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Introduction

A Crisis of Belonging

From his earliest years, Sōseki Natsume (or Natsume Kinnosuke, as he was born), experienced a series of crises concerning his sense of belonging and identity. The sad events of the first years of his life led to a powerful sense of dislocation that permeates his oeuvre. As we shall see in the important essays now available in English for the first time in this volume, his personal experiences led him to consider the philosophical and cultural significance of human isolation from a variety of perspectives. It is impossible to say whether Sōseki would have been as preoccupied with issues of isolation and belonging if he had not also lived in Meiji Japan—a culture obsessed with the issues regarding belonging and identity that arise from rapid change and dissociation from one’s past. In any case, although a genius in his own right, the similarity between his individual concerns and the broader cultural concerns of the Meiji period enhanced the reception of his work and led him to become one of Japan’s most important modern authors. His popularity is witnessed in contemporary material culture by the fact that Sōseki’s face still circulates in Japan on the ¥1000 note—an honor that Sōseki might have declined, had he had the opportunity to do so, just as he declined many other public honors.

Sōseki’s parents were upper-class administrators who found their social standing suddenly undercut with the fall of the feudal system, as the Tokugawa Shogunate collapsed. Partially because of their financial embarrassments, they gave their youngest son Kinnosuke to a local greengrocer. The green-grocers, busy with their daily work, neglected Kinnosuke, leaving him outside their shop in a basket. Finally, taking pity upon her young brother lying outside in the cold, one of Kinnosuke’s sisters brought him home to his original parents. His parents gave him away again after a year, this time to a childless former servant named Shiobara and his wife. Domestic troubles eventually led the couple to divorce, and Kinnosuke returned to his original family. Kinnosuke, however, was unaware of his relation to his new guardians, thinking that his parents were more distant relatives. At age 21, he finally regained the family name Natsume, and a year later, adopted the pen name Sōseki, by which name he is commonly known today. His three successive families, the two aborted attempts to give him away, and his four name changes all lent considerable chaos to Sōseki’s first two decades of life.

Sōseki’s own life span (1867–1916) coincided almost exactly with the long reign of Emperor Meiji (1868–1912), and thus with the Meiji Era that witnessed unprecedented change in Japan. Sōseki’s birth succeeded the arrival of Admiral Perry’s “black ships” by only fourteen years. In 1868, when Sōseki was one year old, Emperor Meiji proclaimed his “Five Articles” that ousted the samurai from their seats of power, promoted Western-style education, and opened the door for a wide range of institutional and social reforms. The following decades witnessed a fascination with things Western, leading to sights that would have been unimaginable only a decade earlier. Alongside these cultural changes occurred the tremendous technological and industrial advances that transformed the Japanese economy and urban landscape. Sōseki lived to see the death of Emperor Meiji in 1912, and died four years later, in 1916. The events of Meiji left an indelible mark on him and others of his generation; all of his literary works reflect his preoccupation with the cultural and spiritual dangers associated with such rapid change.

Just as Sōseki moved from house to house as a young child and grew to be a stranger in his own home, not even recognizing his own parents, Sōseki describes the modern Meiji man as straddling cultures, dislocated both from Japan’s past as well as from its future. This modern man, as Sōseki depicts him, has irreparably lost the innocence and moral integrity connected with Japan’s neo-Confucian past, and is at the same time inexorably attracted to modernity, the West, and material success (c.f. Brodey and Tsunematsu, pp. 1–15). As a character says in his novel Kokoro, published in the same year as “My Individualism”: “You see, loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern age, so full of freedom, independence, and our own egotistical selves!” In the two essays reproduced in this volume, Sōseki self-consciously defines the role of art and the artist in light of the loneliness and individualism of the modern world.

Redefining Japanese Literature for a Modern Age

Meiji literary discourse was not immune from the alternating waves of xenophilia and xenophobia that altered the terrains of other areas of Meiji cultural discourse. Bummeikaika (or “civilization and enlightenment”), a cultural movement encouraging rapid modernization and Westernization, made its presence felt

as Meiji authors tried to redefine Japanese literature, particularly Japanese narrative fiction, according to what were perceived as more modern (and Western) standards. The writings of one of the most influential revolutionary Meiji literary critics, Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935), for example, forcefully promoted a shift toward tightly constructed plots with “logical development.” In addition, specific Western authors and movements were chosen as particularly suitable for the new Japan.

