Kokoro Read online

  MEREDITH McKINNEY

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to the Japan Centre at the Australian National University, under whose auspices I completed this translation while a visiting fellow.

  My warm thanks also go to two friends. Nobuo Sakai of Tezukayama Gakuin Daigaku meticulously checked the translation against the original, and Elizabeth Lawson, as always, generously spared her time to read the final draft and make invaluable suggestions.

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  OTHER WORKS BY NATSUME SŌSEKI

  Brodey, Inger Sigrun, Ikuo Tsunematsu, and Sammy I. Tsunematsu, trans. My Individualism and the Philosophical Foundations of Literature. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 2005.

  Cohn, Joel, trans. Botchan. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2007. Ito, Aiko, and Graeme Wilson, trans. I Am a Cat. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 2002.

  McClellan, Edwin, trans. Grass on the Wayside. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 1971.

  Rubin, Jay, trans. Sanshirō. Michigan Classics in Japanese Studies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.

  WORKS ON KOKORO

  Fukuchi, Isamu. “Kokoro and ëthe Spirit of Meiji.” Monumenta Nipponica 48:468-88.

  McClellan, Edwin. “The Implications of Sōseki’s Kokoro.” Monumenta Nipponica 14:356-70.

  Pollack, David. “Framing the Self: The Philosophical Dimensions of Human Nature in Kokoro.” Monumenta Nipponica 43:417-27.

  WORKS ON NATSUME SŌSEKI

  Beangcheon, Yul. Natsume Sōseki. London: Macmillan, 1984. Brodey, Inger Sigrun. “Natsume Sōseki and Laurence Sterne: Cross-Cultural Discourse on Literary Linearity.” Comparative Literature 50, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 193-219.

  Brodey, Inger Sigrun, and Sammy I. Tsunematsu. Rediscovering Natsume Sōseki. Folkestone: Global Books Ltd., 2001.

  Iijima, Takehisa, and James M. Vardaman Jr., eds. The World of Natsume Sōseki. Tokyo: Kinseido Ltd., 1987.

  McClellan, Edwin. Two Japanese Novelists: Sōseki and Toson. Tuttle Publishing, 2004.

  Miyoshi, Masao. Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.

  Rubin, Jay. “The Evil and the Ordinary in Sōseki’s Fiction.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 46, no. 2 (December 1986): 333-52.

  Turney, Alan. “Sōseki’s Development as a Novelist Until 1907; With Special Reference to the Genesis, Nature and Position in His Work of Kusa Makura.” Monumenta Nipponica 41, no. 4 (Winter 1986): 497-99.

  Viglielmo, Valdo H. “An Introduction to the Later Novels of Natsume Sōseki.” Monumenta Nipponica 19, no. 1, 1-36.

  Yiu, Angela. Chaos and Order in the Works of Natsume Sōseki. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998.

  PART I

  SENSEI AND I

  CHAPTER 1

  I always called him Sensei, and so I shall do in these pages, rather than reveal his name. It is not that I wish to shield him from public scrutiny—simply that it feels more natural. “Sensei” springs to my lips whenever I summon memories of this man, and I write of him now with the same reverence and respect. It would also feel wrong to use some conventional initial to substitute for his name and thereby distance him.

  I first met Sensei in Kamakura,1 in the days when I was still a young student. A friend had gone there during summer vacation for sea bathing and urged me to join him, so I set about organizing enough money to cover the trip. This took me two or three days. Less than three days after I arrived, my friend received a sudden telegram from home demanding that he return. His mother was ill, it seemed.

  He did not believe it. For some time his parents had been trying to force him into an unwanted marriage. By present-day standards he was far too young for marriage, and besides he did not care for the girl in question. That was why he had chosen not to return home for the vacation, as he normally would have, but to go off to a local seaside resort to enjoy himself.

  He showed me the telegram and asked what I thought he should do. I did not know what to advise. But if his mother really was ill, he clearly should go home, so in the end he decided to leave. Having come to Kamakura to be with my friend, I now found myself alone.

