Light and Darkness Read online

  It is no accident, for example, that, among Tsuda’s critics, only Kobayashi succeeds in puncturing his complacency. At their farewell dinner, he insists that Tsuda read a letter from someone he does not know. A cry for help from its author, suffering in the isolating darkness of his despair, the letter enables Tsuda to see something about himself to which he has been blind and creates the possibility of a step forward, but for only an instant:

  Something had startled him. Until now he had been wont to assume that the world was what he beheld in front of him, but just now he had been obliged abruptly to turn and look behind. He had halted in that attitude, his gaze fixed upon an existence opposite to himself. As he stared at that ghostly presence he was encountering for the first time ever, he cried out to himself Ah, this is a person, too!…

  Here he stopped and circled. But he didn’t advance a single step. He went no further than understanding the meaning of the repellant letter in a manner that befitted him. (165:364)

  It is in their self-conscious interactions with Kobayashi and the others that Sōseki discovers and illuminates his protagonists’ innermost feelings: relationship becomes the key to unlocking characterization in depth. Here, for example, is Tsuda, “a man who prided himself on his unfaltering perspicacity where his own interests were concerned,” revealing the cynicism he is at pains to conceal as he calculates the dynamics of the extended family:

  The truth was, he didn’t care for O-Nobu to the extent people assumed he did….

  Tsuda had a particular reason for allowing this misunderstanding to obtain. Kobayashi had disinterred the reason. It was in the soil of this misunderstanding that the Okamotos’ good intentions toward him grew, and it was in his interest to preserve those feelings as best he could. Treating O-Nobu solicitously, in other words, was the same as currying favor with the Okamotos, and inasmuch as Okamoto and Yoshikawa were as close as brothers, it stood to reason that the better care he took of O-Nobu, the more assured his future became. (133–134:293)

  In long, successive scenes we observe O-Nobu dueling with Kobayashi, with her husband, and with her sister-in-law, O-Hide. Tsuda engages in his own fraught dialogues with O-Hide, Kobayashi, and the manipulative Madam Yoshikawa. These strategic engagements now and then explode into moments of intense emotion—jealousy, rancor, recrimination—that will surprise English readers conditioned to expect indirectness and delicacy, not to mention reticence, of Japanese social behavior.

  IN SEARCH OF an overarching 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 he encounters in the course of the novel will affect him in the nature of a cure, healing in some basic way his social, emotional, and moral infirmity. Yet the text offers no corroboration of such a reading. Tsuda suffers, often the result of wounds to his vanity, but, as with many another narcissist, his pain afflicts him but generally fails to move him toward a deepened understanding of himself. By the time they reach the end of the novel, readers 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 a central theme in Light and Dark, it is precisely the impossibility of recovery from the suffering in isolation caused, in Sōseki’s view, by attachment to the self. This was by no means a new idea. Daisuke, the hero of his novel And Then (1909), has stepped aside selflessly to allow his best friend to marry a girl he himself covets, but when the couple returns to Tokyo in financial straits he declares his love for Michiyo and wrests her from her husband. The novel ends with Daisuke confronting madness as he contemplates the social implications of his actions. The married couple in The Gate (1910) has transgressed in a similar way and lives a lonely life in the shadow of an overhanging cliff, seeking refuge in each other from the ostracism they have brought upon themselves. The hero, roughly Tsuda’s age, tries meditation at a Zen temple but finds that the gates of enlightenment are closed to him and returns in resignation to his tedious, haunted life. The sensei in Kokoro (1914), Sōseki’s best-known novel in the West, torments himself with responsibility for driving his friend “K” to suicide by stealing the woman he loves before “K” can find the courage to propose to her. He warns the student narrator that nothing he tells him will allow him to change the way he leads his own life, and the novel demonstrates that he is right: the student remains trapped in his own selfishness. The sensei’s wife asks poignantly, “Can two hearts ever beat as one?” and the answer the novel implicitly provides is a resounding no. On the evidence of his work, Sōseki surveyed the world around him and concluded that his fellow man could not improve. Nor was he tempted by the possibility of redemption as an article of Christian faith that led to the pardons, marriages, and babies that end many a Victorian novel happily.

