous correspondence with, 119. Grass for a Pillow (Kusamakura, Sōseki),
See also Thursday Salon 110–15; and art, necessity of emotion
food, Sōseki’s fondness for, 248. See also in, 113; as haikuesque novel, 113–14;
gastrointestinal distress, chronic on loneliness of egoism, 193; and
Foreign Office, job offer from, 47 Nami as elusive woman characteristic

I ndex   313
Grass for a Pillow (cont.) “Handkerchief” (Akutagawa), 252
of Sōseki’s fiction, 157–58; narrator’s Hattori shoten, and Sōseki’s I Am a
inability to escape emotion in, 112–13; Cat, 91
narrator’s philosophy of non-emotion health problems of Sōseki: anal fissure,
in, 111, 112, 286–87n12; narrator’s 202–3; decline of, in final year, 253,
similarities to Sōseki, 111; opening 254, 256–57; diabetes, 164, 253; as
lines of, 111; plot of, 110–11; disheartening for Sōseki, 213–14;
publication history of, 115; Sōseki’s flatulence, chronic, 203; haiku on, 29,
views on, 113–15; style of, 111; 31–32, 192, 272; hemorrhoids, 202–3;
subordination of reality to art in, as life-long, xi–xii; ruptured appendix
111–12; themes in, 110–11; translations and peritonitis, 14–15; Sōseki on, 253;
of, 115, 286n8; writing of, 90, 110 Sōseki’s stoicism about, 213. See also
Grass on the Wayside (Michikusa, Sōseki), gastrointestinal distress, chronic;
232–37; ending, final pessimism of, mental illness of Sōseki
180, 236–37; on impossibility of Hearn, Lafcadio: background and early
communication or love between two career of, 82; death and burial of, 84;
people, 237; pocket-watch incident in, early teaching jobs in Japan, 82;
235–36; as portrait of man brought to impaired sight of, 83; at Tokyo
bay by life, 236; serial publication of, Imperial University, 81, 82–84; at
237; style of, 237; title of, 299n1 Waseda University, 84; writings on
Grass on the Wayside, autobiographical Japan, 83
elements in: echoes of Natsume Hector (family dog), death of, 231
Kyōko’s bouts of “hysteria,” 45; echoes Higan sugi made (Sōseki). See Until
of Sōseki’s childhood, 4–5, 7, 9; echoes Beyond the Summer Solstice (Sōseki)
of Sōseki’s relationship with adoptive Higashi Shin, 106
father, 7, 232–33, 235, 236–37; Sōseki’s Higuchi Ichiyō, 44, 279n20, 288n20
artistic transformation of, 209, 232–36 Hineno Katsu, 6
Grass on the Wayside, Kenzō character in: Hirano Ken, 260
as second son regenderized, 293n12; Hiratsuka Raichō: background of, 128;
Sōseki as model for, 232–35; and Japan’s feminist movement, 128;
understated version of Sōseki’s mental and sequel to Black Smoke,
illness in, 233–34 controversy surrounding, 199–200;
Grey, Lady Jane, Sōseki story on, 107 Sōseki on, 157; suicide pact, with
Gubijinsō (Sōseki). See The Poppy Morita Sōhei (Baien incident), 128–30;
(Gubijinsō, Sōseki) suicide pact repercussions, 130–31
Gyōtoku Jirō, 105 Hoffman, E. T. A., and Sōseki’s I Am a
Cat, 92–93
haiku: difficulty of translating, 29; by home of Sōseki’s family: in Kumamoto,
Matsuo Bashō, 29–30, 30–31, 112; 42–43, 44–45; moving day help from
Shiki’s skill in, 20, 26, 28; Sōseki’s disciples, 135, 153; in Nishikata-
exchanges with Shiki on, 20, 26–28, machi, 135–36, 141, 152, 153; in
29, 30–32; Sōseki’s life-long interest in, Sendagi, 78–79, 135; in Waseda
20; structure of, 29; by Takahama Minami-chō, 102, 104, 152–54
Kyoshi, 49 homosexuality: at Japanese schools and
haiku by Sōseki, 29, 30–32, 202; on universities, 277n11; and Kokoro, 228,
death of Ōtsuka Kusuoko, 246–47; 297n18, 299n44; Shiki’s friendship
on death of sister-in-law Tose, 38, with Sōseki and, 25–26; in Sōseki’s
246–47; on his dog’s death, 231; on relationships with Thursday Salon
his illness, 29, 31–32, 192, 272; as members, 118, 123–24, 135
refuge from life, 32; on Shiki’s illness, Hōshō Shin, 155–56, 231, 255
27–28 Hototogisu magazine: circulation of, 145;
Hall of the Crying Deer (Rokumei-kan), 12 history of, 281n49; Komiya thesis

314   I ndex
 published in, 165; Matsune Tōyōjō “I-novel” tradition: vs. Sōseki’s artful
and, 133; and Shiki’s death, 70–71; re-shaping of autobiographical
Sōseki publication in, 145; and material, 232, 234–35; and Sōseki’s
Sōseki’s Botchan, 109–10; and Sōseki’s I Am a Cat, 90
I Am a Cat, 91; and Suzuki’s “Plover,” Inside My Glass Doors (Sōseki): copy sent
122–23 to Isoda O-Tami, 244; on discovery of
“The Human Sōseki” (Kaneko), 86 true parents, 6–7; on first adopted
parents, 1; on graves of family pets,
I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru, 231; on Ōtsuka Kusuoko, 246; on
Sōseki), 90–99; Asahi shinbun serial robbery of father, 3; writing of, 237
reprint of, x; autobiographical elements intellectual society in early Meiji era,
in, 97–98, 232, 299–300n3; cynical personal connections and, 137–38
view of humanity in, 92, 99; dense field Inuzuka Shintarō, 103
of allusions in, 93–94; ending of, 99; irony, in Botchan, 110
English translations of, 91; evocation of Ishihara Chiaki, 218, 285–86n7,
Kyōko’s baldness in, 96–97; as 293–94n12, 295n33, 299n44
expansion of original short story, 91; Isoda O-Tami: correspondence with
humor in, as cynical and dark, 94, Sōseki, 243–45; Sōseki’s flirtation
95–96; and “I-novels” tradition, 90; with, in Kyoto (1915), 238–41
length of, 259; misogyny in, 98–99; isolation, assertion of individual ego as
models for, 92–93; Ōtsuka Yasuji as cause of: in The Gate, 167; in Kokoro,
model for Dr. Bewildered in, 246; 224–25; in Light and Dark, 193; as
philosophical ruminations in, 94; plot theme in Sōseki, 167, 193; in And Then,
of, 91–92; preface to second volume, on 167, 170–71
death of Masaoka Shiki, 71; isolation of Sōseki: from family, 211–12;
publication history of, 91, 281n49; during London residence, 50–51, 57,
rakugo and, 94–95; and Sneeze as 58, 59, 66, 67–68, 69, 73; from other
portrait of Sōseki, 97–98; on Sneeze’s faculty, 89, 131; from other literary
unattractiveness to women, 98; figures, 118–19; reflection of, in Kokoro,
sophisticated style of, x; and Sōseki’s 225; reflection of, in The Wayfarer,
obsession with Kyōko’s teeth, 50; and 218–19
Sōseki’s smallpox scars, 5–6; style of, Iwanami Shigeo, 229–30, 257
93–94, 95; Terada Torahiko as model Iwanami shoten publishing house: growth
for Kangetsu character in, 132–33; title into elite publishing house, 230; logo
of, 91, 283n1; work produced of, 230; Sōseki’s relationship with,
simultaneously with, 90; writing of, 115 228–30
Ikebe Sanzan: and Asahi’s hiring of Iwano Hōmei, and Ryūdo-kai group,
Sōseki, negotiations for, 138, 139, 140, 287n2
141–42; background of, 289n8; dinner Izumi Kyōka, 290n22
celebrating Sōseki’s hiring, 142;
resignation from Asahi shinbun, 203; James, Henry: on historian vs. fabulist,
and Sōseki’s health crisis in Shuzenji, 232; money and status as themes in,
187, 188, 190–91; and Sōseki’s 260; Ruskin and, 291–92n14; as Sōseki
“Recollecting and Other Matters,” 191; contemporary, ix; Sōseki on style of,
as Sōseki supporter, 289n8 67; Sōseki’s allusions to, 94; Sōseki’s
Ikeda Kikunae, 65, 281n38 interest in, 66–67
Ikuta Chōkō, 128, 130, 131, 199 James, William, influence on Sōseki, 18,
“I looked at her” (Sōseki poem), 108 95, 173, 184, 193, 293n9
Imperial Literature magazine, 107, 251 “Jamesian” realism, Thursday Salon
individualism, Western, isolation caused members as proponents of, 117
by. See isolation, assertion of Japanese culture, and amae (dependence
individual ego as cause of on senior figure), 292n23