  I could stay or go as I pleased, since some time still remained before classes began again, so I decided to stay where I was for the moment. My friend, who was from a prosperous family in the Chūgoku region, did not lack for money. But he was a student, and young, so in fact his standard of living was actually much like my own, and I was spared the trouble of having to find a cheaper inn for myself after he left.

  The inn he had chosen was somewhere in an out-of-the-way district of Kamakura. To get to any of the fashionable spots—the billiard rooms and ice cream parlors and such things—I had to take a lengthy walk through the rice fields. A rickshaw ride would cost me a full twenty sen. Still, a number of new summer houses stood in the area, and it was right next to the beach, making it wonderfully handy for sea bathing.

  Each day I went down to the shore for a swim, making my way among soot-blackened old thatched country houses. An astonishing number of men and women always thronged the beach, city folk down from Tokyo to escape the summer heat. Sometimes the crowd was so thick that the water was a tightly packed mass of black heads, as in some public bathhouse. Knowing no one, I enjoyed my time alone amid this merry scene, lying on the sand and leaping about up to my knees in the waves.

  It was here in this throng of people that I first came upon Sensei. In those days two little stalls on the beach provided drinks and changing rooms, and for no particular reason I took to frequenting one of them. Unlike the owners of the grand summer houses in the Hasé area, we users of this beach had no private bathing huts, so communal changing rooms were essential. People drank tea and relaxed here, or left their hats and sun umbrellas in safekeeping; after they bathed, they would wash themselves down at the stall, and attendants would rinse their bathing suits for them. I owned no bathing clothes, but I left my belongings at the stall whenever I went into the water, to avoid having anything stolen.

  CHAPTER 2

  When I first set eyes on Sensei there, he had just taken off his clothes and was about to go in for a swim, while I had just emerged from the water and was drying off in the sea breeze. A number of black heads were moving around between us, obstructing my view of him, and under normal circumstances I probably would not have noticed him. But he instantly caught my attention, despite the crowd and my own distracted state of mind, because he was with a Westerner.

  The Westerner’s marvelously white skin had struck me as soon as I came in. He had casually tossed his kimono robe onto the nearby bench and then, clad only in a pair of drawers such as we Japanese wear, stood gazing out toward the sea, arms folded.

  This intrigued me. Two days earlier I had gone up to Yuigahama beach and spent a long time watching the Westerners bathing. I had settled myself on a low dune very close to the rear entrance of a hotel frequented by foreigners, and seen a number of men emerge to bathe. Unlike this Westerner, however, they all wore clothing that covered their torso, arms, and legs. The women were even more modest. Most wore red or blue rubber caps that bobbed prettily about among the waves.

  Because I had so recently observed all that, the sight of this Westerner standing there in front of everyone wearing only a pair of trunks struck me as quite remarkable.

  He turned and spoke a few words to the Japanese man beside him, who had bent over to pick up a small towel that had fallen on the sand. His companion then wrapped the towel about his head and set off toward the sea. This man was Sensei.

  Out of nothing more than curiosity, my eyes followed the two figures as they walked side by side down to the water. Stepping straight into the waves, they made their way through the boisterous crowd gathered in the shallows close to shore, and when they reached a relatively open stretch of water, both began to swim. They swam on out to sea until their heads looked small in the distance. Then they turned around and swam straight back to the beach. Returning to the stall, they toweled
themselves down without rinsing at the well, put on their clothes, and promptly headed off together for some unknown destination.

  After they left, I sat down on the bench and smoked a cigarette. I wondered idly about Sensei. I felt sure I had seen his face before somewhere, but for the life of me I could not recall where or when.

  I was at loose ends and needing to amuse myself, so the following day I went back to the stall at the hour when I had seen Sensei. Sure enough, there he was again. This time he came along wearing a straw hat, and the Westerner was not with him. He removed his spectacles and set them on the bench, then wrapped a small towel around his head and set off briskly down the beach.