Just as Meiji reform leaders attempted to inculcate European scientific method and rationalism through education reform, authors such as Shimazaki Tōson adopted Naturalism and the “scientific novel” from France as a mode suitable to the new level of scientific development in Japan. As a result, Naturalism dominated Japanese literary culture for the first decade of the twentieth century; in fact, it still has a strong presence today, just as it does in American fiction. Few Japanese authors, most notably Mori Ōgai and Sōseki, resisted this movement. In fact, Sōseki’s dislike of Naturalism is one of the motivating forces behind both of the essays in this volume. In “Individualism,” he examines the underlying Japanese “anxiety” behind the need to imitate the West that indirectly led to the excessive admiration for Naturalism. In “The Philosophical Foundations of Literture,” he invokes examples from Zola and Maupassant, as well as Ibsen, to suggest the aesthetic poverty of a realistic depiction of sordid human conditions without the transforming power of beauty, virtue, heroic determination, or even attention to “technique.”

Debates over literature in this same Meiji culture were thinly veiled discussions of national identity, particularly Japan’s place in relation to its expanding world and the “West.” As Etō Jun writes, “No matter how radically they differed from one another in their literary or political opinions, Meiji writers shared in the dominant national mission of their time: the creation of a new civilization that would bring together the best features of East and West, while remaining Japanese at its core” (Etō, p. 603).

Sōseki makes no secret of these two levels of discourse in the essays in this volume: each essay includes individual biographical anecdotes and also invites their allegorical reading as stories about the fate of Japan. Part of this tendency to allegorize his personal experience may stem from his painful awareness of his position as a representative of Japan during his two-year stay in England. It was one year after the influential publication of Ukigumo, Japan’s first “Western” novel, that Sōseki became the first official student sponsored by the Japanese emperor Meiji to study English literature abroad. In “My Individualism,” he mentions the burdensome responsibility he felt on this “unbearable” trip. In Tower of London (London Tō, 1907), he reports that “The two years I spent in London were the most unpleasant two years of my life. Among English gentlemen, I lived like a shaggy dog in a pack of wolves” (Sōseki Zenshū, XI, p. 10, IX, p. 14). After his return, Sōseki received his university position and became a prominent literary figure of the Meiji period, enabling him to help define the new direction of Japanese literature.

“My Individualism” gives us a rare account of his stay in London from the perspective of twelve years after his return, allowing us to see how Sōseki came to understand the profound shift in his thinking about literature that occurred during his stay there. In this essay, he recounts his irritation and sense of helplessness when Englishmen gave their opinions on literature, with which he disagreed. He suffered at not having his own sense of Japanese literature to lend support to his perceptions: “I had no hope of finding salvation if I did not formulate my own basic concept of what literature was.” It is within the pages of the other essay in this volume, “Philosophical Foundations,” that we find one of Sōseki’s principal attempts to provide a cross-cultural framework for the interpretation of literature.

In the pages of both of these essays, we witness Sōseki’s reflections upon the pressures for modernization and Westernization in literature. The helpful combination of the two essays in this volume also allows us better to understand Sōseki’s overall purpose. In creating a theory of literature that is characteristically Japanese, Sōseki wishes to provide Japan with its own literary discourse about the role of literature, satisfying its longing for Western-style philosophy or theory, its need to find a self-conscious approach to literature, and its anxious concern over national identity.

Literary Detours: Prefaces, Apologies, and “Ditches”

The first-time reader of “Foundations” might find the first part of the essay extremely abstruse. If one is not familiar with Sōseki’s writing style, one can find oneself wandering in a desert of abstractions, longing for specific literary examples, and wondering whether one has made any progress toward understanding his central argument. It might help the first-time reader to understand that Sōseki’s serpentine path of argumentation, his apologies, numerous prefaces, self-referential digressions, and even self-professed narratorial “ditches” are part of his self-conscious style and an attempt to combine elements of East and West. In fact, both his Japanese and British literary studies led him to prefer authors who focused on digressive, or “sequential,” forms of narration (Brodey, pp. 193–9). Just as he was particularly interested in Laurence Sterne, whom he introduced to Japanese audiences in 1897, he was also influenced by the shaseibun tradition, championed by his poet-mentor Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902). Shaseibun showed a similar distrust of consciousness, rational control, and closure, and instead emphasized the idea of sketching verbal pictures from life, as in haiku.

