The Miner Read online

  The Miner

  by Natsume Sōseki

  translated from the Japanese, with an Afterword,

  by Jay Rubin

  Introduction by Haruki Murakami

  Acknowledgements

  This translation has been extensively revised from the 1988 edition published by Stanford University Press. It would not have appeared back then without a good deal of moral and financial support. My colleagues at the University of Washington, Fred Brandauer, David Knechtges, Ed Kamens, John Treat, Andrew Markus, and Ching-Hsien Wang, provided interest, information and advice. Thanks were also due to Professors Yasuko Imai of Shizuoka Prefectural University, Toshio Ohki of Hamamatsu University School of Medicine, and Edward Fowler of Duke University, and to my mother, Frances.

  The translation was made possible by a grant from the Division of Research Programs of the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency, with additional support from the University of Washington’s Japan Foundation Endowment and from the university itself. An earlier version of the Translator’s Afterword appeared in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. Stanford University Press has enabled the production of a revised edition.

  The revision benefitted greatly from the close attention of Professor Shōsaku Maeda, whose passionate interest in the English translation of modern Japanese literature has proved invaluable.

  Professor Motoyuki Shibata came to the rescue at crucial points with the translation of the Introduction.

  For writing that informative and insightful Introduction, I wish to add a special thanks to Haruki Murakami, whose discussion of The Miner in his Kafka on the Shore provided the spark of interest that led to the publication of this revised translation. Thanks also to editor Scott Pack, the UK’s foremost Murakami fan, who caught the spark.

  As always, my wife, Rakuko, kept me focused on what really matters.

  J.R.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Translator’s Note

  Introduction to The Miner: A Nonchalant Journey Through Hell by Haruki Murakami translated by Jay Rubin

  Translator’s Afterword

  About the Typeface

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  Translator’s Note

  The Miner (Kōfu) was originally serialized in a Tokyo newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun, in 1908. The translation was based on the text found in Volume 3 of the complete works of Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū, 17 vols. (Iwanami shoten, 1974). The revision was checked against the virtually identical text found in Volume 5 of Sōseki zenshū, 29 vols. (Iwanami shoten, 1994), which indicates the original 96 numbered newspaper installments, but these distracting arbitrary breaks were not indicated when the book appeared and have not been indicated in the translation. For readers interested in problems of serialization, a list of installment breaks is provided in Note 1 of the Translator’s Afterword.

  Few personal names appear in the text, and only one of them includes the surname in addition to the given name. This name, Hara Komakichi, appears in the Japanese order, surname first, the practice adopted in the Afterword. Natsume Sōseki is virtually the only author better known in the West with his name in the Japanese order. His surname is Natsume, but in the Introduction and Afterword he is referred to by his pen name, Sōseki, following the Japanese custom. Haruki Murakami, the author of the Introduction, is better known in the West with his name in the Western order.

  All monetary sums mentioned are minuscule. A rin was a tenth of a sen, which was one hundredth of a yen, which was worth about a thousand times more than the modern yen.

  Most of the smoking done in the book employs the traditional kiseru pipe with its slim bamboo stem and tiny metal bowl. The “tobacco tray” mentioned at one point was actually a small box. It held such utensils as a tinder cup for repeated relightings and a cylindrical (usually bamboo) receptacle, into which the spent shreds of tobacco were energetically knocked.

  Introduction to The Miner:

  A Nonchalant Journey Through Hell

  by Haruki Murakami

  translated by Jay Rubin

  Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) is Japan’s greatest modern novelist. Paperback editions of his works can be found in virtually any bookstore in Japan, and that includes this rather strange and by no means representative book, The Miner. How many general readers—those who are not Sōseki scholars or devoted Sōseki fans or professionals interested in mineral extraction—actually make their way through The Miner in the course of their lives is unclear, but the book has never disappeared from the catalogs of major publishers and it probably never will. This is because Sōseki is the pivotal modern Japanese novelist, whose works set a precedent for the tone and structure of the literature that developed after the beginning of the Meiji period in 1868. It has long been the sacred literary duty—almost an act of faith—of all Japanese (myself most definitely included) to preserve the complete works of this writer who lost his life to stomach ulcers at the young age of 49. That fatally raveled stomach, it might be noted, and intricate brain, which remained active to the end, were donated to Tokyo Imperial University’s medical school. The phrase “Japanese literature” always makes me think of the odd fate of Sōseki’s stomach and brain—which, by the way, was judged to be of average weight.

  The Miner is, to put it mildly, a most unusual novel, one that is almost impossible for even the most systematic readers of the entire Sōseki corpus to “place” among his works. It doesn’t seem to fit with anything that came before it or after it. Calling it Sōseki’s ugly duckling might be an oversimplification, but it is clearly different from all the others in size and shape and color. You could try lining up all Sōseki’s works in a single box, but this one novel would make it impossible to fit them in neatly and close the lid. What is it that makes this work so difficult to set alongside the other novels?

