Natsume Sōseki

Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) is the writer most Japanese readers would name if asked who the greatest modern novelist of their country was. He wrote for only about eleven years, from 1905 until his death in 1916, but in that short time he produced a series of novels that are still read in schools, adapted into films and manga, and translated into many languages.

His real name was Natsume Kinnosuke. “Sōseki” was a pen name he took as a young man. It comes from an old Chinese story about a man who wanted to say he would “pillow his head on stones and rinse his mouth in streams” (live like a hermit) but mixed up the words, and then stubbornly insisted he had meant “rinse his mouth with stones”. The name therefore means something like “stubborn” or “a person who will not admit he is wrong” — a joke at his own expense.

Sōseki lived at a moment of extraordinary change. When he was born, Japan was still ruled by the Tokugawa shoguns and was only just opening to the outside world. The year after his birth, the Meiji Restoration began a rapid transformation: railways, a constitution, a modern army, compulsory schooling and Western-style universities. Sōseki grew up with this new world and spent much of his writing life asking what it was doing to people’s hearts.

Today he is remembered both as a comic writer, for books like I Am a Cat and Botchan, and as a deep psychological novelist, for books like Kokoro and Light and Dark. Many readers meet the funny Sōseki as children and the serious Sōseki as adults.

Sōseki was born on 9 February 1867 in Edo, the city renamed Tokyo the next year. He was the youngest child of a local official family, and his parents were not young. As a baby he was sent to a foster family and then adopted by a childless couple, the Shiobara. When that couple separated, he returned to his birth family, and he was formally re-registered as a Natsume only in 1888. The feeling of being passed from home to home appears later, in fictional form, in his autobiographical novel Grass on the Wayside.

He was a brilliant student. He studied classical Chinese at a private academy, then English, and entered the English department of Tokyo Imperial University, the most prestigious university in Japan, graduating in 1893. At university he became close friends with Masaoka Shiki, the poet who modernised haiku. Sōseki himself wrote haiku throughout his life.

After graduation he taught at schools in Matsuyama on the island of Shikoku (1895) and in Kumamoto on Kyushu (1896). In 1900 the government sent him to Britain to study English. He lived in London from late 1900 until late 1902, short of money, isolated and increasingly depressed. He later called those years the most unpleasant of his life.

On returning to Japan he became a lecturer in English literature at Tokyo Imperial University in 1903, succeeding the famous writer Lafcadio Hearn. In 1905 he began publishing I Am a Cat, and in 1907 he took a bold step: he resigned from the university to become a salaried novelist for the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. From then on almost all his novels first appeared in daily instalments in the paper. He suffered from stomach ulcers for years, nearly died of a haemorrhage in 1910, and died of his illness on 9 December 1916, leaving his last novel unfinished.

To understand Sōseki, imagine a country rebuilding itself in a single lifetime. After 1868 the new Meiji government set out to catch up with the Western powers. Young Japanese learned English, German and French; foreign experts were hired; Tokyo gained brick buildings, trams and newspapers. By the early twentieth century Japan had won wars against China (1894–95) and Russia (1904–05) and had become an empire itself, taking Taiwan and later, in 1910, annexing Korea.

Sōseki’s generation was the first to be educated mainly in the new Western-style system. Many of them felt proud of Japan’s progress but also uneasy. They had been taught to admire the West and were expected to serve the nation, yet they often felt uprooted from older Japanese and Chinese traditions and unsure who they really were.

Sōseki put this uneasiness into words. In a famous 1911 lecture, “The Civilisation of Modern-Day Japan”, he argued that Western civilisation had grown “from within” over centuries, while Japan’s modernisation was driven “from outside”, under pressure and at breakneck speed. The result, he said, was a kind of nervous exhaustion: Japanese people were forced to rush through changes that had taken the West hundreds of years. He did not say modernisation should stop; he said its costs should be admitted honestly.

I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru, 1905–06) began as a short piece in the haiku magazine Hototogisu and grew into a long, loosely connected serial. Its narrator is a nameless cat living with a dyspeptic schoolteacher, Kushami, whose friends drop by to talk nonsense about philosophy, science and money. The cat speaks in a pompous, old-fashioned style (the first word, wagahai, is a grand way of saying “I”), which makes the satire of pretentious Meiji intellectuals even funnier. In the end the cat drinks leftover beer and drowns in a large water jar.

Botchan (1906), based loosely on Sōseki’s own year in Matsuyama, is the story of a hot-headed, honest young man from Tokyo who becomes a teacher in a provincial town and clashes with scheming colleagues. It is one of the most popular Japanese novels ever written. Kusamakura (1906, sometimes translated as The Three-Cornered World) is almost the opposite: a lyrical “haiku novel” in which a painter walks into the mountains, trying to see the world with the detachment of art.

