The Silver Spoon (2 page)

Kansuke's Older Brother Kin'ichi

In considering Naka Kansuke's life and writing, we cannot ignore his older brother Kin'ichi. Kansuke was Kan'ya's fifth son, but three of his older brothers had died young, leaving only the second oldest, Kin'chi (1871–1942), alive. Kansuke also had two older sisters and two younger sisters.

Kin'ichi studied internal medicine at the Imperial University of Tokyo. In 1902, the year he married Nomura Sueko, Viscount Nomura Yasushi's daughter, then nineteen years old, the government sent him to Germany to study medicine further and, upon his return, in 1905, he was appointed professor at the Fukuoka Medical School (upgraded to the Imperial University of Kyūshū, in 1911).

But less than four years after his return from Germany and at the height of his career, Kin'ichi suffered a severe stroke and, born bully that he was, became a half-crazed invalid, speech-impeded and violent. For the next thirty years, he would wreck not just the life of his wife Sueko—the woman that Kansuke's friend, the eminent philosopher and educator Abe Yoshishige (1883–1966), described as someone “I respected and loved the most, who was attractive and at the same time admirable, in addition to being a natural person who was furthest from malice”
¹⁷
—but his brother Kansuke's life as well. With him incapacitated, Japan's family system then prevailing thrust Kansuke into the position of family head to take on what he called “the house burden.”

Kansuke adored his sister-in-law Sueko—he simply called her “my older sister”
(ane)
—as sharer in this difficult situation, and he wrote heartfelt essays about her in diary style, among them
Breaking the Ice (Kōri o waru)
, which covered a period after a stroke—subarachnoid hemorrhage—had cut her down, in 1940, and
Honey Bee (Mitsubachi)
, which covered a period after her death, in 1942. He called her a “honey bee” for resolutely taking care of her husband while assiduously discharging domestic work despite Kin'ichi's “hostility, cruel treatment, and illness,” and her “bleak solitude for forty years, her difficulties for forty years.”
¹⁸

Natsume Sōseki and
The Silver Spoon

Naka went to the First Higher School, then to the Imperial University of Tokyo. His professor of English at both was Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916). Sōseki resigned from his university post in early 1907 and joined the daily newspaper
Asahi Shinbun
as an “associate” to write full time—with the agreement that he would write at least one full-length novel a year for the paper. Several months later, Naka switched from English to Japanese literature at the university. He graduated in 1909.

While Sōseki was still teaching, some of his students began to visit him, and these visitors, later to become prominent writers, scholars, and educators, would be called Sōseki's “disciples”
(monjin, deshi).
Naka, too, visited him, and also would become sufficiently well-known, but with his reserve, aloofness, and misanthropy, he kept out of the group, even though Sōseki played a pivotal role in his debut as a writer. According to
Natsume Sensei and I (Natsume Sensei to watashi)
, the essay Naka wrote for the November 1917 issue of
Mita Bungaku
,
¹⁹
he liked the three novellas collected in Sōseki's
Quails' Cage (Uzura-kago)
,
²⁰
published in 1907, the one called
Grass Pillow (Kusamakura)
most of all, but he didn't like
I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru)
, Sōseki's first work, which had won him plaudits and popularity. He found the title itself “repellent,” he wrote. He made it plain in the essay, and probably in person, that he wasn't a good, let alone admiring, reader of his former professor's writings.

Still, it was to Sōseki that Naka sent the childhood memoir he had written and called
The Silver Spoon
. Sōseki, a remarkably tolerant man despite the periodically severe bouts of neurasthenia that he suffered,
²¹
was impressed, and pushed for its publication in the
Asahi Shinbun.
He wrote to an editor at the daily:

The
Asahi
accepted Sōseki's word and serialized
The Silver Spoon,
from April 8 to June 4, 1913. Sōseki, in fact, did not just recommend the memoir. He gave the young Naka a good deal of advice about his writing: spelling errors, the tendency to ignore paragraphs, to write interminable sentences in kana syllabary, not using kanji, “Chinese characters,” appropriately.
²³
In the Japanese writing system, kanji serve as distinct syntactical markers.

When Naka wrote a sequel the next year, Sōseki again “liked it very much,” he wrote to Naka, even as he noted that it is “eventless (
jiken ga nai
) so that philistines may be unable to read it.”
²⁴
Again the
Asahi
accepted his recommendation and serialized the work, from April 17 to June 2, 1915, this time under the title of
The Contrarian (Tsumujimagari)
. It would become Part II of
The Silver Spoon
.

When the second serialization was complete, Sōseki even offered to pen an introduction to the childhood memoir to have it published in book form. But Naka said it was too short and, when Sōseki suggested he add another piece to fatten the volume, he said he disliked the piece Sōseki named. So nothing came of it.

Publication in Book Form and Growing Popularity

In 1922, Naka's classmate Iwanami Shigeo (1881–1946) published the memoir through the imprint he had started, Iwanami Shoten, as a paste-up of the newspaper serializations, with some deletions. Four years later, the same publisher issued it as a regular book. For this edition Naka made extensive revisions and deletions to shape the story into its present form, cutting not only repetitions but also passages that placed him in an unduly favorable light. In doing so he reduced the number of installments or episodes in Part I from fifty-seven to fifty-three and in Part II from forty-seven to twenty-two—in the latter, practically obliterating the initial installment format.
²⁵

The readership clearly began to increase after 1935, when Iwanami included
The Silver Spoon
in its paperback series and published it with Watsuji's afterword quoted earlier. The reprint history since then is proof of the book's steady popularity.

