Soseski and his Discontents

I

No argument is possible in matters of taste, and nowhere does this maxim seem more evident than in matters literary. We assume as a matter of course that the people unlucky enough to have lived in eras prior to our own were deficient in taste, dismiss with condescension the popular novels of bygone ages and commiserate with the fate of writers subsequently considered "great" who in their own day languished in obscurity. Not to mention the reverse: how many of the list of Pulitzer Prize winners, say from the 1920s or '30s, have we ever heard of?

Still, though judgments in literature seem inexorably subjective, most of us would agree that they are so, at least to a certain degree, predictably. We talk with our friends about our experiences with books that entrance us the first time and leave us cold at an interval of a decade or two (or the reverse), and discover that the experiences have been similar. Some are books not only of our own youth, but of everyone's; others of our collective old age. Most would agree that Madame Bovary is a book of the second kind, and any of the many coming-of-age chronicles of post-World-War-II America are the first. For young people are unlikely to understand the claustrophobic sense of Emma's imprisonment in her situation that Flaubert so meticulously evokes, and those who, at fifty, are still feeling as rebellious and adolescent as Holden Caulfield should probably revaluate their coping skills. Even apparently conflicting groups turn out to be making their choices based on similar criteria: if the particular works chosen for course syllabi in freshman courses diverge, as they are likely to do nowadays, at least the presupposition common to those doing the choosing is that some works merit the time taken to read them and others do not, or at least merit it less. And those who do marketing for publishing houses may well have the most realistic view of all: everything is about niche. Some books are clearly "women's books," some will be read only by yuppies.

Yet some divergences of reaction remain stubbornly resistant to explanation by links with known group definers. Two people of apparently similar backgrounds and of the same age may well disagree, and finally it is too complicated to follow up their psychic histories to determine if there is some determinate reason for the divergence. We shrug our shoulders and go on with our lives.

Of course, there may be no intrinsic reason to assume that divergences of taste in literary matters require any more explanation than do convergences. Or is it the tenor of our age itself that makes us find divergences suspect? For ours is an age defined, at least according to Marxist commentators like Fredric Jameson (to whom I return below), by the fundamental fact of commodification. If Marx was right, Basis (economic structure) has always determined Überbau (taste, intellectual fashions). Nowadays, if Jameson is right, it does so absolutely.

America in the twentieth century, with capitalists searching (as they have always done) for the greatest return on the greatest number of products, invented almost as an accidental side effect of its race to the bank something entirely new in the world: the cultural object that practically everybody likes, an object consciously constructed to correspond to the lowest common denominator of taste. If this becomes the norm, and expectations adjust accordingly, we will find it strange when not everyone likes the same things. Such products as hamburgers (high in fat and sodium, which give virtually every tongue a jolt), blue jeans (durable, easy to care for, and sexy), and Hollywood movies (like getting on a roller coaster: hang on for the ride and trust in the engineers) define America to the world, and are the lingua franca of international taste. Akin to these last are the formulaic literary best-sellers that regularly sell millions, those concoctions of intrigue (for men) and romance (for women) snatched from the rack in every airport from Calcutta to Kalamazoo.

American intellectuals tend to scorn or dismiss such products, when we are not simultaneously revenging ourselves on them and paying homage to them through over-analysis. Commodified products of mass taste control the stage so utterly that American alternatives to the mass-cultural barrage tend to get lost in the din (peruse the lists of small literary publishers to find a flourishing Other world that McDonald's and Barbie dolls will never know). Which is where the rest of the world comes in, a world that exists, it sometimes seems, to give us alternatives to hamburgers, something other than formulaic best-sellers. We are interested in the world at large precisely and to the extent that it offers an alternative to our own situation, because it is the not-us. And in return for the gracious condescension of our interest in things from Outside, the least we expect from them is that they be comprehensible to us.

Which brings up the question: What happens when they aren't? What, that is, of an author lionized in his or her own society who, translated into English, leaves us cold? What, we wonder in such a case, has gone wrong? Surely it is not our fault. Even less can it be the fault of the work from Outside, once translated into English. What to do? We have made ourselves the hosts to the world; anyone, intellectually speaking, is welcome in our house. The last thing we care to admit is that our graciousness has begun to fray: our feet hurt, our smile has long ago become a rictus.

One such author revered in his society who has failed to catch on in the U.S. is the Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki (1867-1916). Soseki may be the paradigmatic and most troubling case of all, given that the contrast is so marked between Soseki's fame in Japan and his obscurity in the West. Soseki's popular status in Japan is such that his portrait adorns the l,000 yen bill. The Soseki scholar and translator Valdo Viglielmo states flatly: "Soseki is . . . the most widely read and loved of Japanese authors." Beongcheon Yu, author of one of the standard Anglophone books on Soseki, noted in 1969 that "in modern Japanese literature, no other writer has been written about as much as Soseki." Angela Yiu, writing in the late 1990s, notes that "Soseki studies have burgeoned in Japan in the past decade. . . . There are thousands of essays, journal articles, and monographs published on [him] each year." This, she observes, constitutes a "Soseki boom" (in Japanese: Soseki buumu).

Yet in the West Soseki remains almost completely unknown. Who's heard of Soseki? Try dropping his name at a campus or urban cocktail party and listen for the silence. Nor is this obscurity the result of unavailability. Most of Soseki's later, and by common consent greatest, novels—including Kokoro (1914), Kojin (1914) [The Wayfarer], Michikusa (1915) [Grass on the Wayside], and Meian (1916) [Light and Dark]—have long ago been translated into English, and can be found in most university libraries (a few are still in print, or have been reissued).