  Like the hero in The Gate, Tsuda is in quest of self-knowledge as an alleviation of the uneasiness he carries inside himself. And the novel lofts the possibility that the mystery woman Kiyoko may hold the key to what he seeks. But the prelude to the actual meeting with Kiyoko suggests that enlightenment for Tsuda was not Sōseki’s intention. His journey to the spa where Kiyoko is staying deep in the mountains is long and fraught with obstacles, the most overtly symbolic of which is the dark boulder lying athwart 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:

  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 alongside the sinks….

  He was inveterately 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. (175:387–88)

  The meeting he finally arranges with Kiyoko, the last scene Sōseki was able to write before he collapsed, is a masterpiece of indirection and provocative hints that lead nowhere. One senses that Kiyoko’s apparent serenity may be counterfeit, that she is not so indifferent to Tsuda as she seems; one senses as well her contained anger. But Tsuda’s confusion when he ponders the meaning of her smile on the way back to his room 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, not unrelated, mystery, or at least ambiguity: the nature of Tsuda’s illness. Ostensibly, he is suffering from hemorrhoids (although the word for “hemorrhoid” never appears). Why, in that case, is he seeing a doctor whose specialty seems to be venereal disease? This fact is revealed implicitly in a scene in the waiting room at the clinic:

  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 cast its shadow abruptly over each of them. Lacking the courage to turn toward the light, they had halted inside the darkness of the shadow and locked themselves in. (17:54)

  Waiting his turn, Tsuda recalls unexpected encounters at the doctor’s office with two men within the past year. One is his brother-in-law, Hori, a playboy, who seemed uncharacteristically “nonplussed” to see him. The other is an “acquaintance” with whom he engaged over dinner after leaving the doctor’s office together in a “complex debate about sex and love,” which had subsequently resulted in a rift between them.

  These passages, coupled with the fact that the medical details Sōseki pr
ovides are inconclusive, lead the reader by indirection to the speculation that the undisclosed “friend” may have been Seki, the acquaintance for whom Kiyoko had left Tsuda. Was Seki infected? Might his illness have been responsible for Kiyoko’s miscarriage? And what of Tsuda himself: Was he immune to the allure of Tokyo’s pleasure quarter? The following exchange with O-Nobu is an invitation to wonder:

  “You stopped off somewhere again today?”

  It was a question O-Nobu could be counted on to ask if Tsuda failed to return at the expected hour. He was obliged accordingly to offer something in reply. Since it wasn’t necessarily the case that he had been delayed by an errand, there were times when his response was 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.” (14:48)

  Entangling Hori and Seki and Tsuda would be structurally satisfying. 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, controlling ambiguity, Sōseki keeps observant readers on the edge of their hermeneutic seats.22

  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” (78:177).

  In an ironic scene in which she attempts to persuade O-Hide, married to a philanderer, that love must be unconditional, absolute, and exclusive, she exposes her naiveté and, by implication, the sense of entitlement that proceeds from her own egoism. She is of course 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 knowledge 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.” (149:326–27)

  Observing that O-Nobu’s tension has eased, Tsuda feels reprieved and turns to placating his wife, “abundantly employing phrases likely to 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 engagement 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 subsided. (150:328)

  One source of animating energy in Light and Dark is the tension between the antipodes of precision and ambiguity. Some scenes feel excessively interpreted. Elsewhere, often at key moments such as this one, the narrator slips out of the room, leaving the reader to interpret the passage on his or her own. And what are we to think? In driving O-Nobu into a gullibility as hopeless as this, as hapless and pathetic, is Sōseki revealing a lack of respect for this inexperienced, passionate young woman? Does he share what amounts to Tsuda’s contempt? Is the reader to pity or condemn her? We are left deliberating in a troubled way, which is perhaps what Sōseki intends. We are obliged to ask ourselves, what is to become of this valiant, vulnerable heroine?

