Sōseki

Modern Japan's Greatest Novelist

John Nathan

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231546973
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Natsume S?seki (1867–1916) was the father of the modern novel in Japan, chronicling the plight of bourgeois characters caught between familiar modes of living and the onslaught of Western values and conventions. Yet even though generations of Japanese high school students have been expected to memorize passages from his novels and he is routinely voted the most important Japanese writer in national polls, he remains less familiar to Western readers than authors such as Kawabata, Tanizaki, and Mishima.

In this biography, John Nathan provides a lucid and vivid account of a great writer laboring to create a remarkably original oeuvre in spite of the physical and mental illness that plagued him all his life. He traces S?seki's complex and contradictory character, offering rigorous close readings of S?seki's groundbreaking experiments with narrative strategies, irony, and multiple points of view as well as recounting excruciating hospital stays and recurrent attacks of paranoid delusion. Drawing on previously untranslated letters and diaries, published reminiscences, and passages from S?seki's fiction, Nathan renders intimate scenes of the writer's life and distills a portrait of a tormented yet unflaggingly original author. The first full-length study of S?seki in fifty years, Nathan's biography elevates S?seki to his rightful place as a great synthesizer of literary traditions and a brilliant chronicler of universal experience who, no less than his Western contemporaries, anticipated the modernism of the twentieth century.

1

Beginnings

Surely, the emotional buffeting that Natsume Sōseki suffered at the hands of his family as a child contributed to the misanthropy that darkens his writing. The youngest of eight children, including two stepsisters he scarcely knew, he had been put up for adoption twice by the time he was four.1 His first foster parents may have been related to a maid who worked for the Natsume family. In a memoir written a year before his death, Inside My Glass Doors, Sōseki wrote that he learned after he had grown up that they were a couple who eked out a living buying and selling used pots and pans:

Every evening, I was parked in a small bamboo basket along with the used junk and left unattended on the main street of Yotsuya in front of a nighttime bazaar. On one such night, one of my elder sisters happened by and picked me up and carried me home wrapped in her kimono—I suppose she felt sorry for me. I am told that I was unable to sleep and my sister received a scolding from my father because I lay awake crying all night.2

Sources, such as they are, agree that Sōseki was returned to his own family before he was three, but only briefly: in 1870, at the age of four, he was adopted by a family known to his father and lived with them until he returned to his parents’ home at the age of nine.

Why did Sōseki’s parents choose not to raise him at home as their own child? Scholars have expended barrels of ink on conjecture but have not offered a conclusive explanation. One possibility is that they already had five young mouths to feed and the family fortunes were in decline. Until the year Sōseki was born, his father, Naokatsu, had held the rank of nanushi (neighborhood magistrate), an administrative position in the feudal government that had been passed down in his family for seven generations beginning in 1702. Nanushi were at once ombudsmen, district judges, and policemen responsible for adjudicating local business and family disputes and keeping the peace in one or more districts. The neighborhood at the center of Natsume jurisdiction, Sōseki’s birthplace, was Waseda Minami-chō, in today’s Shinjuku-ku, north central Tokyo along the Yamanote line (the “upper” city), down the hill from Takada no baba where the imperial horses had once been quartered and just blocks away from Waseda University. The Natsumes seem to have been powerful nanushi: as of 1842, Sōseki’s grandfather was at the top of a list of Edo’s “major nanushi,” in control of eleven contiguous neighborhoods (chō).3 Sōseki’s father would have inherited an urban domain of the same size. The position was well remunerated in rice and money and conferred considerable prestige and authority. During his tenure, Sōseki’s father named a district adjoining his home neighborhood Kikui-chō (Kiku-i) by conflating the two elements in the family crest, the chrysanthemum (kiku) and an abstract symbol for a well, i.4 Kikui-chō survives, as does Natsume Hill (Natsume-zaka) near the house where Sōseki was born.

But just prior to Sōseki’s birth, the position of nanushi had been abolished. This was a time of volcanic social upheaval. In 1867, the year Sōseki was born, the last of the Tokugawa shoguns had resigned; the following year, imperial rule was restored and, not long after, a constitutional monarchy was created. The feudal government, which had been in power for 250 years, had toppled in just ten. The men in control of the country’s new destiny, young samurai loyalists, were committed to uprooting the old order and replacing it with social institutions borrowed from the West. Sōseki’s father was caught in the giant gears of change that powered the creation of a modern state. Even so, it is not clear that he could not afford to feed a new child, since shortly after his youngest was born, he was appointed kuchō, the mayor of the newly designated Shinjuku ward. Moreover, the family owned rice paddies in Yotsuya (an upscale residential district today), that produced, according to Sōseki, “enough rice to feed the family.”5

There are other indications that the Natsumes were far from destitute. Sōseki recalled, or remembered being told, about his two stepsisters (his father’s daughters by his first wife) rising before dawn to make their preparations for a day at the theater in distant Asakusa. Their journey began on foot, accompanied by a male servant because some of the neighborhoods along the way were dangerous, and then east to a covered boat that took them north upstream on the Sumida River to Imado. From there, they walked to a “theater teahouse” where they took refreshment before being ushered to the theater in Saruwaka-chō, a district in which the government had required all small theaters to locate, the better to oversee them. They sat in the loges, seats that were prized by theatergoers, who dressed for the occasion and wished to be seen and admired by others in the house. When the play was over, a young man in a crepe de chine kimono and hakama6 would appear and usher them backstage to meet actors they admired and have them sketch something on their fans. “This must have been satisfying to their vanity,” Sōseki observed, “but this variety of satisfaction was obtainable only with the power of money.”7