This lack of the enthusiasm of even the generally literate Western reading public for Soseki is almost an axiom for his would-be popularizers in the West. Yu noted ruefully in the 1960s that "although [Soseki's] works are regarded as modern classics in Japan, his name and works are known outside Japan only to a handful of specialists." The situation was unchanged by the time of Yiu's book almost thirty years later, though she refers to it only in passing. Norma Moore Field notes in the Afterword to her translation of Soseki's novel Sorekara [And Then]: "In Japan [Soseki is] the towering figure of modern literature, overshadowing [other] writers . . . who have attracted a more enthusiastic following in the West." Reiko Abe Auestad becomes mournful: "In the West, [Soseki's] last works have had difficulty earning real enthusiasm."

Why is this? The indefatigable mid-twentieth-century popularizer of Japanese literature in America, Donald Keene, though allowing that Soseki is "often considered as the most important novelist of the [Meiji] period," concludes his brief consideration of the writer in his seminal Japanese Literature: An Introduction for Western Readers with the admission that the author's works "still delight Japanese, largely because of his beautiful style, but a Western reader may find the oriental calm . . . to be at times insufficiently engrossing." (Like some other commentators, Keene refers to the author as "Natsume," his family name; "Soseki" was a pen-name assumed later.) The other major early American writer on Soseki agrees: In his important "Introduction to Soseki," Edwin McClellan suggests that "in all [Soseki's] later novels, the reactions of the characters to situations are a little too passive. . . it is only the acuteness of their suffering that gives them significance."

It is no longer considered appropriate for Western commentators to speak in terms of "oriental calm" (Keene's book appeared in 1955). Such generalizations are deemed in most current literary-critical circles patronizing or indicative of debilitating preconceptions on the part of the critic. Indeed, a growing awareness of the dangers of reacting to non-Western literature has made Western critics extremely careful while reacting to outside authors, to the point where frequently they will choose to say nothing at all rather than risk offending.

Some Japanese authors, of course, have found committed if numerically limited audiences in the West: Kawabata, perhaps, or Oe, or (pre-eminently) Mishima. Yet typically, these writers either neatly correspond to Western preconceptions of Eastern literature or offer Eastern versions of Western prototypes. Usually Kawabata's "haiku"-like indirectness is evoked to explain why he is read in the West, to the extent he is (we are familiar with the idea that Japanese literature is supposed to be allusive/elusive, as well as short). Mishima's tortured work, by contrast, is easily digestible as full-blown Romanticism in a self-consciously European vein. Indeed, the famous scene from Confessions of a Mask where the hero discovers his homosexuality by masturbating to a painting of St. Sebastian by Guido Reni is generally taken as a synecdoche for Mishima's fascination with the West.

Still, the tendency to fit authors into categories we are familiar with is not by itself evidence of closed-mindedness, or at least is not limited to authors from Outside. We do this no less with domestic authors than foreign ones. Gertrude Stein's insistence that all genuinely important authors are reviled (until they are suddenly accepted) sums up nothing so much as a wishful version of her own situation, or perhaps, more generously and more generally, the genre-bending in-your-faceism of the turn-of-the-century avant-garde. Even the apparent counter-example of a new rubric turns out to prove the strength of labels: the triumph of Latin American "magic realism" on the international scene is surely due in part to energetic marketing of the new literary label invented to explain it to the public. So that's what this is! Well then, all right.

Which brings us back to the problem of knowing what to do with an author from Outside. Western critics have by now thoroughly digested the works of Michel Foucault, as well as Edward Said's Foucault-inflected Orientalism, whose polemical fire still burns bright enough to obscure both its theoretical difficulties and the subsequently more conservative pronouncements of its author. Said's arguments regarding the "Near East" have by now been applied, with varying degrees of success, to other areas of the non-Western world. Indeed, Foucauldian/Saidian analysis dominates current consideration of the theoretical difficulties intrinsic to consideration of non-Western texts by Westerners, and so tends to offer the path of least resistance for analysis of the difficulties when Anglophone critics consider Japanese literature.

Foucauldian analysis focuses on power relationships, insisting that the Western views of non-Western cultures will always be expressions of attempts to dominate and subsume the weaker culture: the very description (which by definition will be expressed in demeaning terms) of the non-Western Other is an act of aggression and subsuming. The portrayal of a geographical area in literature not only echoes the world political situation, but (in a "hard" version of Said's argument) determines or is inseparable from it. (This aspect of Foucauldian/Saidian analysis gives Bernard Lewis the opportunity for his telling riposte to Said in Islam and the West: Lewis points out that until the sixteenth century or so, Islam was the world's dominant culture, rather than the West, and was disdainfully dismissive of the inferior West. Yet it was during this time that Western "Orientalist" studies of the Islamic world flowered; they could therefore hardly have been expressions of hegemonic power by a politically and economically superior civilization. Said is re-writing history to express his view of the present.) If nothing else, the climate in which this analysis flourishes encourages us to believe that we are probably treading on dangerous ground if we attempt to engage directly with the works: all relations, especially with written works, are subjective relations, probably the working out of ulterior motives.

