Kusamakura Read online

  Table of Contents

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  Notes

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  KUSAMAKURA

  NATSUME SOSEKI (1867-1916), one of Japan’s most influential modern writers, is widely considered the foremost novelist of the Meiji era (1868-1914). Born Natsume Kinnosuke in Tokyo, he graduated from Tokyo University in 1893 and then taught high school English. He went to England on a Japanese government scholarship, and when he returned to Japan, he lectured on English literature at Tokyo University and began his writing career with the novel I Am a Cat. In 1908 he gave up teaching and became a full-time writer. He wrote fourteen novels, including Botchan and Kokoro, as well as haiku, poems in the Chinese style, academic papers on literary theory, essays, and autobiographical sketches. His work enjoyed wide popularity in his lifetime and secured him a permanent place in Japanese literature.

  MEREDITH MCKINNEY holds a Ph.D. in medieval Japanese literature from the Australian National University in Canberra, where she teaches at the Japan Centre. She taught in Japan for twenty years and now lives near Braidwood, New South Wales. Her other translations include Ravine and Other Stories by Furui Yoshikichi, The Tale of Saigyo, and, for Penguin Classics, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon.

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  This translation first published in Penguin Books 2008

  Translation and introduction copyright © Meredith McKinney, 2008

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Natsume, Soseki, 1867-1916.

  [Kusamakura. English]

  Kusamakura / Natsume Soseki ; translated with an introduction by Meredith McKinney.

  p. cm.—(Penguin classics)

  eISBN : 978-1-101-09755-7

  1. McKinney, Meredith, 1950- II. Title.

  PL812.A8K813 2008

  895.6’342—dc22 2007024784

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  Introduction

  Kusamakura (1906) is an extraordinary work, written at an extraordinary time in Japan’s history, when the nation was tumbling headlong into the twentieth century and toward its “modern miracle,” even as its traditional past everywhere still haunted it. Kusamakura was conceived out of this double consciousness and embodies it in fascinating ways. It is very much a novel of its historical moment, a literary experiment that was as new and exciting as the great experiment that was Meiji-era Japan.

  Until 1868, when the Meiji era began, Japan had maintained a fiercely isolationist policy that kept it culturally and politically intact for centuries. When the nation finally chose, after a brief internal struggle, to submit to external pressure and open its doors, this largely untouched world of “old Japan” was suddenly subjected to violent upheavals, with the immediate rush to modernize and Westernize. In Kusamakura the powerful and inexorable transforming impetus that was impelling Japan out of its past and into a very different future is embodied in the image of the steam train of the final scene “hurtling blindly into the darkness ahead” with its freight of hapless passengers, an image of the sinister “serpent of civilization” that carries the novel off into its open-ended future. In this final scene the steam train is bearing away men who are leaving to fight in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, a war that had just drawn to its victorious end when Natsume Soseki wrote this work. Though written at the height of the nationalistic fervor that followed this victory, the novel portrays the war as a bloodbath whose distant echo of guns has penetrated even the idyllic peace of a mountain village that is otherwise virtually untouched by the modern world. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Soseki had a complex and deeply uneasy relationship with the new modernity.

  Kusamakura is at odds not only with the generalized euphoric embrace of modernity but also more specifically with the contemporary trends in Japan’s modern literature. Japanese prose writers had rushed to reject the earlier traditions and set about forging a new literature modeled on Western concepts of the novel. The Naturalism of nineteenth-century French writers such as Émile Zola provided the model for works that aimed at a gritty realism and an emphasis on human entanglements. Soseki, however, instinctively rebelled against this unthinking rejection of Japan’s native literary tradition and the focus on the more squalid aspects of the human world. Kusamakura is his attempt at an answer to this literary vogue, reaching back into Japan’s literary past to bring its riches to bear on the possible evolution of the new Japanese novel.

  Soseki was in an ideal position to seek a new literary synthesis of “East and West.” Natsume Kinnosuke (Soseki was his nom de plume) was born in 1867, the final year of the old regime, into a family of minor bureaucrats whose fortunes declined rapidly with the onset of the Meiji era. A late and unwanted child in a large family, he was adopted the following year by a childless couple, then returned nine years later, when the couple divorced, to his parents (whom he believed to be his grandparents). This loveless and lonely childhood marked him with a sense of estrangement and dislocation that haunted him through his adult years and that echoed the dislocations and questioning of identity that were hallmarks of Meiji-era Japan.