I ndex   315
Japanese language: characteristics of, 261; filial piety in, 225; three sections of,
Sōseki’s bending of, x; Sōseki’s late 219–20; writing of, 219
style as melding of English Komiya Toyotaka: biography of Sōseki,
characteristics and, 237, 261, 302n27 133; and birth of Sōseki’s first son, 153;
Japan Mail, Sōseki’s application for correspondence with Sōseki, 109; and
employment with, 35 death of Sōseki, 268, 271, 272; diary
Jijoden (Morita). See Autobiography of, 163–66; as editor of Sōseki’s
(Jijoden, Morita) Complete Works, 133; and The Gate,
“Journal of a Bicyclist” (Sōseki), 69–70 title of, 179; and going-away party for
Morinari, 106, 196–97; on haiku by
Kamei Shunsuke, 66, 279n4 Sōseki, 38; and Kyōko’s health crisis at
kanbun, 276n4; Shiki’s use of, 21; sōrōbun Shuzenji, 194; as member of Sōseki’s
and, 20; Sōseki’s use of, 12, 23, 24, 27 inner circle, 133; as model for
Kaneko Kenji, 86, 89, 283n31 Sanshirō, 163; as model for student
Kano Jūkichi, 80 in Kokoro, 220; and Morita’s
kanshi: Shiki and Sōseki’s interest in, 23; Autobiography, controversy caused by,
by Sōseki, 23–24; in Sōseki’s 200; Natsume family fondness for, 133,
“Recollecting and Other Matters,” 163–66; and Natsume family moves,
191–93 help with, 136, 152; Natsume Fudeko’s
Katzensteg (Cat Walk, Sudermann), romantic interest in, 165, 292n25; and
284n5 Natsume Hinako, funeral of, 206;
Kawakami Theater Troupe, 86 and New Year celebration (1908), 154;
Keene, Donald, 302n25 and New Year celebration (1915),
Ker, William Paton, 52, 66, 108 248; and The Poppy, 144, 151; as
Kikuchi Kan, 251, 301n4 “prince of Sōseki circle,” 291n4; on
Kimura Genjō, 257–59 Sōseki’s correspondence with followers,
Kinnosuke (geisha), 239–40, 241 118; on Sōseki’s fragments, 77; and
Kitashirakawa (prince), 183, 184 Sōseki’s health crisis in Shuzenji, 187;
Koda Rohan: and “gathering in Sōseki’s morning walks with, 136; and
the whispering rain” evenings, 290n22; Sōseki’s stay at Nagayo Clinic, 182;
and Isoda O-Tami, 238 and Suzuki’s stolen letter, 288n6; uncle
Koizumi Setsu, 82, 83 of, as Sōseki’s investment adviser, 229
Kōjin (Sōseki). See The Wayfarer (Kōjin, Komori Yōichi: on Light and Dark,
Sōseki) 302–3n28; reading of Kokoro, 225–28,
Kokoro (Sōseki): Asahi shinbun serial 298n37, 299n44; on re-gendering of
reprint of, x; as companion volume to men in Sōseki’s works, 218; on Shiki
The Wayfarer, 215; design of book by and Sōseki, 26; on Sōseki in London,
Sōseki, 229–30; effect of sensei’s letter 66, 279n4; on Sōseki’s The Poppy,
on student, subtle indications of, 290n27
223–24; hints of subsequent Konjiki-yasha (The Golden Demon, Ozaki), 44
relationship between student Korea, Sōseki tour of, 166, 250, 276n6
and sensei’s widow, 227–28, 299n44; Kumamoto: heat in, 42; Sōseki and
homoerotic bond of sensei and student wife’s residences in, 42–43,
in, 224; Komiya Toyotaka as model for 44–45; Sōseki’s budget in, 43, 44–45;
student in, 220; Komori’s reading of, Sōseki’s marital life in, 43–44;
225–28, 298n37, 299n44; long letter Sōseki’s marriage ceremony in,
used as conclusion of, 223; McClellan 42; Sōseki’s teaching position in, 42,
translation of, 298n36, 298n41, 46–47, 48, 79–80; Sōseki’s
299n44; publication of, by Iwanami unhappiness in, 47, 64
shoten, 228–30; sales of, x, 228–29; Kume Masao: correspondence with
“Sensei and His Testament” section, Sōseki, 254–55, 255–56; courtship of
plot of, 222–23; student’s violation of Natsume Fudeko, 292n25; and death