Yet there are difficulties in applying an analysis based on relations between the First and Third Worlds (so-called) to a relationship of Japan and the West. Whatever difficulties a Westerner reading Soseki experiences, they are most appropriately expressed in terms that go beyond or bypass entirely this now-standard Foucauldian/Saidian analysis. Neither the history nor current economic situation of Japan is comparable with that of countries which nurse a post-colonial grievance toward the West. The argument could still be made for Western cultural hegemony over Japan, beginning with the Japanese fascination with all things Western that has characterized Modern Japan (Meiji Restoration and beyond), perhaps exponentially increased by Japan's defeat at the hands of the Anglo-American-French alliance in World War II. Yet even in that conflict, Japan, now the world's second-largest economic power, was fighting as an ally of several Western countries including Germany, now the third-largest. Japan had arguably begun to overcome whatever inferiority complex it might have had by defeating Russia early in the century, and had developed a world-class industry by the time of its bid for Asian domination in the late 1930s. And Japan's current view of the world seems light years away from the resentment characterizing those cultures for which Foucauldian analysis provides the closest fit. Still unwilling to accept public responsibility for Japanese atrocities in World War II, unwelcoming of foreigners even as akin to the Japanese as Koreans, concerned to a degree that seems excessive to many Westerners with purity of Japanese blood, Japan is well aware, perhaps overly aware, of its important role among world civilizations. By the twenty-first century, aspects of Western culture are now so thoroughly integrated into Japanese society—Western clothing, for example, and Western classical music as well as ubiquitous technology—as to seem Japanese.

The problem is, we no longer know what constitutes an Other society, culture, or civilization. Indeed, if we can communicate with it, it may no longer be Other at all. Christopher Clausen suggests in his recent book Faded Mosaic that the word "culture" should be retired, as there no longer exist societies that are different enough from our own to qualify for this nineteenth-century term. If, as many theorists today argue, cultural baggage is part of every encounter, is it any more debilitating for a Californian to encounter an author from Japan than an author from New Jersey? Is Canada another culture with respect to the U.S.? (Clausen points out that the term "multi-cultural" was invented by Canadian politicians to deal with their domestic situation.) Is China more foreign to the U.S. than Mexico? Is someone from a blue-collar community part of a different culture? An older person? A person with a different hair color? Skin color? (I have developed this argument at greater length in my own "cross- cultural" study Caging the Lion.)

There are enough potential taxonomic barriers to render literally every written (or painted, composed, or danced) work alien to us: no two people are ever identical. Can we ever be sufficiently like any other individual that we may take for granted we belong to the same group? Indeed, at the Cartesian extreme, we may ask what confidence we have that we really "understand" someone who stands before us and talks. We might answer, that person is alive when we are, and in the same place, and so is Other in neither a temporal nor a geographical sense. But perhaps that person's upbringing, presuppositions, language, or individual personality make him or her alien to us. We don't know; it may be that we think we are talking to a normal person and find later that we have had a narrow brush with Jeffrey Dahmer. Or should we say that Jeffrey Dahmer was normal in many aspects of his personality? It is of course true that all things are Other to ourselves, but this fact is trivially true, and there is no particular reason for making it primary in our world-view.

Clausen's point is valid: we have trivialized Otherness to the point where the concept is no longer useful. Nowadays we assert Otherness with just the same degree of certainty as, and much wider application than, the nineteenth-century anthropologists did who are now so universally vilified for inventing the concept. Of course the valence has changed: Other is now good, rather than bad/savage/primitive. It might be argued that this is a sign of respect. Yet such respect leads ultimately to holding ourselves aloof from cultural works. And this estrangement, from a literary standpoint, is the chief disadvantage of today's solicitousness about guests. Now everybody is a guest, and we have to be on our best behavior all the time. When do we get to relax our smile, kick off our heels, and take off our cummerbund or pantyhose? When do we get to see them as people, and not as representatives of some international delegation?

Interestingly, if essentialized (or as we sometimes say, reified) divergences expressed in geographic terms today are frowned upon, essentialized divergences expressed in temporal terms are all the rage. All of us are closet Hegelians: contemporary taste trumps earlier taste as an axiom, even though our taste Here by definition cannot trump, or usually even challenge, their taste There. Still, if geographically Other artistic taste isn't enough unlike ours to make our appreciation of it a feat worth boasting about, there's no point to the exercise. The dragon we slay has to be big enough to be impressive, though our goal is a dead dragon (here, the shibboleth of essentialized Otherness). We want to say that there are Differences between our culture and another one, but deny at the same time that we, the enlightened ones, will have any trouble living with them.

Divergences of taste expressed in geographical terms can go in two directions. In the (apparently rare) case of things we in America like and other countries in the world outside do not, we may simply shrug our shoulders. U.S. culture of a certain sort has infiltrated into the farthest corners of the world; we are not about to be insulted if we discover that Saul Bellow is not so respected a writer in (say) Libya or even Russia as he is in the U.S. (Smaller countries which cannot get their prize authors to play on the international stage have it harder.) Some commentators have pointed out that Anglophone authors have an automatic advantage in the international market, given the status of English as the international language. And Superpower status means that worldwide interest in things American creates an interest in American authors that may not be due entirely to their intrinsic value.

Which is not to say that there may not be more specific difficulties for Westerners with an author like Soseki. Reiko Abe Auestad summarizes some of them from the point of view of a Japanese-speaker. Western readers, Auestad points out (following Masao Miyoshi's arguments in the essay "Against the Native Grain") tend to privilege either what is overtly different or what is overtly familiar in Japanese works. More technically, Auestad notes that the Japanese language tends to obscure a distinction clear in English between first- and third-person narration, so that the effect of Soseki's attempt to find a style that would make this distinction clear even in Japanese may seem off-puttingly detached to an Anglophone reader.

In a similarly linguistic vein, Sumie Jones's consideration of Soseki's Botchan (1906) points out the particular qualities of Edo (Tokyo) dialect and speech patterns of the time that Soseki is imitating. These are either simply lost in the translation, which cannot come up with equivalences, or if they are rendered in one way or another (as in the case of the typical Edo propensity to rhetorical exaggeration), will seem odd to the Anglophone reader unused to the pattern that is being evoked, and lose their original effect.