After joining the Asahi Shimbun, Sōseki wrote a loose trilogy. Sanshirō (1908) follows a naïve young man from Kyushu arriving at university in Tokyo, dazzled by the city and by an elusive young woman. And Then (Sorekara, 1909) shows an idle, educated man who finally chooses love for a friend’s wife over social respectability, and loses everything. The Gate (Mon, 1910) quietly depicts a couple living in guilt and isolation after a similar choice years before.

His later novels grow darker and more inward: To the Spring Equinox and Beyond (1912), The Wayfarer (Kōjin, 1912–13), Kokoro (1914), the autobiographical Grass on the Wayside (Michikusa, 1915) and the long, unfinished Light and Dark (Meian, 1916), a minutely detailed study of a marriage and of how people manipulate one another. Sōseki also wrote essays, travel pieces, a memoir of his London years in short sketches, haiku and many classical Chinese poems.

Kokoro (1914), whose title can mean “heart”, “mind” or “the heart of things”, is Sōseki’s most widely read novel. It was serialised in the Asahi Shimbun from April to August 1914 and then published as a book by the new publishing house Iwanami Shoten.

The novel has three parts. In “Sensei and I”, a young student meets an older man whom he calls Sensei and is fascinated by his melancholy and his refusal to engage with society. In “My Parents and I”, the student goes home to his dying father in the countryside. In “Sensei’s Testament”, which makes up about half the book, the student receives a long letter in which Sensei finally reveals his past: as a young man he betrayed his friend K by secretly securing the hand of the young woman they both loved. K killed himself, and Sensei has lived with guilt ever since.

The story is set against the end of the Meiji era. In 1912 Emperor Meiji died, and General Nogi Maresuke and his wife took their own lives in the old custom of junshi, following one’s lord in death. Sensei says that he, too, feels that the “spirit of Meiji” has ended with the emperor, and he decides to die. Readers have argued ever since about what this means: is it a lament for an age, a critique of its ideals, or a statement about the loneliness of the modern self that Meiji created?

Kokoro has been a staple of Japanese school textbooks for decades, usually through excerpts from the Testament. It has been translated into English three times: by Ineko Kondo (1941), Edwin McClellan (1957) and Meredith McKinney (2010).

A thread that runs through Sōseki’s later novels is egoism: the way people, even good people, put their own desires first and then must live with the consequences. His characters are rarely villains. They are thoughtful, educated people who betray, deceive or simply fail to reach one another, and who suffer from knowing it. Sōseki studies these failures with great patience, often through a narrator who watches closely but understands only partly.

In a lecture of 1914 at the Gakushūin (Peers’ School), later published as “My Individualism” (Watakushi no kojinshugi), Sōseki described his own crisis in London. He had tried to understand English literature by following Western authorities and felt empty, until he decided to judge literature “on his own terms” (jiko hon’i). From this experience he argued for an ethical individualism: each person should be free to develop their own character, but must equally respect the freedom of others and accept the duties that come with power and money. He contrasted this with blind nationalism and with the selfish pursuit of advantage.

Sōseki is also admired for his style. He could write rich, allusive prose full of Chinese learning, as in Kusamakura, or clear, conversational Japanese, as in Botchan. His work helped to establish the modern written language that grew out of the “unification of speech and writing” (genbun itchi) movement, showing that ordinary spoken Japanese could carry deep thought and fine psychological detail.

Before he was a novelist, Sōseki was a literary scholar, and his London years produced one of the most ambitious works of literary theory written in Japan. Theory of Literature (Bungakuron), published in 1907 from his university lectures, tries to explain what literature is using the psychology and sociology of his day rather than the authority of any national tradition.

Its central formula is “F + f”. Capital F stands for the focus of consciousness, the idea or impression at the centre of a reader’s attention; small f stands for the emotion attached to it. Literature, Sōseki proposed, is made of such combinations, and different ages and cultures develop different habits of feeling towards the same things. That meant English literature was not a universal standard; it was one historical set of tastes among others.

The book was little read for decades, but since the late twentieth century scholars in Japan and abroad have revisited it as an early attempt at a cross-cultural, even global, theory of literature. An English translation appeared in 2009 as Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, edited by Michael Bourdaghs, Atsuko Ueda and Joseph A. Murphy.

From 1906 Sōseki’s house in Tokyo became a gathering place for younger writers and scholars every Thursday, a meeting known as the Thursday Salon (Mokuyōkai). Among its members were the physicist and essayist Terada Torahiko, the children’s literature pioneer Suzuki Miekichi, the philosopher Abe Jirō, the writer Uchida Hyakken and, near the end, the young Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, whose story “The Nose” Sōseki praised warmly in 1916.