Inside My Glass Doors contains another account that seems relevant, about eight masked men who broke into the house with drawn swords one night when he was an infant and demanded money of his father “to fund a military action.” Naokatsu, a frugal man who had restored the family to solvency after his spendthrift father had dissipated the Natsumes’ wealth, produced a few bills that failed to satisfy the burglars. They apparently had already dropped in on the saké shop at the corner, the Kokura-ya,8 and had been advised by the proprietor to leave a poor man alone and call on Master Natsume, who had substantial money on hand. At just that moment, Sōseki’s mother appeared and counseled her husband to give the marauders what he had in his purse. This turned out to be 50 ryō, gold coins, a substantial sum. When the intruders had left with their plunder, Naokatsu scolded his wife for speaking out of turn and costing him dearly. Sōseki claimed to have heard the story from his wife, who had heard it from his eldest brother over tea.9 So it seems unlikely, even considering that he had lost money in the new stock market, that straitened circumstances compelled Natsume Naokatsu to put his son out for adoption.

Another explanation is that his parents were embarrassed to have produced another child at an age that would have been viewed by their contemporaries as unseemly, fifty-one and forty-one, respectively. “I was the last of my parents’ children, born late in their lives,” Sōseki wrote, “I’ve been told repeatedly, and am still told even today, that my mother was ashamed when she became pregnant with me because of her advanced age.”10

The record shows that Natsume Kinnosuke11—Sōseki was a pen name—was adopted in 1870 by a childless couple, Shiobara Shōnosuke and his wife, Yasu, both thirty-one. Until the Imperial (Meiji) Restoration of 1868, Shiobara seems to have been a nanushi himself, with jurisdiction in the Yotsuya District, but early in 1872, possibly through the good offices of Sōseki’s father, he was appointed as a local functionary (kochō), a newly created position in the Meiji government generally filled by former nanushi, and moved his family “downtown,” east of the Sumida River to Suwa-chō in proletarian Asakusa. Sōseki lived with the Shiobaras there for between six and seven years, in a small house connected by a long corridor to what would later be called a “ward office.”

By his own account, the Shiobaras, Shōnosuke in particular, who was otherwise tight with his money, lavished toys and goldfish on him, bought him books and shiny new boots, took him to a tailor to be fitted for a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit and a felt hat, and in other ways spoiled him. Some biographers have suggested that Shiobara’s uncharacteristic largesse was a conscious investment with an eye to being repaid by the child’s father at some time in the future, but there is no knowing if such cynicism is justified. What does seem to be the case is that the Shiobaras were intent on inculcating the child with the certainty that they were his true parents and that he owed his loyalty to them. In Sōseki’s next-to-last novel, Grass on the Wayside (Michikusa),12 the protagonist recalls both a catechism he had to rehearse with his adoptive parents and the emotions it triggered in him. The details of this young writer’s life accord in large measure with what is known about Sōseki’s own, and his memories are recorded with a scrupulosity that gives them the appearance of autobiography. This is, of course, not to say that everything found in the pages of this dark fiction actually happened to its author. (Charles Dickens wrote that he could see every brick in every wall he ever imagined.) Nonetheless, the following exchange, or something like it, may well have occurred, and the feelings it produced in the child seem accurately recalled rather than invented:

As an only child they had taken in from elsewhere, Kenzō received special treatment from the penny-pinching Shimadas. But sometimes, on a chilly night, they sat together facing him next to the long brazier and asked questions like this:

“Who’s your papa?”

Turning toward Shimada, Kenzō pointed at him.

“How about your mama?”

Looking at O-Tsune, Kenzō pointed again.

When they had satisfied their need, they asked the same thing in a different way.

“And who are your real papa and mama?”

Though he felt resentful, he had no choice but to repeat the same reply. He couldn’t say why, but that seemed to please them. They looked at each other and smiled.

At times, this scene was repeated among them almost every day. At other times, the exchange didn’t end so simply. O-Tsune was especially persistent.

“Where were you born?”

“Little Ken, whose child are you really? Don’t be afraid to say!”

He felt as if he were being tormented. Sometimes he felt anger more than pain. He wanted to remain silent instead of giving her the answer she expected.

“So whom do you love more? Papa? Mama?”13

When he was six, Sōseki contracted smallpox. In 1872, the government had mandated inoculations for all children, and the vaccine may have infected him. A popular prescription for the pain was to cover the face with “willow-bugs” (yanagi-mushi) whose sting was numbing, and to wrap the hands in burlap to prevent scratching. Sōseki tore the wrapping from his hands and scratched furiously, permanently scarring his nose and cheeks. This disfigurement, as he saw it, seems to have wounded ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Statement
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Beginnings
• 2. School Days
• 3. Words
• 4. The Provinces
• 5. London
• 6. Home Again
• 7. I Am a Cat
• Illustrations
• 8. Smaller Gems
• 9. The Thursday Salon
• 10. A Professional Novelist
• 11. Sanshirō
• 12. A Pair of Novels
• 13. Crisis at Shuzenji
• 14. A Death in the Family
• 15. Einsamkeit
• 16. Grass on the Wayside
• 17. The Final Year
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Series List