Auestad's principal argument, however, focuses on divergences resultant from the macro-level of plot rather than the micro-level of language usage. In the case of readings of Kojin and Meian, Auestad argues, Western critics have been ignorant of the finely-woven web of responsibilities to family and society members that all Japanese are caught in: attempts by the main characters to question or rebel against these constraints will seem events of major import to the Japanese reader, who will understand what is being rebelled against, and puzzling or trivial to Western readers lacking a sense of the obligations in the first place. (Soseki takes knowledge of these obligations for granted, and does not spell them out explicitly.) The result is an almost universal Western tendency to find Soseki's characters flat, uninflected, or petty: we just don't appreciate that there is a great emotional drama unfolding under the surface.

In "Soseki and Western Modernism," Fredric Jameson begins his gratifyingly unapologetic reading of an author from another language and culture by listing some of the (non-Foucauldian) reasons why a Western reader should be cautious in reading Soseki. First is the fact of translation itself: as Jameson points out, it is not Soseki we are comparing with (say) Henry James, but the translator. Then there is the fact that translations translate not only into the English language, but by definition into language contemporary with us. As Jameson puts it, the original language loses its historicity. (The attempt to reproduce an archaic Japanese by English archaisms would still be writing in archaisms, not in the language of the time, as the original would have been.) Furthermore, and not least important, there is the matter of content. The critic reacting to a translation (any translation, it seems, not just a bad one) "exposes himself to the milder [ridicule] . . . of simple gestural and contextual miscomprehension, about which native speakers shrug their shoulders . . . : that stars mean it's time for Christmas shopping (seasonal marker), that raising your hand in the classroom means you need to go to the bathroom (cultural code)."

Such difficulties are not limited to non-Japanese. Yiu cites the Japanese scholar Ishihara, who suggests that the word "sensei," used as a form of address for the older main character in Soseki's Kokoro, "signifies the social bond between the narrator (a high school student) and the protagonist (university educated, seen in the company of a foreigner), thereby presenting today's [Japanese] readers with an interpretive problem, partly because, through overuse, its meaning has been watered down, but also because it signifies a social division that, owing to the prevalence of higher education, no longer exists."

All these commentators are apparently arguing from the presupposition that those without extensive knowledge of Japanese culture or language will by definition be unable to see those things which justify Soseki's great reputation among readers fluent in Japanese and conversant in the givens of Japanese society. A contrary position might suggest somewhat mischievously that Soseki could well be one of those cases of a figure who enjoys a position of local renown within the context of his or her own national literature to which s/he cannot reasonably aspire on a more global scale: a Thorvaldsen dominating neo-classical Danish sculpture, for example, given that the more famous Canova had the international scene sewed up, or an Ugo Foscolo, accorded serious study only inside of Italy and all but unknown in a world with linguistic access to the English, and more international, Byron. Even figures that have gained international renown may have done so for specific works, and be accorded more general interest in their natal lands. Where, outside of Russia, are the operas of Rimsky-Korsakov regularly played? How far does "American music" (classical, that is, not popular) travel? It may not, therefore, be the case that unlimited education in the mores of Japanese society and language would raise Western appreciation of Soseki to the level he enjoys in Japan.

Of course, reflecting that literary reputations (or their lack) are clearly to some degree the result of chance or subjectivity (a Big Name speaks out in favor of X and suddenly X is the rage; Y wins the Nobel Prize and is vaulted from relative obscurity to international stardom), we may say that it is simple chance that Soseki has yet to hear his cue on the international stage. It may simply be that no one has spoken up for him. If we wait long enough, he too may enjoy his moment of Western glory as intense as that of García Márquez or Calvino in the American l970s. After all, explanations for lack of popularity start with the fact of that lack and offer explanations: faced with the contrary phenomenon, they would undoubtedly find equally convincing explanations for the author's celebrity.

Too, since Soseki has missed his initial chance to make a splash in the West, his continuing unpopularity may simply be a matter of reputational inertia. Fame feeds on itself. We use the same limited group of literary works to form our thoughts and reactions not because of any qualities of the works themselves, but because these are the works we are accustomed to using. We cannot refer to all works (there are too many), so we express ourselves by a hundredth analysis of works A, B, and C, rather than branching out. (Canon formation is by no means as malicious as some critics seem to feel: many times canons come into being quite innocently, as the result of the simple fact of our limited attention spans.) Because critics who might be interested in Soseki's work feel they must begin with admitting his unpopularity, readers may see no compelling reason to change that situation.

Indeed, criticism can actually be inimical to the reputation of an author, and in the case of Soseki, has been. Part of the reason for the lack of enthusiasm in the West for Soseki is the insistence of the critics, attempting to fill in the void created by the divergence between Western and Japanese views of Soseki, that their intercession in the form of history, biography, linguistics, or cultural fill-in, is necessary for us to understand his works. Critics, as concerned as any other group with self-preservation, almost always insist on their own necessity. In the case of most authors writing in English from roughly our own time period, however, readers are not taken in by this assertion; this is so even in the case of non-Anglophone Western writers. In the case of an author from Another Culture, however, like Soseki, otherwise interested readers may well be convinced that the best thing to do is leave him to the specialists.