In October 1943, in the midst of Japan's war with the United States and others that was quickly turning into a colossal defeat for the nation, Naka wrote a poem called “Stamp” (
Ken'in
) and referred to the book's “unexpected twelfth printing,” giving its run at 15,000 copies.
²⁶
By then the publishing industry was under tight government control and paper shortages were mounting.
²⁷

More than a half century later, in 1999, when
The Silver Spoon
reached its 108th printing, Iwanami Shoten brought out a new edition. It, too, did well. By the end of 2006 it had seen eleven printings, selling a grand total of a million copies since the first edition came out, in 1935.
²⁸

The Silver Spoon
has appeared in various other forms and editions, among them two sets of Naka's “complete works”: the first set, in thirteen volumes, published by Kadokawa Shoten from 1960 to 1965, and the second, in seventeen volumes, published by Iwanami Shoten from 1989 to 1991. Publishers other than Iwanami have also published the memoir in paperback editions.

If
The Silver Spoon
did not sell particularly well for the first two decades or so, the main reason may well have been what Natsume Sōseki pointed out: lack of drama and development, and lack of events. As contrast, Sōseki could have mentioned one of his own earlier works,
Botchan
, popular since its first publication in 1907. Dealing with the narrator-protagonist's boyhood only at the very outset, the whole novella is meant to be satirical and comical. Still, it is written in terse, vigorous sentences, it is full of drama, it moves fast, and it is packed with entertaining events.

What then are the charms of
The Silver Spoon
?

Again, Sōseki seems to have hit the mark. Naka recalled his former professor of English literature bringing up in conversation
Tom Brown's School Days,
Thomas Hughes's novel published in 1857, and
Peck's Bad Boy
, George W. Peck's newspaper series first collected in 1883, to observe that “the areas they write about are different.” He also mentioned
Boys (Shōnen)
, a short story by Naka's contemporary Tanizaki Jun'ichirō (1886–1965), to observe, again, that “it's a little different in character”—an understatement, considering that
Boys
concerns adolescent sadism and masochism. Nagai Kafū (1879–1959), the editor of
Mita Bungaku,
had praised the story extravagantly, along with four other pieces, among them
Shisei
(
The Tattooer
), putting the new writer Tanizaki in the limelight.

In the following passages in Naka's account, Sōseki is referred to as Sensei, “Teacher”:

One can well believe Sōseki's words as Naka recollected them because, as these passages indicate, Naka was a contrarian who would not hesitate to contradict to his face anyone offering words of praise. Sōseki called him a
henjin
, an oddball or eccentric, Naka admitted.

There is also a certain “nostalgic” purity to
The Silver Spoon
. This quality may have struck some of Naka's contemporary readers as mundane and unexciting, but it may be the most pleasurable aspect to the readers of later generations, as Iwanami's survey in 1987 showed. In that survey to mark the sixtieth anniversary of its launch of the paperback series, the publisher asked “readers representing various fields” to name the three books in the series that stayed in their hearts, and
The Silver Spoon
came out on top. (The number one cumulative seller was Plato's
Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates
.) Many of the three hundred respondents reported that the memoir depicts the child's world so sensitively, so beautifully, that it “purifies their mind.” But they most commonly said that it revived for them their own childhood and boyhood.
²⁹

In this regard, Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's
Childhood Years (Yōshō jidai)
³⁰
presents an illuminating contrast to
The Silver Spoon.
Both cover about the same period in history and the author's life, from the second half of the 1880s to the early 1900s, from infanthood to boyhood. But the similarities end there.

Naka described life mainly in the Yamanote whose inhabitants were largely of the gentry class; Tanizaki, life in the Shitamachi whose inhabitants were predominantly commoners. Naka wrote his memoir in his late twenties to early thirties, apparently relying on memory; Tanizaki wrote his when he was seventy, relying not just on his own memory but also on the recollections of his relatives, acquaintances, and old friends, as well as records, historical commentaries, even classical texts. Naka, in reliving the past, limited himself to the immediate surroundings and the people that entered his sphere as a child and the senses and emotions they provoked; Tanizaki extended his interest to the overall setting and age to reconstruct his youthful days over a span of a dozen years.

But the most remarkable difference may be what Watsuji Tetsurō, in his afterword to the 1935 edition of
The Silver Spoon,
pointed out as “unprecedented”: that it is “neither a child's world as a grownup sees it, nor is it anything like childhood memories recollected in a grownup's experience.” Instead, it is a simple, precise record of things a child observed and perceived.
Childhood Years
, in contrast, is either or both of what Watsuji judged Naka's memoir was not. Tanizaki at times leaves a child's sensibilities and thoughts far afield, bringing in a retrospective view—e.g., “now that I think of it”—to reinforce what he thinks he felt, how he reacted to things and people. What he wrote is a layered account of
la recherche du temps perdu
.