Sōseki also shaped Japanese publishing. Kokoro was one of the first books published by Iwanami Shoten, founded in 1913 by Iwanami Shigeo; Sōseki is said to have designed the book’s cover himself. Iwanami later published his collected works and became one of Japan’s most important academic publishers.

He could be a demanding and moody presence, and his wife Kyōko’s later memoirs describe a difficult home life, including periods when he seemed to suffer from severe nervous illness. These memoirs are a valuable but partial source, and biographers read them alongside his letters and diaries.

Sōseki wrote during the years when Japan was becoming a colonial power. In 1909 he travelled through Manchuria and Korea at the invitation of an old friend, Nakamura Zekō, who was president of the South Manchuria Railway Company, and wrote a travel series about it, Travels in Manchuria and Korea (Man-Kan tokorodokoro). The next year Japan annexed Korea.

Modern readers, especially in Korea and China, have pointed out that the travel pieces describe Chinese and Korean people in condescending terms and take Japan’s imperial presence largely for granted. Other scholars stress that in his novels and lectures Sōseki was sceptical of patriotic enthusiasm and ridiculed the self-satisfaction of the Japanese elite. Both points can be true: Sōseki criticised aspects of modern Japan from within a society that benefited from empire, and his writing reflects the blind spots of that position.

Korean readers encountered Sōseki early, since many colonial-era Korean intellectuals studied in Japan and read him in Japanese. Today his novels are widely translated and read in Korea and China, often discussed alongside writers like Lu Xun, who also studied in Japan and who translated a work by Sōseki into Chinese.

Sōseki is part of everyday Japanese culture. His portrait appeared on the 1,000-yen banknote from 1984 to 2004, making his face familiar to everyone who handled money in those years. His novels are constantly reprinted, and many of his works are freely available in the Aozora Bunko online library, since they are out of copyright in Japan.

Places connected with him have become sites of pilgrimage. In Matsuyama, the setting of Botchan, a replica steam-era tram called the Botchan Train runs through the city, and the Dōgo Onsen bathhouse, which the hero visits in the novel, proudly recalls the connection. In Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, where he lived his final years, the Sōseki Sanbō Memorial Museum opened in 2017 on the site of his last home.

His influence on later writers is enormous. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke considered himself Sōseki’s disciple; later novelists as different as Ōe Kenzaburō and Murakami Haruki have discussed his work, and critics have treated him as a touchstone for thinking about Japanese modernity. For many readers outside Japan, Kokoro and Botchan are the first modern Japanese novels they read.

Kokoro has generated some of the liveliest debates in Japanese literary criticism. Traditional readings treated it as a moral tragedy of egoism and atonement, with Sensei’s suicide and its link to General Nogi read as a farewell to Meiji values. In the 1980s critics, notably Komori Yōichi, challenged this by focusing on the structure of the narrative: the young narrator writes his account long after Sensei’s death, and some details suggest he may later have formed a relationship with Sensei’s widow. On this reading the novel is less about loyalty to a dying age than about a new generation that refuses Sensei’s solitary path. The interpretation provoked a heated exchange, sometimes called the “Kokoro debate”, over how far readers may go beyond what the text states.

A second strand of debate concerns what Sōseki reveals about the construction of the modern subject. Karatani Kōjin’s Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (Japanese 1980; English 1993) used Sōseki, among others, to argue that concepts such as “interiority”, “landscape” and “the self” were not timeless but were produced in Meiji Japan through new institutions and new forms of writing. Sōseki, who was acutely aware of the arbitrariness of literary standards, appears in Karatani’s account as both a product and a critic of that process.

Feminist and postcolonial critics have added further questions: how the women in Sōseki’s novels, often seen only through male narrators, might be read against the grain; and how his ambivalence about Western civilisation relates to his relative silence about Japan’s own empire. These are active areas of research rather than settled conclusions.

Unlike writers of earlier centuries, Sōseki left an unusually rich documentary record: the newspaper serials in which his novels first appeared, surviving manuscripts, diaries, notebooks from London, many hundreds of letters, and the testimony of family and disciples. The Iwanami Shoten collected works, first issued shortly after his death and revised several times since, remains the standard scholarly edition.

This abundance creates its own problems. Newspaper serialisation shaped his novels: they were written in daily instalments with deadlines, and scholars compare newspaper texts, manuscripts and book editions to see how he revised. Memoirs by his wife and pupils shaped the popular image of Sōseki as either a tormented genius or a kindly master; biographers weigh these accounts against his own letters, which sometimes tell a different story.

The long English-language tradition of Sōseki studies runs from Edwin McClellan’s Two Japanese Novelists: Sōseki and Tōson (1969) and Donald Keene’s history of modern Japanese literature, Dawn to the West (1984), to the recent translation of his critical writings. Much current research also draws on Japanese scholarship that has not been translated, so readers relying only on English should be aware that they see part of a larger conversation.