Many commentators, especially those addressing more general audiences in reference or introductory works, present Soseki as the spokesman of a particular historical era, implying or suggesting that we must understand the intellectual and economic history of the Meiji Era before we can understand Soseki. Considering the Japanese critical reception of Soseki's later novels, Auestad writes: "The protagonists of these works have often been seen as alienated 'individualists,' acclaimed as the 'living examples' of Meiji 'modernity'." Yoko McClain develops this idea: "Soseki . . . was swept up by the widespread conviction that his homeland was extremely backward in comparison with the West. . . . [He] was consumed with difficult problems: how to learn Western culture and yet preserve Japanese traditions, how to fuse Japanese and Western ideas, and how to live ethically between the old and the new. His works provided him with a venue for addressing such questions." Yu offers a more general formulation: "All of [Soseki's] novels can provide a telling panorama of the [Meiji] era, an era of dramatic transition from the old to the new Japan. At this period . . . the most urgent problems for Japan to solve were modernization and Westernization . . . [which] were one and the same problem. . . . All of Soseki's heroes are delighted by their discovery of self. But their exhilaration is short-lived."

Was Soseki expressing the Meiji mentality, or criticizing it? Was he of his time period or outside of it? David Pollack concurs that "the central problem of Soseki's most famous novels is the Meiji problem of the nature of the individual: not only 'who am I?', but 'What is an 'I'?" Yet at the same time: "for Japanese [Soseki] has always represented one aspect of the quintessential 'Meiji man' . . . not because his fictional characters embody the public spirit of the Meiji period—the quest for 'civilization and enlightenment' . . . —but rather because he explored so thoroughly the dark side of that quest." Hisaaki Yamanouchi offers a compromise: "One of the major themes of Soseki's work is his concern for individual freedom and the difficulty of its realization in modern Japanese society." Janet Walker sounds the same theme with a more optimistic, future-directed twist: "Soseki was looking ahead to a time when the egotism unleashed by the Meiji atmosphere of expansion and unlimited opportunity could be transcended."

The standard critical position on Soseki, apparently within Japan as well as without, sees him as analyzing the difficulties created in the Japanese psyche by Western individualism; the unhappiness of his characters, the sign of "alienation," is produced by a simultaneous attraction to and difficulty with Westernization. Yet this formulation hardly seems coherent, given that much of Modernism in the West is similarly analyzed as the acknowledgment of alienation in the modern world. If the difficulty is the clash of Westernization with Japanese culture, why should the West at roughly the same period have been producing a literature criticizing the same phenomenon? What explains the alienation of individuals in late Romantic Western works, or early Modernist ones, or "existentialist" ones of later in the century? Perhaps the problem is not specific to Meiji Japan, but a more general situation that does not require such historical backgrounding in order for it to be comprehensible. Who, for that matter, says that the unbridled egotism apparently characteristic of the Meiji era is limited to that time? What of the 1980s in the USA? Even without having read him, we may begin to suspect that Soseki is more accessible, more universal, than critics admit.

Related to this critical attempt to render Soseki comprehensible to a presumably skeptical Anglophone audience by placing him in his historical context, whether portraying him as expressing it or subverting it, is the heavy emphasis placed on Soseki's biography. (According to Yiu, things are different in Japan, at least to a certain degree: "Currently in Japan, Soseki's works are defined as a discursive space in which language, form, and meaning, give rise to a special arena for interpretation. Yet interest in the author as a literary figure as well as his time has never been stronger.") The interest in Soseki's biography is especially pronounced in commentators of a previous generation introducing him to a Western audience, for example McClellan's writings, Viglielemo's introduction to Soseki's later novels, Sakuko Matsui's "East and West in Natsume Soseki," or Yu's book. Still, Yiu argues as well for its importance in her own more recent work. If nothing else, such an emphasis on biography allows apologists (these critics are much more than apologists, but they are also that) to talk at great length about Soseki's career as first a student and then a professor of English literature—surely a comforting aspect of this author for an Anglophone audience.

Biography is linked to history. And ultimately the two approaches merge: the Westernization which presented a challenge for Japan was experienced by Soseki in the form of English literature. If we can understand Soseki's works only in the context of his particular historical or biographical circumstances, it is no wonder that a lay reader will have difficulties with them. Yet the Japanese read his works profitably without benefit of biography. Insistence on its necessity by Western commentators is an attempt to fill the interest void, to give readers something, anything, to hang on to.

What if we live dangerously, abandoning our concerns that we see his works "correctly" in the way the critics wish us to see them? What if we simply read these (translated) books like any others whose language we understand? Our reactions may well not be their reactions: the earlier readers whose tepid response was summarized by writers like McClellan and Viglielmo were in a different situation than we. Decades later, we may be able to see Soseki as being more clearly akin to the Western Modernists than they, less a representative of a particular country or the result of his own particular biography. Are we afraid of offending the Other? It is putting the cart before the horse to start from the presupposition that Soseki is alien to our sensibility.

There is even Japanese precedent for "uneducated" Western readings of Japanese literature such as I am proposing so brazenly. As Thomas J. Harper puts it in his Introduction to An Invitation to Japan's Literature, published by the Japan Cultural Institute for dissemination in the West, "There flourishes in Japan a genre of literary comment that so far as I know exists nowhere else in the world. Foreign readers—scholars, diplomats, journalists, clerics—are asked to describe what Japanese literature looks like from the outside, through foreign eyes . . . on occasion whole issues of prominent journals have been given over to "blue-eyed" views of Japanese literature." So let us be "blue-eyed" (in German, the adjective blauäugig means naïve, and it is in this sense I use it here). We should simply pick a book from the shelf, saying a short prayer of thanks to the translators: thanks to them, we hold in our hands a book with words we understand. And then we read.

II

What do we find? I think, something like this. Kokoro and Kojin, to start with what are probably the two most admired of Soseki's novels, present an interesting case of works without a structural middle level. The smallest level, that of immediate actions like conversation between characters, taking the train, or eating, are fully comprehensible: these are things we understand and, as the smallest building blocks of plot, require no further explanation. (We don't ask "why" at this level of narrative; we simply file away the actions and look for larger patterns to emerge.) At the same time, the largest level of macro-structure is made quite clear to us by the end of the books. Each ends with a sort of meta-narrative that Explains It All To Us. Yet what these books lack, we discover, is any significant connection between the level of the very small action and the big picture: we have micro- and macro-structures, but apparently little in between.