  SINCE ITS PUBLICATION in 1917, Light and Dark has inspired conjecture about how Sōseki intended to conclude his novel. He left no outline, and the only oracular reference is O-Nobu’s prediction to Tsuda that “the day was coming when I’d have to summon up my courage at a certain moment all at once… courage for my husband’s sake” (154:339). This has been taken to mean that O-Nobu would travel to the hot–springs resort to do battle with Kiyoko for Tsuda. In his preface to the Shinchō paperback edition, the haiku poet Nakamura Kusatao paints the grimmest picture: Tsuda and Kiyoko fall back in love, and O-Nobu, failing to win Tsuda away from her, commits suicide. In Ōe Kenzaburō’s version, O-Nobu hastens to the hot springs accompanied by Kobayashi and remonstrates with Kiyoko. But in her naiveté she is no match for her rival and, defeated, falls physically ill. Tsuda nurses her back to health and rediscovers his love for her. Together they return from the realm of darkness—Ōe locates the hot springs in a Stygian realm, the “darkness” in Light and Dark—to the world of life and “light.”23 The novelist Ōoka Shōhei (Fires on the Plain) postulates a variety of endings.24 Kiyoko concludes that she has paled on seeing Tsuda at the bottom of the stairs because she still has feelings for him, and her confession rekindles their romance. O-Nobu travels to the hot springs and 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 Bunraku play, Love Suicide at Amijima. Unlike Koharu, who sympathizes with O-san, Kiyoko pleads her own grief at miscarrying as a consequence of an infection that her libertine husband has passed to her. (Ōoka is the only Japanese critic I have read who takes Sōseki’s intimation to heart.) Under the stress of this impasse, Tsuda begins to hemorrhage and collapses. O-Nobu nurses him, and Kiyoko, perceiving the bond between them, departs.

  There are other extrapolations, but none clarifies or deepens significantly the vision that Sōseki has already conjured: the unlikelihood of an escape from the prison of vanity and self-interest into the light of liberating self-knowledge. Among the writers who have essayed to “conclude” the novel with a full-length sequel—there have been four published attempts25—only Mizumura Minae has conveyed the pessimism that is Sōseki’s primary color. Her Light and Dark, the Sequel (Zoku Meian, 1990), begins boldly with the final installment of Light and Dark and develops the game of cat-and-mouse that Sōseki initiated. 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 divulging an explanation for having turned away from him: “When all is said and done I can’t trust you,” she obliges. “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.”26 Coming from the woman who inhabits his dreams, this unsparing put-down might have withered Tsuda with chagrin, for he is guilty as charged of betraying his wife. But, as always, he is insulated against humiliation by his own self-regard and feels only anger. Just then O-Nobu arrives, but there is no confrontation between the women, only a moment of breathtaking awkwardness. Kiyoko returns to the inn with a soft “Farewell,” and the couple is left alone to suffer in silence. Thus Mizumura’s sequel concludes on a note that seems congruent with Sōseki’s intent: difficult lessons have not been learned, and the way ahead is no clearer than it ever was.

  The question remains: Is Light and Dark incomplete as Sōseki left it? Certainly he intended to continue writing, but an author’s desire to augment a novel needn’t be taken ipso facto as proof that the work is unfinished; in view of the inconclusiveness that characterizes much of Japanese fiction, the question may not be as frivolous as it appears. How “complete,” for example, is Snow Country by Kawabata Yasunari, a series of impressionistic episodes loosely assembled over a period of long years, or, for that matter, the same au
thor’s open-ended portrait of an old man preparing for death, The Sound of the Mountain? How complete is Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s Some Prefer Nettles, which ends with the mistress O-Hisa kneeling enigmatically in the doorway? And what of Tanizaki’s magnum opus, The Makioka Sisters, which leaves the reader with Yukiko, suffering from diarrhea, boarding a train for Tokyo to begin her new life as the wife of an architect who is not introduced?

  Let us not belabor the point. Light and Dark appears to be as complete as many Japanese novels in the twentieth-century canon: everything the reader needs to know about its principal characters to anticipate the ineluctable outcome Sōseki intends has been revealed. The details of the ending are missing, but the essence of his conclusion is already encoded in the text: Tsuda will not succeed in liberating himself from the egoism that blinds him, and O-Nobu will continue to pursue an exalted version of love that she will not ultimately attain. This motif is a refrain that sounds throughout Sōseki’s oeuvre. It is the contradictory, terrifying, ultimately unaccountable complexity of human consciousness microscopically examined in Light and Dark that installs it as a landmark in twentieth-century Japanese fiction.