316   I ndex
 of Sōseki, 270, 271, 272; and New Light and Dark, Kiyoko character in: as
Trends in Thought magazine, 251 elusive woman characteristic of
Kunikida Doppō, 287n2, 290n22 Sōseki’s fiction, 157–58; as mystery at
Kure Shūzō, 75 heart of novel, 262–63
Kurosawa Akira, 251, 291n7 Light and Dark, O-Nobu character in:
Kusamakura (Sōseki). See Grass for a detailed exploration of character of,
Pillow (Kusamakura, Sōseki) 260–61; egoism of, 265; naiveté of,
Kusunoki Masashige, 12 265–66; as “new woman” threatening
Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange traditional homosocial order, 266,
Things (Hearn), 83, 282n17 302–3n28; obsession with preserving
Kyōritsu Academy, 21 appearances, 259–60
Kyoto, Sōseki stay with Tsuda Seifū in Light and Dark, Tsuda character in: as
(1915), 237–41; flare-up of stomach emotional dullard, 260; flirtation with
problems during, 238–41; geisha met nurse, autobiographical basis of,
during, 238–41; Sōseki’s 250–51; illness, nature of, 263–65; as
correspondence with Nishikawa narcissist, 262; obsession with
Issōtei following, 241–43; Sōseki’s preserving appearances, 259–60;
thank-you letters for, 241 quest for self-knowledge by, 262
“The Literary Arts and Morality” (Sōseki),
Leale, Priscilla and Elizabeth, 63, 68, 201
69, 73 literary figures, contemporary, Sōseki’s
Lebansansichten des Katers Murr (The Life isolation from, 118–19
of Tomcat Murr, Hoffman), and literature: Sōseki’s decision to study,
Sōseki’s I Am a Cat, 92–93 16–17; Western, Japanese interest in,
lectures by Sōseki: lecture tour for Asahi 48. See also Chinese literature; English
Shinbun, 200–202; requests for, in literature
1916, 248 Lloyd, Arthur, 84, 86, 283n31
The Life of a Fool (Akutagawa), 252–53 London: Ministry of Education order
The Life of Tomcat Murr (Lebansansichten requiring Sōseki’s study in, 48;
des Katers Murr, Hoffman), and Sōseki’s efforts to avoid assignment to,
Sōseki’s I Am a Cat, 92–93 48; Sōseki’s travel to, 49, 50–51
Light and Dark (Meian, Sōseki), 259–67; as London, Sōseki in: and bachelor life,
birth of modern Japanese novel, 260; inconveniences of, 58; and bicycle
critics’ response to, 302n25; critics’ riding lessons, 69–70; book purchases,
views on theme of, 262; deep 51, 52, 53, 54, 63, 64, 69, 70, 108–9,
revelations of character in, as new to 291n12; on British condescension to
Japanese fiction, 260–61, 267; echoes Japanese, 56; on constrained Western
of Sōseki’s health problems in, 253; society, 60; diary entries on, 53, 56, 60,
echoes of Sōseki’s marriage life in, 62, 65–66, 67; echoes of, in Grass on the
240; heated emotions in, as new to Wayside, 232, 233; on empty flattery of
Japanese fiction, 259; Japanese Westerners, 63; encounters with
constraints on social relationships as Christian faith, 60–61; and European
theme in, 260; length of, 259; plot of, formal dress, 57; failure to file required
261–62; setting for final scene of, 249; Education Ministry reports, 68; hard
speculations on intended conclusion study during, 58, 61, 64–65, 67, 69;
of, 266–67; as study of prewar urban homesickness for Japan, 72; isolation
bourgeoisie, 259; style of, 237; and loneliness of, 50–51, 57, 58, 59, 66,
suppressed passion of disrupted past 67–68, 69, 73; lack of access to great
as source of dramatic tension in, 176; novelists in city, 66–67; and life astride
and Western novelistic conventions, two cultures, 57, 71–72; and mental
use of, 260; writing of, 253, 254, illness, flare-up of, 66, 67–72, 279n4;
256–57, 258, 259 and mental illness, Ministry of

I ndex   317
London, Sōseki in (cont.) Lowell, Robert, 287n19
Education intervention in, 69, 70; and Lu Xun, 48
monthly stipend, inadequacy of, 51, 52,
54–55, 58, 67; other Japanese met maids: Kyōko’s reliance on before
during, 51, 57, 58, 65, 69, 70; on poor marriage, 43; revelation of Sōseki’s
English skills of many Londoners, real parents by, 6; Sōseki’s abuse of,
55–57; purpose of assignment, 48–49; 46, 75, 76, 135, 145, 212–13, 213–14
and Queen Victoria’s death and Malory, Thomas, influence on Sōseki,
funeral, 58, 280n21; and realization of 108–9
non-white status, 67–68; residences, 51, Manabe Kaichirō, 253, 268, 269–70,
52, 53–54, 55, 62–63, 65; and return 272–73
trip, 69, 70, 72–73, 74; and Scottish Manchuria, Sōseki tour of, 166, 250
highlands, visit to, 69–70; sightseeing Mann, Thomas, and philosophy of non-
by, 51, 52; social events with society emotion, 286–87n12
women, 60–61; teaching obligation marriage: ceremony in Kumamoto, 42–43;
incurred by, 79, 80, 138; theater negotiations preceding, 39, 40–42; and
attendance, 51, 57; and A Theory of Sōseki as desirable match, 40; Sōseki’s
Literature, decision to begin, 63–65; and decision to pursue, 40
unhappiness, 58, 72–73; visit to married life: echoes of, in Grass on the
Cambridge, 51 Wayside, 232, 234, 237; echoes of, in
London, Sōseki’s correspondence from: Light and Dark, 240; and infidelity,
about voyage to London, 49; with unconfirmed hints of, 238–41, 250–51;
father-in-law, 61; with friends, 52, and Kyōko’s lack of household skills,
55–56, 57, 79; with Masaoka Shiki, 63, 43–44; separations occasioned by
67–68, 71; with Matsune Tōyōjō, 135, Sōseki’s mental illness, 76, 85, 213;
145; with Suga Torao, 64; with Shinchō magazine article on, 183;
Takahama Kyoshi, 49, 70–71; with Sōseki’s tyranny over Kyōko, 50;
Terada Torahiko, 65; with wife, 49–50, unhappiness of, 43, 45, 46, 213, 250.
50–51, 54–55, 58–59, 59–60, 61–62, See also love interests of Sōseki;
65, 67, 68, 72 Natsume Kyōko (wife)
London, Sōseki’s lifestyle after return Masaoka Shiki: background of, 20; death
from: housing, 78–79; immersion in of, impact on Sōseki, 20, 70–71;
Japanese culture, 72; initial lack of education of, 20–22, 25–26;
money, 79; Westernized dress and experiments with fiction, Sōseki’s
moustache, 74, 80–81, 85, 86–87, comments on, 24–25; given name of,
87–88, 101 20; kanshi by, 21; Matsune Tōyōjō and,
London, Sōseki’s schooling in: frustrations 133; move to Sōseki’s home in
of, and Sōseki’s mental illness, 66; Matsuyama, 28–29; and rakugo, 23,
search for appropriate classes, 51, 66; 94; and Shiki as pen name, 20, 28; in
study with Craig, 52–53, 65–66; turn Sino-Japanese War, 28; and Sōseki’s
to self-study, 66; at University College departure for London, 49; on Sōseki’s
of London, 52, 66, 108 humor, 146; Sōseki’s remark to, about
“London Tidings” (Sōseki), 67–68, 71 death, 273; as student, Sōseki on, 22
love interests of Sōseki: curious lack of, Masaoka Shiki, correspondence with
245–46; indications of Sōseki’s interest Sōseki: homoeroticism of, 25–26; on
in attractive women, 250–51; Isoda Matsuyama, Sōseki’s dislike of, 40; on
O-Tami as, 245; and Japanese mysterious girl courted in Tokyo,
tradition of artists keeping mistresses, 36–37; on poetry, 20, 24, 26–28, 29,
245; mysterious girl courted in Tokyo, 30–32; on Shiki’s illness, 26–28, 32;
36–37, 246; Ōtsuka Kusuoko as, 246– and Shiki’s move to Matsuyama, 28;
47, 301n28; sister-in-law Tose as, on Shiki’s novel-writing, 24–25; on
37–38, 245–46, 285n2 Sōseki’s brother’s interference in