The first half of Kokoro is written by an unnamed I-narrator. He recounts his life in and around meetings with an older man whom he has met on a beach, and whom he calls by the title "Sensei." The older man drops clues regarding his sordid past and his approval of suicide. Halfway through the book the narrative switches to Sensei's suicide letter, which explains his disgust with himself and hence with life itself. The book never returns to the narrator. He was important only as the warm-up act to Sensei, or so it seems, an apparently random young man to whom Sensei happened to reveal himself. Suddenly the micro-level actions, the mechanics of the narrator's life, appear fundamentally meaningless from the point of view of the book. (There is some effort to parallel the young man's life to Sensei's, in the relationship with the young man's own family and his father's impending death, but the parallels take too much teasing-out to be effective.)

There is a divergence between the way we understand this novel when it is over (the point of view of most critics) and the way we digest it in reading. Apparently what we are meant to focus on is the object of the narrator's obsession; what we in fact are given, and what we perceive during the act of reading, is the fact of the obsession itself, that is to say, an unmotivated obsession, an obsession in the void. Why is Sensei important to this young man? Why the young man to Sensei? Any answer would be the result of sheer desperation. In her edition of And Then, Field notes that "it is something of a vogue nowadays to posit a homoerotic relationship between Soseki's characters." This may or may not be justified: the text gives us no evidence either way, and positing it seems simply an attempt to make things comprehensible, filling a gap rather than acknowledging it. What seems clear is that a sense of missing motivation is not a case of cultural blindness on the part of non-Japanese readers.

In Sensei's suicide letter, similarly, the same middle level of patterning is missing. We are very clear about Sensei's conclusions, which presumably are not only his but also those of his creator (nothing encourages us to distance ourselves from Sensei's interpretation of things): he himself is repugnant, and life is unbearable. Yet at the same time, these conclusions seem exaggerated or unmotivated, so that what emerges from the pages of his lengthy narration of his life is, finally, not the conclusion, but the fact of this man insisting on this conclusion, the self-hatred of the man who sees himself in this fashion. The book is a record of intensity without purpose: the young man's intense interest in Sensei, Sensei's intense disgust with himself and hence with humankind. The cause of this disgust is what he perceives as his betrayal of a young man known only as "K" whom he has gone out of his way to befriend. Just as we have no real basis for the attraction of Part I's narrator to Sensei, so we are never clear about the basis of the youthful Sensei's equally intense attraction to this earlier young man, so different than he. Sensei himself has been betrayed: initially innocent of the ways of the world, he has been cheated of his inheritance by a conniving uncle. Apparently putting this betrayal behind him, he finds lodgings and discovers his attraction to the daughter of his landlady.

The reader understands that some degree of attraction exists, but not what that degree might be, as we see Sensei failing to follow up on what would be logical opportunities to declare himself. Nor is the narrative any clearer regarding the reasons why he finally seems so indecisive and ultimately withdraws from the girl. Subsequently we are given an explanation: Sensei tells the narrator of the book's first half, to whom he is writing the story of his life, that he was in love with the girl, but was reticent to ask for her hand in marriage out of resentment at what he felt was entrapment by the mother—his lingering suspicion of human motives resulting from his own experience with his uncle. But this explanation is offered too late to the reader to be satisfying. It seems, if not suspect, then at least irrelevant, too removed from the fact of the text. (I am not proposing an unreliable narrator here, for there is no particular reason to posit one, save that it would make our task easier, like declaring events we don't understand to have been a dream.) We are unwilling to let go of the perception of actions without motivation. Once again our understanding after the fact is at odds with our sense during the process of reading.

This inward-looking, chaste friend K, whom Sensei has practically forced into sharing his digs, falls in love with the landlady's daughter as well. Jealous of K and spurred to action by the thought of losing her (the jealousy is spelled out, but the reason for action is not), Sensei quickly does what apparently he should have done before: he asks for the daughter's hand in marriage and is accepted. As a reaction, K slits his veins. Sensei is consumed with a life-long guilt, the basis of his hatred of himself, and of his conclusion that the world is bad.

But why should he feel so guilty? The reader is left puzzled. K, with his Buddhist world-view, is quite removed already from worldly things, is clearly asocial to a fault, and opposes fleshly entanglements. Surely it is the threat to his entire world-view constituted by his attraction to this woman which led to his suicide, not merely, or even primarily, the fact that the girl married another man. Is Sensei not in some sense guilty of the sin of pride in holding himself responsible for K's action? If he really loved the girl, as he said he did, he should have asked her to be his wife, and far sooner than he did. Or is his action merely one of spite, a kind of unwillingness to be bested? We cannot say. All we ultimately understand is the fact of his remorse. Because the motivation for Sensi's action is unclear (which does not mean that there is any point in filling the gap with one of a dozen plausible theories rather than merely labeling it as unclear), we are left, once again, with the sense of a man who is too intense for his own good, someone looking to blame himself as if thereby to gain importance in his own eyes.

Sensei even gives us the proper (it seems) historical interpretation and the right symbols to conceptualize his remorse and resultant suicide: the critics' job in Explaining It All To Us has been made immeasurably easier by Soseki himself, whose professorial side (here the biography may in fact be relevant) comes out at the end of the book. "Loneliness [Sensei writes to the narrator] is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern age, so full of freedom, independence, and our own egotistical selves." He conceives of his impending death as a junshi, like that of the Meiji General Nogi referred to in the text: the suicide of a faithful retainer at the passing of the emperor, which takes place offstage. Sensei's life, he—and by extension Soseki—suggests to us, is somehow equal to, or coexistent with the entire Meiji era. But have we, the readers, any reason to believe that his suicide is such a thing, rather than merely something he finds it necessary to present as such? We don't even understand the human relationships here; how can we possibly say whether they are typical or belong to the Zeitgeist in any way?