  Perhaps the first thing to mention is the frustration it gives the reader. You get to the end of this book, and all you can do is wonder why Sōseki went to all the trouble of writing it (and he clearly did go to a lot of trouble to put it together). What was his purpose? The author himself seems to be trying to sweep away such doubt and frustration when he undertakes the daring and tricky task of negating the very premise that this book is a novel at all. At the end, the protagonist almost hurls at the reader his parting shot: “That’s all there is to my experience as a miner. And every bit of it is true, which you can tell from the fact that this book never did turn into a novel.” At this point, most readers are ready to throw up their hands and ask, “Well, if it’s not a novel, what is this thing I’ve been spending my time reading?”

  Whatever excuses the author (or his protagonist) might be trying to make for the book, the undeniable fact remains that The Miner is a piece of fiction—or, rather, that it could not be anything but a piece of fiction. For one thing, Sōseki himself never went anywhere near a copper mine. He just happened to meet a young man who had worked in such a mine, and he took notes when the young man told him about his experiences there. He went on to reproduce these experiences more or less faithfully, but they were not Sōseki’s experiences, and most of the concretely described scenes and the character’s psychology, vividly conveyed as if the novelist had observed them himself, were products of his imagination. The minutely described three-dimensional world he created based on another person’s recollections could hardly be called “reportage” or “non-fiction.” Perhaps it is best described as “fiction inspired by fact.”

  Just as Moby-Dick is not a novel about whaling, The Miner is not a novel about copper mining techniques or miners’ labor conditions. It’s about the inner workings of a flesh-and-blood human being. The method that Sōseki deploys from the arsena
l of novelistic techniques to approach his subject is perhaps best called—for him at least—experimental. He all but announces as much to his reader when he declares at the end with urban brusqueness that “this book never did turn into a novel.”

  I imagine, however, that Sōseki was not entirely happy with the results of his experiment. There’s a faintly dissatisfied air that clings to the work as a whole. And at the time the novel was serialized in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, readers’ responses were not all he might have hoped for. (Nor could one blame them, either. The book has nothing that might be called a plot.) But I suspect that once he had finished it, Sōseki felt secretly satisfied that his literary experiment had more or less accomplished its aim—that, as an author, he had created something special. It is my personal conviction that the space occupied by The Miner amid the literary monument that is Sōseki’s complete works is by no means small, that it cannot and should not be overlooked. It is one of my favorites, I confess, and I suspect that there may even be other readers out there—not many, to be sure—who, like me, are far more strongly drawn to The Miner than to such supposedly representative late works as Kokoro (1914, literally, The Heart) or Light and Dark (1916, Meian).

  Before I touch upon the experimental qualities of the novel, I’d like to provide a brief overview of the historical background against which it was created, an important element in any discussion of the book. The Miner began to appear on January 1, 1908, and the notes upon which it was based were taken down by Sōseki in late November 1907 when his young informant visited him, but before then, in February 1907, an event had occurred which had gripped the entire country: a violent mass protest staged by workers at Ashio Copper Mine, the very same that serves as the setting for The Miner. When he decided on his material and started writing the novel, Sōseki must have had in mind the startling events that had recently filled the news. And yet his text never once mentions that the copper mine in the book is the one in Ashio (though considering the geography, the towns mentioned and the scale of the mine, it could not have been any other), and he remains almost unnaturally silent about the topics that had so shaken society—the miners’ riot and mineral pollution. This was undoubtedly quite deliberate on Sōseki’s part. Ashio is located deep in the hil4 ls of Tochigi prefecture, north and east of the Kanto Plain that includes the sprawling city of Tokyo.

  As the crow flies, it is a mere 110 kilometers northeast of Tokyo, but to drive there still takes a good four or five hours. The vein of copper was first discovered in the sixteenth century, after which Ashio flourished for two centuries as an open-pit mine. Most of the copper coins that circulated in the Edo period (1600–1868) were cast from copper extracted there. The vein was thought to have been exhausted and the mine was all but abandoned by the mid-nineteenth century. In 1877 the prefecture transferred ownership of the mine to the private Furukawa Mining Company (later part of the Furukawa Industrial Conglomerate), which soon discovered, using new technology introduced from the West, that a rich vein of copper still lay sleeping far below the surface. The company invested heavily in the latest mining equipment and proceeded to develop the mine on 4 a vast scale.

  The demand for copper was increasing dramatically in those days, both for private enterprise and the munitions industry as Japan continued to solidify its foundations as a newly modernizing nation, gaining victories in two major hard-fought foreign wars (against China in 1894–95 and against Russia in 1904–05) and developing domestic industries to spectacular new heights. As a “strategic company” that received support from the national government, Ashio Copper Mine prospered. For a time it produced up to forty percent of Japan’s copper output. A large town grew up in the mountains, centered on the mine. It had its own rail line, and at its peak almost 40,000 people lived there, rivaling the provincial seat of Utsunomiya. The labyrinth of underground mine tunnels was almost equal in total length to the distance from Tokyo to Fukuoka—nearly 900 kilometers.