318   I ndex
 marriage negotiations, 39; on Sōseki’s 173–74, 289n14; educational system
career, 47; on Sōseki’s London in, 10, 12, 13, 19; efforts to build
experiences, 63, 67–68, 71; writing of modern Western state, 12, 48;
in sōrōbun, 20 personal connections in intellectual
Masaoka Shiki, and haiku: exchanges society, 137–38; turmoil of transition
with Sōseki on, 20, 26–28, 29, 30–32; to, Sōseki’s father and, 2
skill in, 20, 26, 28 Meiji gentleman: Sōseki as model of, 57,
Masaoka Shiki, tuberculosis of, 20, 25, 72; And Then’s Daisuke as, and
26–27, 28; Sōseki haiku on, 27–28; tension between feudal and modern
Sōseki’s concern about, 27 worlds, 171–72, 173–74; The Wayfarer’s
Masaoka Shiki’s friendship with Sōseki, Ichirō as, 215
20; basis of, 22–23; homoerotic mental illness of Sōseki: and abuse of
overtones of, 25–26, 277n11; origin of, children, 75, 211–12, 213; adequate
21–22; and poetry as shared interest, functioning in outside world despite,
23–24 78; bipolar disorder symptoms in, 212,
Matsune Tōyōjō: background of, 133; 282n7, 287n19; as chronic problem in
career of, 133; correspondence with later life, 56; death of Masaoka Shiki
Sōseki, 135, 145; and death of Sōseki, and, 70; doctor’s evaluation of, 75–76;
268, 271; as member of Sōseki’s inner and enraged destruction of his
circle, 133–34; and New Year paintings, 230–31; and fits of rage, 75,
celebrations (1908), 154; and rivalry 212, 230–31; flare-up in London, 66,
among Sōseki’s followers, 271; Sōseki’s 67–72, 279n4; and fragments written
criticisms of, 134; on Sōseki’s haiku, by Sōseki, 214, 234; incidents after
38, 146; and Sōseki’s homoerotic return from London, 74–78; and
interest, 135; Sōseki’s interest in utai maids, abuse of, 75, 76, 145, 212–13,
and, 156; and Sōseki’s limits on 213–14; marital separations
visitors, 117; and Sōseki’s mental occasioned by, 76, 85, 213; paranoid
illness, 214; and Sōseki’s recovery delusions, 37, 75, 76, 77–78, 143–44,
after Shuzenji health crisis, 189; and 212, 213, 214; and sensitivity to noise,
Sōseki’s visit to Shuzenji, 183–84 75, 212–13; Sōseki’s level of awareness
Matsuo Bashō: death of, 271; haiku by, of, as unclear, 234; and strain of
29–30, 30–31, 112; Sōseki on writing The Poppy, 144–45; and stress
detachment of, 112 of move to Nishikata-machi, 135
Matsuoka Yuzuru, 251, 278n6, 292n25 mental illness of Sōseki, Sōseki
Matsuyama: as Shiki’s hometown, 20; on: downplaying of, 78; as necessary
Shiki’s move to Sōseki’s home in, cost of great writing, 114, 115–16,
28–29; Sōseki’s dislike of, 40; Sōseki’s 287n19; in preface to Theory of
leisure activities in, 40; Sōseki’s move Literature, 115–16; understated version
to, 28, 36 of, in Grass on the Wayside’s Kenzō,
Matsuyama middle school, Sōseki as 233–34
teacher at, 28, 36, 253; echoes of in Meredith, George: influence on Sōseki,
Botchan, 110; reasons for accepting, 215–16; residence in London during
36–39; salary, 36; student responses Sōseki’s visit, 66; as Sōseki
to, 39–40 contemporary, ix; Sōseki on influence
Maupassant, Guy de, 90 of, 93; Sōseki’s allusions to, 94;
McClellan, Edwin, 298n36, 298n41, Sōseki’s interest in, 53, 66–67
299n44, 302n25 Michikusa (Sōseki). See Grass on the
McKinney, Meredith, 286n8, 298n36 Wayside (Michikusa, Sōseki)
Meian (Sōseki). See Light and Dark (Meian, Milde, Frederick and Miss, 52, 280n8
Sōseki) Milton, John, Sōseki’s difficulty in
Meiji era: and conflict of feudal and teaching poetry by, 34
modern worlds, 142, 154, 171–72, The Miner (Sōseki), writing of, 131

I ndex   319
Ministry of Education: order requiring Shuzenji, 187, 188; Sōseki’s interest in
Sōseki’s study in London, 48; and utai and, 156; and Sōseki’s mental
Sōseki’s failure to file required reports illness, 213; and Sōseki’s rejection of
from London, 68; and Sōseki’s mental doctorate award, 195–96, 197; and
illness in London, intervention in, 69, Sōseki’s stay at Nagayo Clinic, 182; as
70; Sōseki’s rejection of doctorate student at Tokyo Imperial University,
awarded by, 195–98, 295–96n46; 89, 125
and teaching obligation incurred by Morita Sōhei, and Baien incident (suicide
Sōseki’s London assignment, 79, pact with Hiratsuka), 127–30;
80, 138 newspaper coverage of, 130;
Mishima Yukio, 147 repercussions of, 130–31; Sōseki’s
misogyny of Sōseki: in I Am a Cat, 98–99; involvement in, 128, 130, 131
psychology underlying, 266, 284n14 Murayama Ryūhei, 138, 272
Miyoshi Yukio, 298n37, 299n44 Murdoch, James, 198
Mizumura Minae, 267 “My Individualism” (Sōseki): on Sōseki’s
Mon (Sōseki). See The Gate (Mon, Sōseki) lack of direction after University,
Mori Kainan, 198 32–33; on study at University of
Morinari Rinzō: Sōseki’s going-away Tokyo, 18–19
party for, 106, 196–97; and Sōseki’s
health crisis in Shuzenji, 185, 186, Nagai Kafu, 119
188, 194, 195 Nagano Prefecture Teachers’ Association,
Mori Ōgai: as former resident of Sōseki’s Sōseki’s lectures for, 200
house in Sendagi, 282n13; and Nagayo Gastroenterology Clinic: doctor
“gathering in the whispering rain” sent to Shuzenji to attend Sōseki, 185;
evenings, 290n22; Sōseki echoes of Sōseki’s stay in, in Light and
correspondence with, 119; and Sōseki’s Dark, 250–51; Sōseki’s recovery at,
funeral, 272; study in Germany, 48 after Shuzenji crisis, 188–91; Sōseki’s
Morita Sōhei, 124–32; Autobiography stay at, 182–83, 184; tests on Sōseki,
(Jijoden), controversy surrounding, 181–82
132, 199–200, 204; Black Smoke Nagayo Shōkichi, 185, 188, 294n2
(Baien), 128, 131–32; “Blighted Nakagawa Yoshitarō, 119–20
Leaves,” Sōseki’s critique of, 125–26; Naka Kansuke, 81, 214
conversations with Sōseki on fiction, Nakamura Shigeru, 204, 205, 209
157; correspondence with Sōseki, 118, Nakamura Zekō, 103; career of, 13–14;
125, 126, 127; and death mask of character of, 14; and death of Sōseki,
Sōseki, 270–71; and death of Sōseki, 269, 271; hosting of Sōseki on tour of
268; extreme admiration for Sōseki, Korea and Manchuria, 166, 250,
118, 126–27; first meeting with Sōseki, 276n6; part-time teaching at Etō
125; and The Gate, title of, 179; and gijuku while at school, 15–16; Shiki
going-away party for Morinari, 106, and, 21; as Sōseki’s friend at First
197; help with Natsume family moves, Special High School, 13, 14, 15–16, 21,
153; loss of teaching position, 128; as 24; as Sōseki’s lifelong friend, 13, 14;
member of Sōseki’s inner circle, 89, and Sōseki’s stay at Nagayo Clinic,
124, 132, 164; and New Year 182; and Sōseki’s stay at Yugawara
celebrations (1908), 154; numerous Hot Springs, 249–50; and sumo
amorous entanglements of, 124–25, matches, 249
128; as “prince of Sōseki circle,” Nakane Jūichi (father-in-law): decline in
291n4; rental of house used by heath of, 281n2; financial decline of,
Higuchi Ichiyō, 288n20; son, death of, 74, 281n2; help locating job in Tokyo,
128; and Sōseki’s embarrassing 47; and marriage ceremony, 42; and
incident with handicapped student, marriage negotiations, 40, 41, 42; and
89; and Sōseki’s health crisis in Sōseki’s return from London, 74;