As if in a self-referential "save" on Soseki's part, Sensei suggests that the narrator of the book's first half, to whom he is writing, will not understand his suicide either. This failure, he suggests, may be due to the difference in generations; on the other hand it may simply be due to the gaps between all individuals. Perhaps, some critics have suggested, Soseki has intended our puzzlement regarding the motivation in this book too, to make it clear to us that no individual can ever understand another. The disjunction between the two halves of the book is mirrored by the disjunction between people—and so on. Yet such a meta-explanation of the hole at the center of this book seems too smart by half, and completely out of sync with the braying pain of Sensei's negative perception of the world. It seems impossible for an author to be as arch as this and simultaneously to portray characters who are so obsessed themselves: the distance that such clever intellectual explanations require doesn't comport with the emotion-saturated narrative we are offered.

It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that commentators have fallen in line so universally behind Sensei's (and hence, it seems, Soseki's) own interpretation of events because no other is available. The interpretive strokes provided within the book's metanarrative-within-the-narrative (the suicide letter) seem too broad, with little relation to what we have actually seen in the book's first half. We end up not knowing if we have even been looking in the right direction as we dutifully paid attention to the events of the first half, or whether its bulk has been random data.

Kojin [The Wayfarer] is characterized by the same kind of structural hole in its middle. When we are through reading it, we understand, as we do at the end of Kokoro, that the book is "really" about a character who at first had seemed peripheral. In this case, the subject of the book turns out to be Ichiro, the brother of the narrator; it is the narrator's world that we enter initially. We become intrigued by his situation, and ultimately may become frustrated when it dawns on us that its only function in the book was as a carrier for another's story. The narrator's life becomes disposable in terms of the book, but not in terms of the reader's perception: we are left with the feeling that Soseki is giving short structural shrift to a character who is really more interesting in his own right than the author is willing to admit. We have a sense that the author is using very large and overly elaborated units to accomplish very small structural goals.

The book opens with a lengthy section whose relevance to the plot is unclear, not merely in reading, but in retrospect. We see the narrator, Jiro, sent on a trip as a marriage go-between, visiting a friend who ends up in the hospital. Only later do we figure out that the link between this section and the rest of the book is a romantic relation the friend has had years before, and of which he is reminded by another woman in the hospital: it functions, as Yu suggests in the Preface to his translation, as a contrast with the strained relationship between Ichiro (the brother) and his wife. Yet this link, like so many links in Soseki, is too weak to hold the section, and it breaks away conceptually, seeming almost a fragment of another novel entirely.

Though puzzled, we keep reading, regaining the sense of following things as the focus fixes on Jiro. Soon, the plot begins to coalesce around what seems the central situation of the book, Ichiro's request that Jiro test the fidelity of Ichiro's wife, who he suspects does not love him. Jiro refuses, but the fates arrange a rainstorm to strand the brother- and sister-in-law in a hotel. They spend the night together, during which time precisely nothing happens. The sister-in-law's ironic comments suggest that this may not be totally to her liking; her reaction may, however, be due to other reasons that remain mysterious.

Though Jiro seems appalled at his brother's suggestion that he test his sister-in-law's chastity, the fact that so much is made of the proposition makes the reader consider seriously the possibility that Jiro is, against all appearances, in love with his sister-in-law and is resisting his own impulses (even to the point of pretending disinterest) only out of brotherly loyalty. Such a motivation is plausible, but it seems to have neither the approval nor the disapproval of the author: all we see is the lack of a clear motivation. In the same way, it may be that homosexual desire in Kokoro somehow plays a role in all the various male friendships: perhaps, but also perhaps not. The slate seems blank enough for us to be able to superimpose on it any pattern we like, though there is no more justification for one such pattern than the other.

Soseki simply drops the strained relations between brother and sister-in-law, like a puppeteer wearied of holding the strings of his puppets. The book ends, like Kokoro, with an Explain It All To Us letter (written by a friend) that quotes Ichiro's own gloomy pronouncements regarding himself. Ichiro feels angst and alienation so strong they render almost irrelevant all the delicate shades-of-gray of the relationship between his wife and brother, who disappear from the landscape. From the perspective of the end of the book, their relationship seems dramatic filler designed to set up this final address from the edge of the stage. What does it matter, we wonder, if Jiro was in love with his sister-in-law? Indeed, because we have been forced to care about them more than their creator apparently does, we almost resent Soseki. If Soseki had wanted only to make a portrait of an unhappy man, why all this pretense of developing other characters, who lead lives of their own and have concerns that disappear at the end of the book?

The "autobiographical" Grass on the Wayside [Michikusa] is structurally more conventional than either of these two novels. In this case, Soseki's prototypical unhappy man, Kenzo, remains at front and center of the narration for the entire book, rather than appearing from the shadows at the end. Though we get the same suggestions as we do elsewhere (in most developed form in Soseki's earlier And Then, where they function as a means to characterize the protagonist rather than authorial pronouncements regarding him) that the protagonist's unhappiness is due to his time period, we don't really understand any better here than we do elsewhere why he is so disgruntled. It can't be only the result of the time period, or everyone would be just as unhappy and there would be no purpose in writing a novel rather than a sociological report. Kenzo's is an unhappiness without objective correlative—to use T. S. Eliot's phrase explaining why Hamlet is a bad play.