Both of the essays in this volume originated as speeches. And in both cases, Sōseki revised them for serialized publication. It is interesting that in both cases, he chose to leave intact (or even emphasize) theatrical gestures of the speech, including direct comments to his audience and references to the passing of time, size of the room, etc. This is even more remarkable given that he informs us early on in “Foundations” that he has had to “almost double its original length” in order to make a comprehensible essay from his notes: “I was forced to rewrite my text completely.” Despite the fact that these essays were written seven years apart, there are several similarities, particularly the opening preambles. In both cases, an illustrious institution offers a flattering invitation in person, Sōseki desires to (and attempts to) refuse the invitation, he reluctantly accepts, and finally he studiously avoids preparing for the speech, giving us frequent warnings of the poor quality of the speech to come. In the case of “My Individualism,” he says he did not start writing it until the very morning of the speech; in “Philosophical Foundations,” he refers to his meager “three or four pages” from which he will “talk wildly” to form his argument. His mock humility in these passages, obliquely drawing attention to his creative genius, is reminiscent of Romantic claims of unwitting or inspired composition, such as Coleridge’s preface to “Kubla Khan” or Goethe’s comments on the composition of Werther.

In other words, we have serialized essays that still maintain the surface appearance of speeches, for the sake of maintaining the non-linear, digressive style, as well as the guise of spontaneous order. Despite their revised and expanded character, Sōseki keeps using references to the historical speech in order simultaneously to provide humor and to excuse the gaps in argumentation. An example would be when he exclaims “the lecture has deviated from its main subject and has fallen into the very center of a muddy ditch. Let us quickly return and continue our progress in a straight line!” or “However, as I do not have time to explain this to you in detail, I am going to cut short my remarks.”

Both essays, but particularly “Foundations,” express Sōseki’s disdain for traditional forms of social hierarchy, including the precedence of university professors. Sōseki took the unprecedented step of renouncing his prestigious professorship at Tokyo University in 1907, the same year that he published “Philosophical Foundations”; instead, he decided to publish his writings with the Asahi newspaper. And again, in 1911, three years before the publication of “My Individualism,” he once again gained public notoriety for declining to accept the government’s Doctor of Letters degree. His digressive style and references to the reverence in which professors are (wrongly) held, help enhance his reader’s sense that we are encountering his own self-re-enactment. As readers, we are encountering his literary personality in action. Sōseki wants his reader to understand that he is presenting perceptions rather than analysis—that he is an artist rather than a philosopher.

Sōseki’s extreme degree of self-referentiality can be surprising or annoying to readers, but also became one element of his trademark style. Self is always at the center of his writings: at one point in “Foundations,” when he is about to “dissect” a passage from Shakespeare’s Henry V, he stops and suddenly decides to “dissect his feelings” instead, because he says he understands them better than the poem. Although by the end of this particular essay, Sōseki suggests ways in which we can transcend the self through “correspondences” with readers (when we strike sympathetic chords or ideals), our inescapable solitude and therefore self-referentiality is at the core of his understanding. The fact that identity issues are so central to all of his writings is certainly one reason Sōseki’s work resonated so well with his Meiji audiences—and may also account for his popularity today.

Art Beyond Naturalism

“Foundations” begins with a strong statement of human isolation—the ailment for which literature provides a temporary cure, or at least occasional relief. Human beings are in a state of disunity seeking unity, or isolation seeking community. As we discover by the end of this essay, human isolation and the temptations of solipsism drive the artist to art, and the author to write literature. Literature, if it succeeds in achieving “correspondences” with readers achieves a form of community.

To make his case, Sōseki posits a psychological model which includes three modes of mental operations that mediate the experiences of the senses and emotions (and that “originate from the ego”): namely, intelligence, perception, and will. While this model is far from complete, it helps us understand Sōseki’s sense of the place of the artist within the world of ideas. Different human activities, professions, and inclinations naturally give preference to one of these three mental operators, as he calls them. Those who “cause their intelligence to be exercised are people who have a clear understanding of our relationships with objects and beings outside ourselves; we normally call them scientists or philosophers.” Will is the realm of many practical, active professions, such as “soldiers, politicians, tofu merchants or even carpenters.” And while the man of letters must, according to Sōseki, also have both practical skills and philosophical skills, perception is his most defining characteristic: “People who exercise their perception appreciate relationships with objects or beings with enthusiasm.” Through their perception, artists observe reality and transform it, endowing the world around them with feeling. Sōseki goes on to claim that there are four ideals by which we respond to the works of these operators, and according to which we prioritize them. These ideals are “Truth,” “Beauty,” “Goodness,” and “Sublimity” (see chart, p. 19). In a work of art, for example, “one of these four categories will stand out more clearly than the others.” These ideals, he says (though he never fully develops them in the essay), vary according to period, individual, society, and other contexts; therefore, moments in history can be defined by their dominant ideals.

