Kusamakura (2 page)

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.

Kusamakura
undoubtedly does achieve its aim of impressing the reader with a pervasive sense of beauty. Its intensely visual writing gives us a rich experience of the world filtered through the double aesthetic consciousness of “East and West” that the artist-protagonist embodies. Woven through is the voice of the first-person consciousness that experiences and comments, thinking through implications, sometimes opinionated and posturing, a gently ironic yet deeply serious voice that both is and is not the voice of Soseki himself. This sometimes difficult discursive style (which holds echoes of Western writers Soseki admired, such as Laurence Sterne) brings a strong philosophical dimension to the work. The constant digressions are also a foil to any latent urge toward plot. They hold the reader firmly inside the terms of the novel: to explore experience rather than be swept along by it. We, like the protagonist and Soseki himself, emerge from this journey with its larger questions left unanswered, but with a wealth of fresh understanding and experience that has made the journey well worthwhile.

 

MEREDITH MCKINNEY

It is, of course, impossible to reproduce adequately in English the effect of Soseki’s prose, particularly the frequent passages of elevated diction and parallel syntax in the Chinese style, which contrast with sections, such as the farcical barbershop scene of Chapter 5, that draw on the alternative tradition of a comic and “vulgar” mode. In much of
Kusamakura,
Soseki’s style is consciously elegant and literary, carefully distinguishing itself from the modern Japanese of the Naturalist writers of his day (although in other ways the writing is contemporary and even innovative in the history of the modern novel). I have attempted to preserve its tone with a rather more old-fashioned literary language than contemporary written English. My primary aim has been to give some sense of the elegance of the Japanese, although reproducing its beauty is impossible.

Most of the novel is written in the present tense. Since English, unlike Japanese, cannot sustain occasional shifts to past-tense narration, I have chosen to retain the present tense throughout, in order to reproduce the effect of the journey’s open-ended experiment that asks the reader to experience the protagonist’s moment-by-moment feelings and thoughts.

A final word about the title. This novel was previously translated by Alan Turney with the title
The Three-Cornered World,
a reference to the quirky nature of the artist found in Chapter 3. The Japanese title,
Kusamakura
(literally “grass pillow”), is a traditional literary term for travel, redolent of the kind of poetic journey epitomized by Basho’s
Narrow Road to the Deep North.
I have chosen to retain the original Japanese title.

My thanks to the Australian National University’s Japan Centre, which provided me with a haven as a Visiting Fellow while I worked on this translation.

Nobuo Sakai generously spared me his precious time to read through the translation and carefully check for errors.

I also owe a debt of gratitude to Elizabeth Lawson, whose perceptive comments and suggestions helped the manuscript to achieve its final form.

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My Individualism and the Philosophical Foundations of Literature.
Tokyo: Tuttle, 2005.

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Botchan.
Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2007.

Ito, Aiko, and Graeme Wilson, trans.
I Am a Cat.
Tokyo: Tuttle, 2002.

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

———, trans.
Kokoro.
Washington, D.C.: Gateway Editions, 2003.

Rubin, Jay, trans.
Sanshiro.
Ann Arbor: Michigan Classics in Japanese Studies. Michigan University, 2002.

 

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Natsume Soseki.
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50, no. 3 (Summer 1998), 193-219.

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Rediscovering Natsume Soseki.
London: Global Books, 2001.

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The World of Natsume Soseki.
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Tokyo: Tuttle, 2004.

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Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel.
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46, no. 2 (December 1986), 333-52.

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Kusa Makura
.”
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41, no. 4 (Winter 1986), 497-99.

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Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998.

As I climb the mountain path, I ponder—

If you work by reason, you grow rough-edged; if you choose to dip your oar into sentiment’s stream, it will sweep you away. Demanding your own way only serves to constrain you. However you look at it, the human world is not an easy place to live.

And when its difficulties intensify, you find yourself longing to leave that world and dwell in some easier one—and then, when you understand at last that difficulties will dog you wherever you may live, this is when poetry and art are born.

The creators of our human world are neither gods nor demons but simply people, those ordinary folk who happen to live right there next door. You may feel the human realm is a difficult place, but there is surely no better world to live in. You will find another only by going to the nonhuman; and the nonhuman realm would surely be a far more difficult place to inhabit than the human.

So if this best of worlds proves a hard one for you, you must simply do your best to settle in and relax as you can, and make this short life of ours, if only briefly, an easier place in which to make your home. Herein lies the poet’s true calling, the artist’s vocation. We owe our humble gratitude to all practitioners of the arts, for they mellow the harshness of our human world and enrich the human heart.