320   I ndex
 Sōseki’s support of, 138; and Sōseki’s Natsume Kyōko (wife), 100, 106; bouts
travel to London, 49 of “hysteria,” 44, 45, 61; on character
Nakane Kyōko (wife). See Natsume Kyōko of Sōseki, 44; and death mask of
(wife) Sōseki, 270; and death of Sōseki,
Nakane Tokiko (sister-in-law), 41 267–68, 268–69, 270, 272;
Naruse Shōichi, 251, 258 depression of, 44; and doctorate
Natsume Aiko (daughter), 106, 136, 269 award, Sōseki’s rejection of, 195;
Natsume Chie (mother): posing as family home of, 41, 74–75; on family
Sōseki’s grandmother, 6; shame at late move to Nishikata-machi, 136; family
birth of Sōseki, 3 of, 40, 41; on father-in-law’s death,
Natsume Daiichi (brother), 279n20; 44; and going-away party for
death of, 8–9, 21; and Sōseki’s career Morinari, 196; habit of sleeping late,
path, 16 Sōseki’s criticism of, 43–44, 62; on
Natsume Eiko (daughter): birth of, 76; health of Sōseki, decline of, 253, 254;
echoes of birth of, in Grass on the on house in Waseda Minami-chō,
Wayside, 235; Kyōko’s pregnancy 153; inability to run household
with, 75 effectively, 43–44; involvement in
Natsume Einosuke (brother), death of, 8 Sōseki’s business affairs, 229; and
Natsume family: financial status of, 1–3; Komiya, fondness for, 133, 164–65;
home of, 2; other children put up for on Kyoto geisha, Sōseki’s dalliance
adoption, 275n1; robbery of home, with, 239–40; lack of interest in
287–88n6; Sōseki as youngest of eight Sōseki’s writing, 145; and marriage
children, 1; Sōseki’s estrangement ceremony, 42–43; and marriage
from, 39, 44; Sōseki’s estrangement negotiations, 39, 40–42; memoir of,
from, echoes of, in Grass on the 278n6; on mysterious girl courted by
Wayside, 235–36; Sōseki’s move from Sōseki, 37; and Nagayo Clinic,
home of, 13; Sōseki’s return to from Sōseki’s stay at, 182; reputation as
Shiobara family, 1, 6; two stepsisters undutiful wife, 299n45; rumored
of Sōseki, 2–3 suicide attempt by, 45; search for
Natsume Fudeko “Fude” (daughter), 105, house (1906), 135; on Sōseki’s
166; birth of, 45; and death of sister abusive rants at students, 46; on
Hinako, 204; and death of Sōseki, Sōseki’s flatulence, 203; and Sōseki’s
269; and Komiya Toyotaka, fondness lectures in Nagano Prefecture, 200;
for, 133, 164–65, 292n25; marriage of, and Sōseki’s relapse on Osaka lecture
251; naming of, 45; rearing of, tour, 202; on Sōseki’s scruples
Sōseki’s views on, 55; on Sōseki’s against taking advantage of
emotional detachment, 211–12; on generosity of followers, 249; on
Sōseki’s enraged destruction of his Sōseki’s spirits in summer 1916, 253;
paintings, 230–31; on Sōseki’s final Sōseki’s tyranny over, xii, 50; on
year, 254; and Sōseki’s mental illness, Sōseki’s utai, 155; on Sōseki’s visit to
75, 213; suitors from Sōseki’s circle, Shuzenji, 183–84; teeth of, Sōseki’s
292n25; and visiting Buddhist monks, concern about, 41, 50, 58–59; and
258 Thursday Salon, 117, 134; and Tsuda
Natsume Hinako (daughter): death of, Seifū, Sōseki’s stay with, in Kyoto
204–5; description of death in Sōseki’s (1915), 237, 240–41; and visiting
“A Rainy Day,” 209–10; funeral Buddhist monks, 258; and Yugawara
arrangements and cremation of, 205–7; Hot Springs, Sōseki’s stay at, 249–50.
retrieval of cremated remains, 207–8; See also married life
seizure disorder of, 204; Sōseki’s grief Natsume Kyōko, baldness of: echoes
at death of, 207–10 of, in Sōseki’s I Am a Cat,
Natsume Jun’ichi (son), 104, 106; birth of, 96–97; Sōseki’s concern about,
153; views on Sōseki, 212 50, 58–59

I ndex   321
Natsume Kyōko, children of: and child first modern novelist, ix; Kinnosuke as
rearing, Sōseki’s advice on, 55, 62; given name of, 4; mocking of, by
death of daughter Hinako, 204, 206, neighbor children and ruffians, 121.
208; first daughter Fudeko (Fude), See also childhood of Sōseki; final year
birth and naming of, 45; first son of Sōseki’s life; health problems of
(Jun’ichi), birth of, 153; miscarriage, Sōseki; mental illness of Sōseki; other
44; second daughter (Tsuneko), birth specific topics
and naming of, 48, 50, 58, 59, 61; on Natsume Sōseki (Komiya), 133
Sōseki’s love of, 211; and third Natsume Tose (sister-in-law): death of, 38,
daughter (Eiko), birth of, 75, 76. See 246–47; Sōseki’s fascination with,
also children of Sōseki; entries for 37–38, 245–46, 285n2
specific children Natsume Tsuneko (daughter), 106; birth
Natsume Kyōko, correspondence with of, 61; and Komiya Toyotaka, fondness
Sōseki: on payment of bills for for, 133, 164; Kyōko’s letters to Sōseki
Shuzenji health crisis, 189–90; during about activities of, 61–62; Kyōko’s
Sōseki’s London assignment, 49–50, pregnancy with, 48, 50, 58, 61; naming
50–51, 54–55, 58–59, 59–60, 61–62, of, 59; Sōseki’s abuse of, 211, 212
65, 67, 68, 72 Natsume Wasaburō (brother): and death
Natsume Kyōko, during Sōseki’s London of Sōseki, 272; on mysterious girl
assignment: and bouts of “hysteria,” courted by Sōseki, 37; and Sōseki’s
61; correspondence with Sōseki, marriage negotiations, 39, 40; and
49–50, 50–51, 54–55, 58–59, 59–60, Sōseki’s return from London, 74; wife
61–62, 65, 67, 68, 72; residence with of, 37–38
father, 49, 74–75; small stipend given Naturalism: and Ryūdo-kai group, 287n2;
to, 49–50, 54–55, 74 Sōseki’s dislike of, 90, 110, 209;
Natsume Kyōko, and mental illness of Thursday Salon’s opposition to, 117
Sōseki, 208, 211, 212–13; after return New Fiction magazine, 252
from London, 75–78; doctor’s New Trends in Thought (Shinshichō)
evaluation of, 75–76; in London, 68, magazine, 251–52, 254
69; refusal to leave him despite, 76; New Year celebrations: in 1897, 43; in
separations occasioned by, 76, 85, 1908, 154–55; in 1915, 248
213. See also mental illness of Sōseki Nishikawa Issōtei: correspondence with
Natsume Kyōko, and Sōseki’s health Sōseki following Kyoto visit, 241–43;
crisis in Shuzenji, 185, 186–87; effect refined tastes of, 300n10; and Sōseki’s
on Sōseki’s character, 194–95; painting, critiques of, 239, 241–43; and
payment of bills from, 189–90; Sōseki’s visit to Kyoto (1915), 237–38,
recovery from, 190 239, 240
Natsume Naokatsu (father): agreement to Nishō gakusha, 11–12
reclaim Sōseki from Shiobara family, Nogami Toyoichirō, 88–89; in Cambridge,
9; death and funeral of, 44; death of England, 301n14; and death of Sōseki,
sons, 8–9; decision to reclaim Sōseki, 268; and going-away party for
7–9; financial status of, 1–3; as kuchō Morinari, 106, 196–97; Sōseki’s
(mayor) of Shinjuku ward, 2; as interest in utai and, 156, 190, 255;
nanushi (neighborhood magistrate), visits to Sōseki’s home, 164, 165
1–2; and political upheaval in Meiji Nogami Yaeko, 88
transition, 2; posing as Sōseki’s Nomura Denshi, correspondence with
grandfather, 6; robbery of, 3; Sōseki’s Sōseki, 204
relationship with, 7; and tug-of-war for “The Nose” (Akutagawa), 251–52
custody of Sōseki, 7–9 nō theater: in Botchan, 155; doctor’s
Natsume Shinroku (son), 104, 212 order to refrain from utai, 182; Grass
Natsume Sōseki, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, for a Pillow on, 110, 111, 112; Sōseki’s
106; grave of, 84, 279n16; as Japan’s decision to drop utai, 255; Sōseki’s