The dominance of Naturalism in Japan, although never explicitly named, is in his thoughts as he developed this psychological model, and is in the back of Sōseki’s mind whenever he mentions “Truth” and “Intelligence” in the body of the essay. For Sōseki, the artist exclusively devoted to Truth and who values only intelligence and not perception robs the artistic experience of part of its potential. Art, according to Sōseki, does not have to represent all four ideals, but can become misshapen: audiences can become “color blind” by an emphasis on one ideal that seeks to “actively attack and demolish another ideal.” Naturalism’s exclusive devotion to Truth, in other words, is pursued to the detriment of other ideals, impoverishing the literary experience.

As an oblique response to Naturalism’s de-emphasis on style or “technique,” Sōseki adds an interesting section where he compares two literary passages: one from Defoe and one from Shakespeare, one in prose and the other in verse. The meaning of the two passages when paraphrased seems equivalent, he argues, but their emotional impact, their involvement of the reader, and artistic quality differ greatly: Shakespeare’s use of Etonymy and poetic condensation forces the reader to become involved in interpreting meaning, and thereby forces the reader into a participatory role in Shakespeare’s creative process, allowing us to encounter a perceptive genius at work. Shakespeare “adjusts our spectacles to suit our vision,” while Defoe’s meaning is visible “with the naked eye” from “a long way off.” Defoe’s description “walks and drags its feet all year as if it had wooden legs”; it does not require imaginative participation from the reader or involve any poetic reconfiguration of reality.

The essay develops the psychological model in order to illuminate both the dangers of the current, “narrow” approach to literature by suggesting the broad spectrum of approaches that one can have. Part of his purpose is to inspire a new generation of artists to re-infuse art with the ideals of Goodness, Beauty, and Sublimity, by freeing them from the pressure of the single-minded devotion to Truth, from the attachment to Western fashion, and from the practical concerns of prestige and advancement. Sōseki culminates “Foundations” with a moving description of his ideal for art and the artist:

“If, through the continuity of awareness which we have discussed, a correspondence is established between our work and one person in a hundred, or even one person in a thousand, and if we have made a small contribution to the enhancement of Truth, Goodness, Beauty, and the Sublime, which will illuminate the essence of our work like flashes of lightning, we will leave traces difficult to efface. If, progressing even further, we are able to attain the ecstasy that produces the reducing influence—because the spiritual power of arts and letters can exercise a great and intangible influence on society—we will have fulfilled our mission by obtaining eternal life in the human story.”

The Social Benefits of Solitude

Written near the end of the Meiji period, as Japan was reaching the zenith of its territorial expansion in Asia, Sōseki’s famous essay “My Individualism” continues in his quest to liberate the Japanese artist toward such social goals, yet this essay resonates with a more sober sense of social and political dangers facing Japanese culture as a whole. Rather than focusing on the enthusiastic imitation of the West, Sōseki is now concerned with what happens when that imitative drive is converted into a desire for national or domestic homogeneity; when a mistrust of foreigners paradoxically leads to a mistrust of Japanese citizens.

Sōseki’s concern is with a generalized “anxiety” or insecurity that may lead one to become either one of “Panurge’s sheep” (part one of the essay) or a tyrant (part two of the essay). The slavish follower will be afraid to assert his own individual opinions or perceptions, while the tyrant will not allow others their own individual perceptions. These dual dangers, it turns out, have an element in common: they both involve an inability to recognize the separation of self from others. Ironically, then, the painful recognition of our fundamental human isolation, a recognition that provoked his earlier essay “Philosophical Foundations,” serves in this later essay as the element of human existence best able to help us liberate ourselves and to allow others their freedom as well.

INGER SIGRUN BRODEY

Assistant Professor, Curriculum of Comparative

Literature University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Works Cited

Brodey, Inger Sigrun, “Natsume Sōseki and Laurence Sterne: Cross-Cultural Discourse on Literary Linearity,” Comparative Literature, 50(3), 1998, pp. 193–219.

Brodey, Inger Sigrun and Tsunematsu, Sammy I., Rediscovering Natsume Sōseki, Kent, UK: Global Oriental, 2001.

Etō, Jun, “Natsume Sōseki: A Japanese Meiji Intellectual,” The American Scholar, 34, 1965, pp. 603-19.

Natsume, Sōseki, Sōseki Zenshū, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1965.

_____, The Tower of London (trans. Peter Milward and Kii Nakano), Brighton: In Print Publishing, 1992.