  As I watched him make his way through the crowd at the edge and start to swim, I had a sudden urge to follow him. In I strode, the water splashing high around me, and when I reached a reasonable depth, I set my sights on him and began to swim. I did not reach him, however. Rather than return the way he had come, as he did the previous day, Sensei had swum in an arc back to the beach.

  I too swam back, and as I emerged from the water and entered the stall, shaking the drops from my hands, he passed me on his way out, already neatly dressed.

  CHAPTER 3

  The next day I went to the beach at the same hour yet again, and again I saw Sensei there. I did the same the day after, but never found an opportunity to speak to him or even to greet him. Besides, Sensei’s demeanor was rather forbidding. He would arrive at the same time each day, with an unapproachable air, and depart just as punctually and aloofly. He seemed quite indifferent to the noisy throng that surrounded him. The Westerner who had been with him that first day never reappeared. Sensei was always alone.

  Finally my chance came. Sensei had as usual come striding back from his swim. He was about to don the kimono that lay as usual on the bench, when he found that it had somehow gotten covered in sand. As he turned away and quickly shook it out, I saw his spectacles, which had been lying on the bench beneath it, slip through a crack between the boards and fall to the ground. Sensei put on the robe and wrapped the sash around his waist. Then, evidently noticing that his spectacles were missing, he quickly began to search for them. In a moment I had ducked down, thrust my hand under the bench, and retrieved them from the ground.

  “Thank you,” he said as he took them.

  The next day I followed Sensei into the sea and swam after him. I had gone about two hundred yards when he suddenly stopped swimming and turned to speak to me. We two were the only beings afloat on that blue expanse of water for a considerable distance. As far as the eye could see, strong sunlight blazed down upon sea and mountains.

  As I danced wildly in place there in the water, I felt my muscles flood with a sensation of freedom and delight. Sensei, meanwhile, ceased to move and lay floating tranquilly on his back. I followed his example and felt the sky’s azure strike me full in the face, as if plunging its glittering shafts of color deep behind my eyes.

  “Isn’t this good!” I cried.

  After a little while Sensei righted himself in the water and suggested we go back. Being physically quite strong, I would have liked to stay longer, but I instantly and happily agreed. The two of us swam back to the beach the way we had come.

  From this point on, Sensei and I were friends. Yet I still had no idea where he was staying. On the afternoon of the third day since our swim, he suddenly turned to me when we met at the stall. “Are you planning to stay here a while longer?” he asked.

  I had not thought about it and had no ready answer. “I don’t really know,” I responded simply.

  But the grin on Sensei’s face made me suddenly awkward, and I found myself asking, “What about you, Sensei?” This was when I first began to call him by that name.

  That evening I called on him at his lodgings. I say “lodgings,” but I discovered it was no ordinary place—he was staying in a villa in the spacious grounds of a temple. Those who shared the place, I also discovered, were not related to him.

  Noticing how he grimaced wryly when I persisted in calling him “Sensei,” I excused myself with the explanation that this was a habit of mine when addressing my elders. I asked him about the Westerner he had been with. The man was quite eccentric, he said, adding that he was no longer in Kamakura. He told me a lot of other things about him, then remarked that it was odd that he, who had few social contacts even with his fellow Japanese, should have become friends with such a person.

  At the end of our conversation I told him that I felt I knew him from somewhere but could not remember where. Young as I was, I hoped that he might share my feeling and was anticipating his answer. But after a thoughtful pause, he said, “I can’t say I recall your face. Perhaps you’re remembering somebody else.” His words produced in me a strange disappointment.

  CHAPTER 4

  At the end of the month I returned to Tokyo. Sensei had left the summer resort long since. When we parted, I had asked him, “Would you mind if I visited you from time to time?” “Yes, do,” he replied simply. By this time I felt we were on quite familiar terms, and had expected a warmer response. This unsatisfactory reply rather wounded my self-confidence.