322   I ndex
 interest in utai, 154–56, 164, 181, 190, 157–58; Fujio’s death, as necessity to
197, 205, 208; Sōseki’s poor utai preserve homosocial society, 151,
performance, 155, 242; training of 290n27; melodrama of, 148;
actors in, 155 overwrought prose of, 146–47, 152;
Nott, Grace Catherine, 51, 60 popularity of, 152; public anticipation
Nott, P., 60 of, 145; public’s surprise at conclusion
Nowaki (Sōseki). See Autumn Storm of, 151; serial publication in Asahi
(Nowaki, Sōseki) shinbun, 144; Sōseki’s later
deprecation of, 151–52; Sōseki’s
Ōe Kenzaburō, 295–96n46 obsessive work on, 144, 145–46;
Okakura Yoshisaburō, 69 strain of writing, and flare-up of
O-Kimi (geisha), 239–40, 241 mental illness, 144–45; title of, 144
Ōkuma Shigenobu, 281n2
“On Joining the Asahi” (Sōseki), 142–44 Quail Basket (Uzura-kago, Sōseki), 115
“On Natsume Sōseki” (Shinchō magazine), Queen Victoria, death and funeral of, 58,
182–83 280n21
“On the Poetry of Walt Whitman”
(Sōseki), 19, 277n18 “A Rainy Day” (Sōseki), 209–10
Ōoka Shōhei, 266–67 rakugo: described, 94; Shiki and Sōseki’s
Ōtsuka Kusuoko, 246–47, 301n28 interest in, 23, 94; and Sōseki’s I Am a
Ōtsuka Yasuji, 79, 214, 246, 270 Cat, 94–95
Ozaki Kōyō, 44 “Rashōmon” (Akutagawa), 251
realism of Sōseki: as unprecedented in
painting, Sōseki’s practice of, 156, 230, Japanese literature, ix; as Western-
248–49, 255; admirers’ requests for style realism, 117, 157
works, 248; after return from London, “Recollecting and Other Matters”
72; echoes of, in Grass for a Pillow, (Sōseki), 191–93
110–13; lessons with Tsuda Seifū, 230, Richie, Donald, 282n18
238; Nishikawa Issōtei’s critique of, Romanticism, in Sōseki’s “Tower of
239, 241–43; Sōseki’s enraged London,” 108
destruction of his work, 230–31; Tsuda Rubin, Jay, 302n25
Seifū’s critiques of, 242 Ruskin, John: Henry James and, 291–
passion: of disrupted past, as source of 92n14; influence on Sōseki, 158
dramatic tension in Sōseki, 174–76; Russo-Japanese War, Sōseki on, 256
longing for, in fiction by Sōseki, Ryōkan, Sōseki’s interest in, 248–49
250–51; Sōseki’s reluctance to Ryūdo-kai group, members of, 287n2
portray, 178–79
Penn, Annie, 54 Saigō Takamori, 141–42, 289n8, 289n14
pen used by Sōseki, 90, 289–90n17 Saionji Kinmochi, 137, 146
“The Phantom Shield” (Sōseki), 108–9 Saitō Agu, 35, 42, 79
philosophy, Sōseki’s interest in, 18 Sakamoto Settchō: and Asahi shinbun
“Plover” (Chidori, Suzuki), 121–23 negotiations with Sōseki, 137–39; and
poetry by Sōseki: Chinese poetry of final Sōseki’s health crisis in Shuzenji, 185,
year, 254–55, 301n12; in “Recollecting 186–87, 188
and Other Matters,” 191–93. See also Sanshirō (Sōseki), 156–63; advertisement
haiku by Sōseki; kanshi written by Sōseki for, 156–57; Asahi
The Poppy (Gubijinsō, Sōseki), 144–52; shinbun’s serial publication of, 156;
characters and plot of, 148; conclusion plot of, 159–63; popularity of, 159;
of, as strained and overheated, 148–51; Tayama on models for, 284n5; title of,
final remarks on tragedy vs. comedy, 156; and unfolding of characters
151; Fujio as elusive woman within environment, 157; writing
characteristic of Sōseki’s fiction, of, 156

