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Sōseki, an Anti-War Writer

In the spring of 2000, to recognize the millennium, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper conducted a nation-wide survey asking the Japanese people who they considered was the best Japanese writer of the past one thousand years. Sōseki Natsume was the first choice among readers. Murasaki Shikibu, author of The Tale of Genji, was ranked second. Matsuo Bashō, the great haiku poet, ranked sixth. Similarly, there was a great outcry in the fall of 2002 when proposed high school textbooks submitted for approval by the Ministry of Education did not include selections from the oeuvre of Sōseki Natsume. Clearly Sōseki is a literary institution in Japan, an author whose work has spoken to generations of Japanese readers, an author who, eighty years after his death, still dominates Japan's literary scene.

More perhaps than any other Japanese writer, the bulk of Sōseki's works have been translated into English, and yet there still remain a host of letters, diaries, poems, and short early works which are unknown outside Japan. These early works are of particular interest because they reveal the extent to which Sōseki was a protean, ever experimental writer, seeking a medium, themes, and methodology that would allow him to express his ideas clearly.

Nearly four decades ago, Professor Edwin McClellan performed a great service when he outlined for English readers the progression of themes in Sōseki's major novels. In this progression, McClellan shows a particular line of philosophical development in Sōseki's work. Today, we have a chance to look at Sōseki's shorter work and see the rich creativity and diversity he brought to his writing.

Shumi no iden, translated here as The Heredity of Taste, was written in December 1905 just following the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War the previous September, and it stands as Sōseki's response to this great and tragic war. This is Sōseki's only work of anti-war literature, and in some ways it marks him as a renegade in Meiji society. The response of the Japanese public to this war was highly ambivalent. On the one hand, the war confirmed Japan's maturity as a modern nation. The proof of this was that she had engaged a major European power in war and had come away the victor. In an age which firmly believed that no non Euro-American people could defeat Europeans in war, Japan had done just that. Admiral Togo had destroyed the Russian naval fleet at Tsushima, and General Nogi had broken General Stoessel's defense of Port Arthur. This victory established Japan's position as the strongest military power in East Asia and guaranteed her a seat as one of the five major victorious nations at the Treaty of Versailles following World War I. In other words, Japan had arrived as a modern world power.

This success, however, had cost Japan dearly both in economic terms and, more significantly, in terms of blood shed by its youth. While patriotism and nationalism were at a fever pitch throughout the nation, there were some who began to question the price Japan had paid for this victory. And when the Treaty of Portsmouth, brokered by President Teddy Roosevelt, left Japan without $600,000,000 in reparations to recoup the cost of the war, there was a huge outcry in Japan against the government for winning the war with the sacrifice of soldiers, but losing the peace negotiations by caving in to the demands of others. There was rioting in Hibiya Park and martial law was imposed, remaining in effect until the end of November 1905. General Nogi returned from the front on January 14, 1906.

Between these two events, Sōseki wrote this story in which he speaks out against the atrocity of war and the sacrifice of soldiers' lives, but he also protests the degradation of the individual implied by a military uniform and the mindless, squirming mass of advancing soldiers. When he envisions troops struggling up the hill in a serpentine mass, the only thing that makes his friend Kō-san stand out is the fact that he is carrying the regimental flag. Otherwise this golden boy would be indistinguishable from the mass of other soldiers. For Sōseki, it was not only the loss of life that was to be regretted, but also the loss of individuality.

Shumi no iden opens with an impressionistic, dreamlike account of the loosing of the dogs of war, emphasizing the violence of the conflict. Waking from this reverie, the narrator finds himself at Shimbashi Station just as the troop trains are returning in triumph from the front. Among the returning soldiers he sees one who is the very image of his friend Kō-san, a sergeant welcomed home by his mother. This leads the narrator to imagine Kō-san's death in the assault on Port Arthur. He has a vision of soldiers swarming up the hill in a tight, squirming mass. Kō-san, by contrast, is a golden boy, far above the common crowd, and yet in this context all that distinguishes him is the regimental flag which he carries. Nevertheless, he falls into the trench and dies like the others. Throughout the rest of the story we have the refrain, Kō-san wa agatte konai (Kō-san could not climb out of the ditch). The drum beat repetition of this line throughout the story continues to remind us of the slaughter of the war.

Observing the returning troops and officers at Shimbashi Station, the narrator notes their graying hair and lined faces, the result of the hardship and strain of battle, and he feels sorry for them, but he feels even more sorry for Kō-san who cannot climb out of the ditch and return from the war. And yet, Kō-san who died is by no means the most abject victim of the war. What about his widowed mother who has been left behind with no one to care for her in her old age? The mother wishes she at least had a daughter-in-law, which would have been sadder still—a woman married for a few weeks, then doomed to a lifetime of widowhood. (This story must have had particular resonance forty years later in the aftermath of World War II when many women found themselves in this situation.)

As the troops return home through the victory arch, Sōseki reminds his readers of the many casualties who did not return from the battlefield, and describes the pathos of those they left behind, a mother who says, "I wouldn't care if he had a wooden leg as long as he came home." Thinking of Kō-san who will not be returning home, the narrator decides to visit his grave. Although Kō-san never climbs out of the ditch at Port Arthur, he had sent clippings of his hair and fingernails to be buried in the event he died.