  Sensei frequently disappointed me in this way. He seemed at times to realize it and at other times to be quite oblivious. Despite all the fleeting shocks of disappointment, however, I felt no desire to part ways with him. On the contrary, whenever some unexpected terseness of his shook me, my impulse was to press forward with the friendship. It seemed to me that if I did so, my yearning for the possibilities of all he had to offer would someday be fulfilled. Certainly I was young. Yet the youthful candor that drew me to him was not evident in my other relationships.

  I had no idea why I should feel this way toward Sensei alone. Now, when he is dead, I understand at last. He had never disliked me, and the occasional curt greetings and aloofness were not expressions of displeasure intended to keep me at bay. I pity him now, for I realize that he was in fact sending a warning, to someone who was attempting to grow close to him, signaling that he was unworthy of such intimacy. For all his unresponsiveness to others’ affection, I now see, it was not them he despised but himself.

  Needless to say, I returned to Tokyo fully intending to visit Sensei. Classes would not resume for another two weeks, so I planned to visit him during that time. However, within two or three days of my arrival in Tokyo, my feelings began to shift and blur. The city’s vibrant atmosphere, reviving as it did all my stimulating memories, swept away thoughts of Kamakura. Seeing my fellow students in the street gave me a thrill of excited anticipation for the coming academic year. For a while I forgot about Sensei.

  Classes started, and a month or so later I slumped back into normalcy. I wandered the streets in vague discontentment, or cast my eyes around my room, aware of some indefinable lack. The thought of Sensei came into my mind once more. I wanted to see him again, I realized.

  The first time I went to his house, he was not home. The second time was the following Sunday, I remember. It was a beautiful day, with the sort of sky that feels as if it is penetrating your very soul. Once again Sensei was out. I distinctly remembered him saying in Kamakura that he was almost always at home. In fact, he had said, he quite disliked going out. Having now found him absent both times I called, I remembered these words, and somewhere inside me an inexplicable resentment registered.

  Instead of turning to go, I lingered at the front door, gazing at the maid who had delivered the message. She recognized me and remembered giving Sensei my card last time, so she left me waiting while she retreated inside.

  Then a lady whom I took to be Sensei’s wife appeared. I was struck by her beauty.

  She courteously explained where Sensei had gone. On this day every month, she told me, his habit was to visit the cemetery at Zōshigaya and offer flowers at one of the graves. “He only went out a bare ten minutes or so ago,” she added sympathetically.

  I thanked her and left. I walked a hundred yards or so toward the bustling town, then fe
lt a sudden urge to take a detour by way of Zōshigaya myself. I might even come across Sensei there, I thought. I swung around and set off.

  CHAPTER 5

  I passed a field of rice seedlings on my right, then turned into the graveyard. I was walking down its broad maple-lined central avenue when I saw someone who could be Sensei emerging from the teahouse at the far end. I went on toward the figure until I could make out the sunlight flashing on the rim of his spectacles. “Sensei!” I called abruptly.

  He halted and stared at me.

  “How . . . ? How . . . ?”

  The repeated word hung strangely in the hushed midday air. I found myself suddenly unable to reply.

  “Did you follow me here? How . . . ?”

  He seemed quite calm. His voice was quiet. But a shadow seemed to cloud his face.

  I explained how I came to be there.

  “Did my wife tell you whose grave I’ve come to visit?”

  “No, she didn’t mention that.”

  “I see. Yes, she wouldn’t have any reason to, after all. She had only just met you. There’d be no need to tell you anything.”

  He seemed finally satisfied, but I was puzzled by what he had said.

  Sensei and I walked together among the graves to the exit. One of the tombstones was inscribed with a foreign name, “Isabella So-and-so.” Another, evidently belonging to a Christian, read “Rogin, Servant of God.” Next to it stood a stupa with a quotation from the sutras: “Buddhahood is innate to all beings.” Another gravestone bore the title “Minister Plenipotentiary.” I paused at one small grave whose name I could make no sense of and asked Sensei about it. “I think that’s intended to spell the name Andrei,” he replied with a wry little smile.