  Soseki’s education too epitomized the split consciousness of his time. As a child, he was given a traditional education with a strong grounding in the Chinese and Japanese classics—his love of this rich literary tradition is a constant presence in Kusamakura and to a lesser extent in everything he wrote. A bright student, he later chose to concentrate on the study of English, which was an important prerequisite for a scholarly career, and at Tokyo University he majored in English literature, but the classics remained his first and deepest love. Here again he was haunted by a sense of dislocation between his inheritance and the world in which he found himself, which he embraced with an unwilling fascination. Where others were throwing themselves indiscriminately into the huge experiment of modernization, with a largely uncritical adulation of Western c
ulture and its values, Soseki studied it carefully and was impressed and intrigued by it but found himself unable to embrace it wholeheartedly. He belonged to neither world and to both, and this uneasy, complex identity informs his writing, making him a uniquely Meiji voice.

  Once he graduated, Soseki took up a series of teaching posts, although he felt himself to be more scholar than teacher. During the following years he moved first to a school in Matsuyama in Shikoku (where he married) and then to Kumamoto in Kyushu. While there he paid a visit to the nearby hot spring village of Oama, which evidently formed the basis for his depiction of Nakoi in Kusamakura. Kumamoto was far from Tokyo, and such small villages at the turn of the century would still have preserved virtually intact the traditional Japan that was Soseki’s first inheritance and love. Perhaps the visit to Oama stayed in his imagination as the epitome of a brief journey into the apparently idyllic past, to set against the stresses and alienation of life in modern Japan. Although he had not yet begun to write, Soseki was already absorbing themes and material for his later novels.

  In 1900 the Japanese government provided Soseki with a scholarship to study in England for two years, part of its design to send promising scholars abroad to bring back an informed understanding of key aspects of Western civilization. Unwillingly, Soseki set sail for London, leaving behind his wife and baby daughter. The two years that followed were probably the unhappiest of his life. He was poor, he was intensely lonely, and he found nothing to love about the English or their way of life. England was aesthetically depressing for him—we can guess that the occasional criticisms of England scattered throughout Kusamakura echo the author’s own sentiments. He took meager lodgings, spoke to few people other than his landlady, and spent most of his time reading in his room, since he had failed to enroll himself in any formal course of study. He read widely, not only in literature but also in art, philosophy, and science, all the while fervently attempting to formulate for himself a position that would allow him to be true to his “Japaneseness” in relation to this very different culture whose influence was so rapidly transforming Japan.

  Yet even in the unhappy depths of his time in London, Soseki never simply rejected the West, as a less diligently honest and inquiring person might have done. He found much that earned his respect, particularly in the realms of literature and art. Kusamakura is on one level a working-through of his complex and ambivalent relationship to Western culture. A quotation from Shelley’s poem “To a Skylark” springs as readily to the protagonist’s mind as a quotation from Chinese poetry, and the novel’s frequent long digressions are often devoted to much the same sort of pondering on the relative merits of the two cultures as would have filled Soseki’s thoughts and notebooks during his lonely days in London. These questions remained of intense concern to him throughout his life. To such questions there could be no final answer. Kusamakura can be read as a journey through this terrain, a philosophical novel that delicately probes important propositions about the two cultures but necessarily draws no conclusions.

  When Soseki returned to Japan in 1903, he was required to take up a post teaching at the First National College in Tokyo, as well as lecturing in English literature at Tokyo University. His nerves, never strong, had been brought close to the breaking point by the London years. Partly, it seems, as a way of soothing and entertaining himself, he began to write fiction. In 1905 the gently humorous novel I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru) was serialized in a magazine and proved immediately popular. Botchan followed in 1906, sealing his reputation as a new and exciting novelist. Kusamakura appeared in the same year.

  By this time his four-year teaching term was almost over, and Soseki’s fame as a novelist was now such that the Asahi newspaper offered him a monthly salary to serialize all future novels. To everyone’s astonishment, Soseki accepted, turning his back on a likely professorship and honorable academic career. From 1907 until his death ten years later, at the end of 1916, he was a professional writer. During this time he wrote steadily, at the rate of around one novel a year, the works that would establish him as the foremost author of his time and the revered father of modern Japanese literature, whose works are still read and loved today.

  Kusamakura forms a kind of bridge between the first, lighthearted novels and the works Soseki wrote as an established and professional author, such novels as And Then (Sore kara, 1909), The Wanderer (Kojin, 1912), and Kokoro (1914), in which loneliness and introspection have become the dominant theme and tone. For all its seriousness of purpose, Kusamakura carries through from the early novels a delightful lightness and a wry, gently ironic humor. It is, however, in almost every way an anomaly, in terms both of Soseki’s work and of the modern Japanese novel. Written when Soseki was in his late thirties, balanced at the edge of a professional writing career, and self-consciously placing itself at the beginning of a new century, with Japan balanced on the edge of its own very different future, Kusamakura embodies a moment when Soseki, and Japanese literature, paused to look backward and forward and to play with possibilities.