At the cemetery, the narrator encounters a beautiful and mysterious woman and also a ginko tree in the full splendor of its yellow autumn leaves against a clear blue sky The lavish description of this tree marks a shift in mood from the violence of war to the pathos of love. The tree itself and its description is reminiscent of a similar scene in Sōseki's novel Kokoro where the narrator also passes beneath a golden ginko at the entrance to a cemetery. The ginko tree here is described as bakeichō, a ghostly or transformed ginko, a tree which marks a liminal space that is the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead. In this way, it serves as a nexus between the death of Kō-san and the existence of the mysterious woman. In some sense, it marks the dividing line between love and war. It implies a question. There is love for a beautiful woman, a mother's love for her son, the domestic love of a marriage, and set against these is the sacrifice required to give up all prospect of love and to die in war. To die in war for what? For the nation? Is patriotism worth this level of sacrifice? Sōseki's intent here is not to celebrate the heroism of Kō-san, but to show the folly of war and the magnitude of the sacrifice made by both the living and the dead.

Sōseki was not the only Japanese writer to speak out in opposition to the war. The poet Yosano Akiko wrote a famous poem in which she asked her brother not to sacrifice his life for this cause. The novelist Otsuka Kusuoko, who had close personal ties to Sōseki, also ended up writing in protest to this war.

Sōseki's narrator passes beneath the radiant ginko tree and encounters a beautiful, mysterious woman praying at Kō-san's grave. As she leaves the cemetery, the narrator sees her pause outlined against the ginko tree, its golden leaves, like falling soldiers, swirling down around her. What better image can there be for death than the fallen leaf which can never be reattached to the tree?

The second half of the story centers on finding out the identity of this woman and her relationship with Kō-san. Sōseki famously disliked mystery fiction as a literary genre, and yet here we see him using the techniques of the mystery writer to advance his story. Perhaps we hear an echo of this in the text itself when Sōseki, speaking through his narrator, declares his revulsion for private investigators and yet finds himself behaving like one in his pursuit of the woman's identity.

In search of the woman, the narrator first goes to Kō-san's mother where he sees white chrysanthemums in the garden and learns that they were Kō-san's favorite flower, the same flower the woman had left at the grave. This reinforces the link between Kō-san and the mysterious woman even though the mother insists that her son was not involved with anyone, and that there was no female family member of that age. A perusal of Kō-san's diary reveals that he had erased a passage that speaks of meeting a woman at the post office. At the end of the diary, Kō-san predicts that if he dies in the war, someone will bring white chrysanthemums to his grave. This not only anticipates what actually happens, it also brings together the two main strands of the story, love and war, eros and thanatos.

The second part of the story deals with the matter of love between Kō-san and the woman, but the story line begins to break down at this point. The narrator tells us clearly, "From here on I will abbreviate my story." In this sense, the work might be considered as another of Sōseki's unfinished novels. Although the focus in this second part of the story is on the love between Kō-san and the woman, we are never told how she learned of Kō-san's death or where his grave was located. We never learn why Kō-san felt compelled to erase part of his diary. The abbreviated style that leaves these questions hanging is especially evident in contrast to the earlier scenes at Shimbashi Station which are so long and detailed.

The most important aspect of this second part of the story dealing with love is the way Kō-san is remembered after his death. He lives on in the memory of the woman, he lives on in the memory of his mother, and he lives on in the memory of his friend. But what a poor substitute these memories are for a real and meaningful love relationship. In this sense, what should have been a love story has been shattered by the reality of war. For Kō-san's love for the woman consists only of a single brief encounter and exists only as a dream. For the woman, love which should be lived out in daily life exists only in visits to the grave and in memories.

This story may be added to the list of Sōseki's stories of failed love, yet the poignancy of the failure of these two young people to be together in a loving relationship is an expression of the losses suffered during the war. Instead of telling us how many thousands of young men died at Port Arthur, he shows us the full, tragic implications of a single death and leaves it to us as readers to multiply this tragedy by uncounted thousands. In this context, the repetition of the refrain, "But Kō-san did not climb out of the ditch," is a steady reminder of the magnitude of Japan's sacrifice for this so-called victory.

Finally, we have the matter of Sōseki's notion of the heredity of taste. He was raised in an age when theories of evolution and heredity were first being explored scientifically, a time when the mysteries of human psychology were being probed. In many of his works, he explores the question of what attracts a particular man to a particular woman and vice versa. Certainly in the majority of his writing, Sōseki proves himself to be a connoisseur of the failure of love, but here the question is what attracts people in the first place? The suggestion put forth in this story that the heredity of taste skips one generation and reasserts itself, that Kō-san looks exactly like his grandfather and the woman looks exactly like her grandmother and that they are genetically attracted to each other seems simplistic and naive. Indeed, it sounds less like a modern concept of heredity and more like an old-fashioned view of Buddhist karma where the things that happen in this life are the result of things we did in previous lives. My own view is that Sōseki was not seriously engaging the question of heredity, but was more interested in writing a polemic against war in general and the way in which the modern state forces the individual to forego his individuality and conform to the needs of the state regardless of the sacrifice involved.

STEPHEN W. KOHL

University of Oregon

June 2004