I ndex   323
Sanshirō, Mineko character in: ambiguous Shiobara incident. See Baien incident
intentions of, as source of narrative Shiobara Shōnosuke (adoptive father):
tension, 158; as elusive woman career of, 4; contact with Sōseki after
characteristic of Sōseki’s fiction, departure from family, 7; demand for
157–58, 292n17; as “unconscious money from successful Sōseki, 9;
hypocrite,” 157 demand for money, echoes of, in Grass
Sanshirō, Sanshirō character in: appealing on the Wayside, 7, 232–33, 235, 236–37;
optimism of, 159, 162; darkening leaving of wife for mistress, 6; Sōseki’s
outlook at close of novel, 163; fear of relationship with, 7; spoiling of young
life’s uncertainty, 162, 163; Komiya as Sōseki, 4; and tug-of-war for custody
model for, 163 of Sōseki, 7–9
Sasaki Nobutsuna, 214 Shiobara Yasu (adoptive mother), 4, 6, 9
Satō Kōraku, 183 Short Pieces for Long Days (Sōseki), 69
Satsuma Rebellion, 142, 289n8 Shuzenji, near-death experience at
Sawdust Chronicle (Bokusetsu-roku) (Shuzenji catastrophe), 183–88;
(Sōseki), 24 duration of Sōseki’s stay, 187, 188;
School of Special Studies, Sōseki’s effect on Sōseki’s character, 193–94;
teaching at, 34 gathering of family and followers, 187;
Scottish highlands, Sōseki’s visit to, 69–70 lengthy recovery from, 194–95,
Seiritsu Academy, 13, 21 199–200; occasion for visit to Shuzenji,
“Sensei’s Death” (Akutagawa), 270 183–84; payment of bills from, 188,
Sequel (Zoku Meian, Mizumura), 267 189–91; period of unconsciousness,
Sesshū, Sōseki’s interest in, 248–49 186–87; public’s attendance outside
Shakespeare, William: Craig’s expertise Inn, 187–88; recovery at Nagayo Clinic
in, 52; as epitome of Western culture following, 188–91; relapse during
for Japanese, 86; influence on Sōseki, Osaka lecture tour, 201–2; Sōseki’s
107–8; lectures on, by other professors desire for seclusion following, 188–89,
at Tokyo Imperial University, 86; 190; Sōseki’s memoir on (“Recollecting
productions of in Japan, 86; Sōseki’s and Other Matters”), 191–93; vomiting
allusions to, 94, 111, 147; Sōseki’s of blood, 185, 186
study of, 63, 151; Sōseki’s teaching of, Sino-Japanese War: Shiki and, 28; Sōseki
85–87, 117–18, 125; translations of in at victory celebration for, 40
Japan, 86; Tsubouchi lectures on, 86; smallpox, Sōseki’s scarring from, 5–6,
Tsubouchi translation of, 146, 290n23 41, 51
Shaku Sōen, 35 sokuten kyoshi, 193, 295n33
Shibukawa Genji, 190, 295n25 Sore kara (Sōseki). See And Then (Sore
Shiki. See Masaoka Shiki kara, Sōseki)
Shimazaki Tōson: The Broken Sōseki: meaning of, 278n17; as pen name,
Commandment, 124; and “gathering in 4; Sōseki’s adoption of, 28. See also
the whispering rain” evenings, Natsume Sōseki; other specific topics
290n22; and Ryūdo-kai group, 287n2; South Manchuria Railway, 13–14
Sōseki correspondence with, 119; Spring (Shimazaki), 156
Spring, 156 Spring Miscellany (Sōseki), 10
Shimonoseki, Sōseki in, 23–24 Sterne, Lawrence: influence on Sōseki, x;
Shinchō magazine, “On Natsume Sōseki,” Sōseki essay on, 93; and Sōseki’s I Am
182–83 a Cat, 93, 99
Shinshichō magazine. See New Trends in Student Types in Today’s World
Thought (Shinshichō) magazine (Tōsei shosei katagi, Tsubouchi),
Shiobara family: adoption of Sōseki, 1, 4; 158–59
Sōseki’s life with, 4–6; Sōseki’s return style of Sōseki: critics on, 182; early
to birth family from, 1, 6; spoiling of sophistication of, x; evolution of, x;
young Sōseki, 4 late-career effort to meld

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 characteristics of Japanese and 157; and Westernized dress and
English languages, 237, 261, 302n27 manner after return from London, 74,
Sudermann, Hermann, 157, 284n5 80–81, 85, 86–87, 87–88, 101
Suga Torao: career of, 279n16;
correspondence with Sōseki, 64, 78, Takahama Kyoshi: correspondence with
85, 152; help with Natsume family Sōseki, 49, 70–71, 131, 156; friendship
move to Nishikata-machi, 136; and with Sōseki, 281n49; and Hototogisu
Sōseki’s early job searches, 35, 36, 42; magazine, 70, 281n49; as member of
on Sōseki’s flatulence, 203; and Sōseki’s inner circle, 164; and New
Sōseki’s grave marker, 279n16; and Year celebrations (1908), 154–55; and
Sōseki’s health crisis in Shuzenji, 187; Sōseki’s departure from Matsuyama,
and Sōseki’s mental illness, 75, 77; 42; and Sōseki’s I Am a Cat, 91, 132;
and Sōseki’s search for housing, 78–79 and Sōseki’s mental illness, 77; and
Sugimoto (doctor), 185–86, 188 Sōseki’s travel to London, 49; and
sumo matches, Sōseki’s attendance Sōseki’s utai, 154–55, 164; and
at, 249 Suzuki’s “Plover,” 122–23
suppressed passion of disrupted past as Takita Chōin, 252, 255, 271–72
source of dramatic tension in Sōseki, The Tale of Genji, Sōseki’s evocation of,
176; in The Gate, 174–76 109
Suzuki Miekichi, 119–24; background of, Tanaka Seichirō, 249–50
119; career of, 124; correspondence with Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, 238
Sōseki, 114, 119–24, 121, 181, 287–88n6, Tayama Katai: Bedclothes (Futon), 90,
299–300n3; and death of Sōseki, 268, 283–84n1, 284n5; correspondence
269; extreme admiration of Sōseki, with Sōseki, 119, 284n5; and
120–21; The Fledgling’s Nest, 181, 199; “gathering in the whispering rain”
and going-away party for Morinari, evenings, 146; and Ryūdo-kai group,
106, 197; handsomeness of, Sōseki’s 287n2; on Sōseki’s I Am a Cat, 284n5
interest in, 123–24; help with Natsume teaching career of Sōseki: after return
family moves, 135, 136, 152, 153; from London, 79–81; choice of, after
Komiya and, 165; as member of University, 33; civil service rank
Sōseki’s inner circle, 119, 124, 165; accompanying positions, 36, 46, 48; at
nervous disorder of, 119, 120; and New Fifth Special Higher School
Year celebrations (1908), 154; “Plover” (Kumamoto), 42, 46–47, 48, 79–90,
(Chidori), 121–23; as “prince of Sōseki 132, 137; isolation from other faculty,
circle,” 291n4; and rivalry among 89; lack of interest in, 33; in provinces,
Sōseki’s disciples, 271; Sōseki’s and desire to return to Tokyo, 47;
encouragement of, 124, 252; and resignation from Tokyo teaching jobs,
Sōseki’s health crisis in Shuzenji, 187, 36; at School of Special Studies, 34;
195; Sōseki’s interest in utai and, 156; Sōseki’s discomfort in classroom, 88;
and Sōseki’s mental illness, 213 Sōseki’s early discomfort with, 34–35;
synthesis of Western and Japanese Sōseki’s unhappiness with, 47, 64, 121;
sensibilities in Sōseki: in his fiction, student responses to, 39–40, 80–81;
72; and late-career style, melding of teaching jobs in Tokyo after
Japanese and English language University, 34; teaching style of, 46,
characteristics in, 237, 261, 302n27; 80, 81, 84, 85, 86–87; and Western
and life in London astride two critics of literature, studied irreverence
cultures, 57, 71–72; and Meiji era toward, 88. See also First Special
conflict of feudal and modern worlds, Higher School, Sōseki as teacher at;
142, 154, 171–72, 173–74, 289n14; as Matsuyama middle school, Sōseki as
mirror of Japanese cultural change, ix; teacher at; Tokyo Imperial University,
Sōseki on cost of, ix; and Sōseki’s Sōseki as teacher at
realism as Western-style realism, 117, Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 109