  It was, Soseki said, written in the space of a week. The claim seems hardly credible, yet a certain intensity and tightness of interwoven motifs certainly suggest concentrated and even feverish writing. By any standard, the prose is extraordinarily polished—if it was indeed written in a week, it stands as supreme testimony to Soseki’s mastery of style and language.

  The discursive passages often rise to a sonorous ornateness that echoes the classical Chinese-influenced prose of an earlier era, replete with the parallelisms and phrasal balancing of Chinese literary writing. This style was already dated and somewhat difficult in its time; to modern readers, it is sometimes almost impenetrable. The descriptive passages, on the other hand, are elegantly poetic in the best Japanese tradition. In style as well as in content, Soseki was self-consciously experimenting with new forms by drawing on old.

  In a brief piece entitled “My Kusamakura” (Yo ga Kusamakura), Soseki stated that his aim had been to write “a haiku-style novel.” Previous novels, he said, were works in the manner of the senryu, the earthier version of haiku that looks at everyday human life with a wryly humorous eye. “But it seems to me,” he wrote, “that we should also have the haiku-style novel that lives through beauty.” He had written Kusamakura “in a spirit precisely opposite to the common idea of what a novel is. All that matters [in this work] is that a certain feeling, a feeling of beauty, remain with the reader. I have no other objective. Thus, there is no plot, and no development of events.”

  The plot is certainly exiguous. A nameless young artist sets off on a purposely aimless walking trip across the mountains to the remote village of Nakoi, where he stays at a hot spring inn and indulges in an artistic experiment: to observe all he sees, humans included, with a detached, aesthetic eye, in the manner of the artists and poets of old. The novel traces this process, recording his experiences in the first person, most particularly his encounter with the startling, intriguing, and beautiful Nami, the daughter of the establishment. The scene is perfectly set for a romantic entanglement—but nothing happens. In the final chapter, he joins Nami and her family as they travel by boat down to the town, returning himself and us to modern civilization. The novel flirts with plot as Nami flirts with the young man, never intending any serious development, intent on its own ends. Nami, the center of the novel, is (as Soseki pointed out) the still point, the enigma, around which the artist moves, watching and pondering the highly dramatized series of images of herself that she proffers him. When at last he glimpses in her a moment of unguarded pity, it completes the “picture” he has been working toward in his mind, and with it the novel.

  Kusamakura embodies its own experiment: it sets off with the artist to explore just how and to what extent the serene beauty that was the artistic ideal of the past might be achievable in terms of a twentieth-century Japanese consciousness and its artistic products. The lofty “unhuman” and “nonemotional” approach to which this artist aspires—the ideal
of a cool and uninvolved aesthetic response to all experience—can only be compromised by experience itself, and this is indeed what happens in the course of the novel. Yet the original aim of this experimental journey, to attempt to keep “beauty” as the central focus, is retained through all its testings. Kusamakura succeeds in embodying difficult balances.

  Like Soseki, this artist is deeply imbued with an understanding of and respect for the traditions he has inherited, yet he is an artist “in the Western style,” a modern man with a wide-ranging grasp of Western culture. He has returned out of the very different present to bask for a brief time in the old world of beauty and serenity that the village of Nakoi embodies, but he necessarily brings with him the outsider’s eye of modern Japan, with all its yearnings and confusions and ironic knowledge of the wider world. The village, still precariously maintained in a “timeless past,” is slowly revealed as a place whose dream is disturbed by the distant violent disruptions of the modern world. Like the artist with his problematic outsider’s vision, Nami, the central embodiment of the beauty that he encounters and with which he must come to terms, is also “returned” from the outside world, and her confusions and complexities cannot be contained by the village or by any simple portrayal of her. At the end of the novel she remains essentially elusive.

  The artist in fact never succeeds in painting Nami (whose name itself means “beauty”), that potential amalgam of Western and Japanese artistic vision that has haunted him, and after the experiment of Kusamakura Soseki likewise did not pursue his vision of the new novel that takes “beauty” as its central aim and premise. He seems to have abandoned his brave hopes for this “haiku-style novel” as Japan’s answer to the realistic novel of Western-style Naturalism. Honesty about the truths of modern experience compelled him to focus his subsequent novels on the contemporary world of the “new Japan” and to explore its lonely consciousness.