  The spectacular development of Ashio Copper Mine, however, bequeathed to history a number of dark, even tragic side-effects. The first was that of mineral pollution. The waste water from the smelting process was discharged into the nearby Watarase River, and its powerful toxins killed most of the fish and rice paddies downstream. The soil of the area had always been particularly fertile, but the mulberry trees needed for silkworm culture ceased to grow there, and smoke from the mine operations killed the surrounding thick forests, exposing the soil of the mountainsides and leading to many river floods. The local people suffered serious health problems, of course.

  Starting in 1890, farmers living downstream from the mine began to appeal for a shutdown of the mine, but the national government and the company saw copper production as a lifeline of the Japanese economy and turned a deaf ear to the protests on the grounds that no clear causal link had been established. Finally, in 1897, the battles waged by Diet member Tanaka Shōzō began to have an impact, and the government officially recognized the connection between the mine and the environmental disasters, ordering Furukawa Mining to build filter beds and settlement ponds and to attach desulfurization equipment to their smokestacks. Even so, the people of the area continued to suffer from the effects of mineral pollution for many years. Several villages simply ceased to exist, their inhabitants scattered to other parts of the country. This, then, is how a modernizing Japan dealt with one of the first cases of serious industrial pollution in its history, making the name “Ashio” synonymous with horrible environmental pollution on a par with Minamata, the site of the mercury pollution that caused an enormous social problem in the 1960s.

  Ashio Copper Mine’s other grave problem involved the cruelty of its labor conditions. The miners’ pay was low, bribery was rampant in the allocation of work, labor supervision was often violent, insufficient safety measures led to frequent caveins, and those miners who were not killed in accidents rarely lived to forty owing to the lung disease known as silicosis. Hygienic conditions were poor and medical facilities wanting, so that anyone felled by illness could do little more than lie there and die. And once one became a miner, it was almost impossible to extricate oneself from the “boiler system,” the regime built around dormitories or “boilers” (hanba), with its stringent contracts and crippling “loans” to workers, each of whom would almost literally “owe my soul to the company store” until the day he died. Many of the miners, it seems, were either men who sought refuge in the mountains from a failed life (living in a “boiler” at least assured one of meals and a place to sleep) or lawbreakers fleeing from the authorities in hopes of hiding themselves in the mine. It was truly a world peopled by men on the lowest rungs of the social ladder, a harsh gathering place for losers, as vividly portrayed in the pages of The Miner.

  In February of 1907, however, the miners’ dissatisfaction at being treated like disposable slaves reached the boiling point, and something set off a large-scale riot. The miners dynamited the surveillance and guard facilities, burned the Furukawa Mining staff residences to the ground, and vented their fury in violent attacks against company officials. Although by some miracle no one was killed, the miners took over the entire town of Ashio and sent company personnel who lived there running down the mountain in fear for their lives. The scale of the violence was more than the local police could handle, and armed troops were sent in. They arrested 628 of the miners who had occupied the town. After this, improvements were made to the work environment, but mining continued to be as harsh and potentially deadly as ever.

  As mentioned earlier, it was November 1907, nine months after the riot, when Sōseki took down the words of a young man named Arai who had gone to work (or, rather, had been recruited by a quick-talking procurer to work) in Ashio Copper Mine. Arai’s experience, however, dated from before the riot; the mine conditions we see in the book date from just before the explosion, as it were. It would be natural for us to assume that Arai was offering the famous novelist his special take on current events as fresh and valuable primary source
material for use in a novel, in return for which he hoped to be paid.

  According to Sōseki’s own testimony in an interview, however, this was not the case. Arai primarily wanted to tell Sōseki about the complicated love affair that had led him to flee from Tokyo into the mountains, with his various experiences at Ashio Copper Mine merely a kind of postscript to all that. Sōseki declined the offer then and there on the grounds that it was impossible for a stranger to write such personal matters as another’s love affair accurately. Almost immediately, however, Sōseki received an unexpected request to serialize a novel in the Asahi Shimbun when the writer Shimazaki Tōson informed the newspaper that he would be unable to produce the work he had been commissioned to write. Sōseki was unprepared to write a new novel, but as a special member of the Asahi staff, he was in no position to turn the request down flat. He decided, perhaps as a last resort, to ask young Arai for permission to use his material, not to write a love story but a novel based on his experience in the mine. Arai agreed to this, and Sōseki started serializing The Miner on New Year’s Day, 1908. In other words, he had little more than a month between taking his notes from Arai and starting to write the novel. Far from having a chance to let the material ferment in his consciousness, he wrote it almost extemporaneously.

  Of course one cannot always take a novelist’s anecdotes or confidences about his writing at face value. As a novelist myself, I know about such things. I don’t think there’s a novelist anywhere who tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about how each of his works came into being. We all set up smokescreens to hide inconvenient truths and make up episodes to add a little color. There must be some novelists, too, who enjoy creating little legends about themselves. Or, even if they don’t do it consciously, their memories can undergo spontaneous change while they are engaged in the creation of their works.