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“Ten Nights of Dreams” (Sōseki), 156, Tokyo Imperial University, Sōseki as
291n7 student at: choice of major, 16–17;
Terada Torahiko: career of, 45, 132, faculty in, 17–19; and friendship
292n29; correspondence with Sōseki, with Shiki, 22; high grades, and
65, 179, 202; first visit to Sōseki, 45; as postgraduation status, 35, 36;
member of Sōseki’s inner circle, 132, publications in University
133, 164, 165, 166; as model for magazine, 19; study of English
Kangetsu in I Am a Cat, 132–33; and literature, 16–19
New Year celebrations (1908), 154; Tokyo Imperial University, Sōseki as
quarrel with Sōseki, 133; and Sōseki’s teacher at, 84–89; courses taught,
haiku, 38, 45; and Sōseki’s return from 84–86, 109, 117–18; as demanding
London, 74; and Sōseki’s turn to work, 85; echoes of, in Grass on the
literary theory, 65, 132 Wayside, 232, 233; embarrassing
A Theory of Literature (Bungaku-ron, incident with handicapped student,
Sōseki): on Austen, 285n6; 89; hiring of, 81; and literary contacts
correspondence on, 64–65; decision to through former students, 137–38; offer
begin work on, 63–65; publication of, of full-time employment, 138; as
115; Ruskin and, 158; teaching career replacement for Lafcadio Hearn, 81,
as distraction from, 81 85; salary, 84; securing of position,
A Theory of Literature, preface to: 79–80, 81; Sōseki’s apprehensions
publication in Yomiuri shinbun, 137; about, 81; Sōseki’s criticisms of, after
on Sōseki’s London experience, resignation, 143–44; Sōseki’s
72–73; on Sōseki’s mental illness, resignation from, 142; student
115–16 responses to, 84, 85, 86–88, 283n31;
Thursday Salon, 117–19; Asahi shinbun and students as Thursday Salon
editors and, 156; August 1916 failure members, 117–18, 119, 125, 133, 134;
to meet, 255–56; continued meetings teaching style of, 84, 85, 86–88
after Sōseki’s death, 134; Elisséeff Tomizawa Keidō, 257–59
and, 292n30; meetings of, 117; origin Tonoyama Masakazu, 19
of, 117; Sōseki’s interest in utai and, Tōsei shosei katagi (Student Types in
156; visiting Buddhist monks’ Today’s World, Tsubouchi), 158–59
attendance at, 258; writing skill as “The Tower of London” (Sōseki), 107–8
membership requirement for, 118; tragedy vs. comedy, Sōseki on, 151
younger attendees at, 251 translation of haiku, difficulty of, 29
Thursday Salon, members of, 117–18; Travels in Manchuria and Korea (Sōseki),
homoerotic overtones of Sōseki’s 276n6
relationships with, 118, 123; number Tristram Shandy (Sterne): Sōseki essay on,
of, 119; Sōseki’s correspondence 93; and Sōseki’s I Am a Cat, 93, 99
with, 118–19; Sōseki’s intimacy with, Tsubouchi Shōyō, 86, 119, 146, 158–59
118, 119. See also Komiya Toyotaka; Tsuda Seifū: and critiques of Sōseki’s
Matsune Tōyōjō; Morita Sōhei; paintings, 242; and death of Sōseki,
Suzuki Miekichi; Terada Torahiko 270; on Sōseki’s anger, 243; Sōseki’s
titles of Sōseki works, Sōseki’s odd lack painting lessons with, 230, 238
of interest in, 156–57, 179–80 Tsuda Seifū, Sōseki’s stay with in Kyoto
Tokuda Shūsei, 119, 290n22 (1915), 237–41; flare-up of stomach
Tokyo, and bubonic plague, 74 problems in, 238–41; geisha met
Tokyo Imperial University: followers of during, 238–41; Sōseki’s
Sōseki from, 117–18, 119, 125, 133, correspondence with Nishikawa
134, 251; homosexuality at, 277n11; Issōtei following, 241–43; Sōseki’s
Lafcadio Hearn at, 81, 82–84; in thank-you letters for, 241
Sanshirō, 159; ties to Iwanami shoten Turney, Alan, 286n8
publishing house, 230 The 210th Day (Sōseki), 115

326   I ndex
Uchida Hyakken, 251, 268 portrait of Sōseki, 215; Ichirō’s testing
Ueda Bin, 84, 86, 125, 283n31 of wife’s fidelity in, 215–18; Kokoro as
The Undying Past (Sudermann), 157 companion volume to, 215; and
University College of London, Sōseki’s loneliness of Ichirō, 219, 225; long
monitoring of classes at, 52, 66, 108 letter ending, 219; Sōseki’s mental
Until Beyond the Summer Solstice (Higan illness and, 215; writing of, 213, 215
sugi made, Sōseki), 157–58, 209, Western novels, Sōseki on suggestive
293n12 banter in, 168
utai: doctor’s order to refrain from, 182; Western works, Iwanami shoten
Sōseki’s decision to drop, 255; Sōseki’s publishing of, 230
interest in, 154–56, 164, 181, 190, 197, “White Tower” (Sōseki), 107
205, 208; Sōseki’s poor performance world literature, Sōseki’s place in, xi
in, 155, 242
Uzura-kago (Quail Basket, Sōseki), 115 Yamamoto Matsunosuke, 253
“Yam Gruel” (Akutagawa), 252
Vincent, Keith, 26, 228, 277n11, 284n14, Yanagiya Ko-san, 267–68
301n12 Yomiuri shinbun: offer to hire Sōseki, 136–
visitors to Sōseki, Sōseki’s limitations on, 37, 138; publication of preface to
117 Theory of Literature in, 137; and Ryūdo-
Von Koeber, Raphael, 18 kai writers’ group, 287n2; serialization
of Ozaki’s Golden Demon, 44; Sōseki
Wagahai wa neko de aru (Sōseki). See essay on literary criticism in, 137
I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru, Yoneyama Yosasaburō, 17, 21
Sōseki) Yugawara Hot Springs, Sōseki’s visit to,
Waseda University, and Ryūdo-kai group, 249–50, 251
287n2 Yugeta Akie, 203
Watsuji Tetsurō, 212, 251, 254, 271,
301n10 Zen Buddhism, Sōseki’s interest in: in late
The Wayfarer (Kōjin, Sōseki): focus on life, 253, 257–59; as young man, 35
Ichirō’s existential agony, 218–19; “Zen Buddhism in Japan” (Sōseki), 35
Ichirō as paradigmatic Meiji Zoku Meian (Sequel, Mizumura), 267
intellectual in, 215; and Ichirō as Zola, Émile, 90

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 ASIA PERS P E CT IVE S : HIS T O RY, S O CIE T Y , A ND C ULT UR E

A series of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

Carol Gluck, Editor

Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II,
by Yoshimi Yoshiaki, trans. Suzanne O’Brien

The World Turned Upside Down: Medieval Japanese Society,

by Pierre François Souyri, trans. Käthe Roth

Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion: The Creation of the Soul of Japan, by Donald Keene

Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star: The Story of a Woman, Sex, and Moral Values in Modern
Japan, by William Johnston

Lhasa: Streets with Memories, by Robert Barnett

Frog in the Well: Portraits of Japan by Watanabe Kazan, 1793–1841, by Donald Keene

The Modern Murasaki: Writing by Women of Meiji Japan, ed. and trans. Rebecca L.
Copeland and Melek Ortabasi

So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers,

by Donald Keene

Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop,

by Michael K. Bourdaghs

The Winter Sun Shines In: A Life of Masaoka Shiki, by Donald Keene

Manchu Princess, Japanese Spy: The Story of Kawashima Yoshiko, the Cross-Dressing Spy
Who Commanded Her Own Army, by Phyllis Birnbaum

Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts: From Kishida Ryūsei to Miyazaki Hayao, by
Michael Lucken, trans. Francesca Simkin

The First Modern Japanese: The Life of Ishikawa Takuboku, by Donald Keene

The Japanese and the War: Expectation, Perception, and the Shaping of Memory, by
Michael Lucken, trans. Karen Grimwade

The Merchant’s Tale: Yokohama and the Transformation of Japan, by Simon Partner