Yet here at least we understand the goad that exacerbates Kenzo's pain: unwelcome figures from his past, with whom he was once intimate and from whom he is now estranged, turning up again. The narrator had been adopted, then un-adopted; his temporary father has showed up again. We can all empathize with the spookiness of intimacy put behind us re-asserting its claims. Coupled with Kenzo's marital problems, apparently the result of his inability, as an intellectual, to reach out to other people (again this is unclear: we see the alienation but don't understand it), the result is a coherent pattern that the other two late novels seem to lack. To be sure, we don't understand why he is so alienated, but we gain a sense of depth from the intersection of two unrelated sources of pain and suffering.

The narrator's voice in this novel is believable as well: sometimes Kenzo descends into self-pity, sometimes he preserves an objective distance precisely where we would expect more emotion, in his relationship with his wife; the result is something like Beckett. One thinks of Krapp's Last Tape. Indeed, because of the absence of background in this novel, the result seems all the more like Beckett's play: an almost disembodied voice, reflected back at itself on a tape recording, a phenomenological rejection of the nineteenth-century realist means of characterization by placement in a social situation. Similar coherence at the middle level of plot, we may note, is achieved in the much earlier "haiku-inspired" novel The Three-Cornered World (1906) (sometimes called The Grass Pillow). Not that the progression from one event to the next makes much sense: the plot, such as it is, consists of a series of dream-like encounters between Soseki's usual alienated intellectual with a woman and various other people at a spa that seems like a lower-class cross between the sanitarium in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain and the spa in Fellini's 8 ½. Yet its coherence is precisely as a world apart which, by definition, does not function by the rules of reality: it's a vacation world, a world of art rather than reality (the narrator, a painter, enunciates Decadent art-over-life theories). It doesn't have to have the pattern of real life; because it isn't real life, it's a dream, and its logic that of a dream.

The beauty of this novel is the acknowledgment of just how fragile such utopias are, and how difficult it is to maintain them. The book ends with a trip to the train station where a local boy is going off to fight the war in Manchuria, and the former husband of the romantic female figure, paid off, is leaving as well. Everyone has a real past or a bloody future, it seems, when the mists finally part. With its philosophizing and its attempt to find solace in a realm outside of coarse reality, The Three-Cornered World echoes European Symbolism. However, at the same time it looks forward to Modernism. The work it approximates most closely in Western literature is Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, written nearly two decades later. Both books are anti-novels, rejecting the primacy of linear progression as a structure for narrative and that of public events as a way of structuring history. Both liberate their plot structures from progression to allow the narrative to fall into a series of fragments. Both reject doing for being, action for reflection. Both use war as the contrast-definer to the ordinary, rather banal events back home.

The Three-Cornered World even ends with a distinctly Woolfian touch, though more like the ending of To the Lighthouse, where Lily Briscoe finds the dot of color for her painting that causes it to all make sense, or Between the Acts, where Miss Latrobe discovers the mirrors as a solution to her problem of how to portray the present day.The narrator watches O-Nami, the mysterious woman who has floated in and out of his observational field at the spa, bidding goodbye to her ex-husband. "O-Nami gazed after the train abstractedly, but strangely enough the look of abstraction was suffused with that 'compassion' which had hitherto been lacking. 'That's it! That's it! Now that you can express that feeling, you are worth painting,' I whispered patting her on the shoulder. It was at that very moment that the picture in my mind received its final touch."

Reading Meian [Light and Dark], Soseki's final, unfinished, novel, is like swimming out into the ocean, further and further, toward no visible goal. The micro-structure is clear, and much richer in texture than in other novels. Yet once again we lack, even after hundreds of pages, any sense of mid-level structure that would tell us where the novel is "going," and the fact that it is unfinished robs us of macro-structure. As Kathryn Sparling emphasizes in "Meian: Another Reading," theories regarding the ultimate meaning of the book and the hero Tsuda's possible development remain speculative. Most commentators see the hero as in need of a spiritual as well as physical healing: this strategy gives coherence, but again at the price of doing violence to the way we actually read the work.

Much is therefore frustrating for a reader of Soseki (or his translators). But the experience bears no resemblance whatever to the boring pastel washes that earlier commentators have prepared us to find. If anything, these are violent works, both emotionally and structurally, all rough edges and bleeding stumps. They exhibit the same openly binary quality that characterizes the primary works of Western Modernism—an argument developed in my book Structure and Chaos in Modernist Works. They combine almost too-clear over-structures with undifferentiated bits of micro-structures, and lack the medium-sized structures of plot that define the realist tradition. For the European Modernists, achieving this suspension of mid-level narrative structures took a great rebellion against nineteenth-century models. It may be that Soseki, lacking a Japanese Dickens to rebel against, found his way to this point through more personal channels. Or was he rebelling against the English literature he taught as a professor?

Yiu's book, the most extensive and recent work on Soseki in English, speaks in similar terms of the duality in Soseki. The purpose of her study, she tells us, is "to delineate, on the one hand, Soseki's effort to give order to the dance of chaos through his innovations in narrative and, on the other hand, the subversion of form by the powerful emotions in the content of his works." For Yiu, as for other critics, the purely narrative jumps and inconsistencies are reflections of psychic states of many of Soseki's characters, of Soseki himself, and of his age. She finds the coherence of Soseki's work at the level of the entire oeuvre. Some of his works, such as his poetry in the Classical Chinese style and his essays, are formally tight; precisely because these writings are controlled, the novels show ruptures by contrast.

But this interpretive method denies the novels interest as individual units, as ends in themselves. Biography and time period may indeed turn out to be relevant in understanding Soseki. But they cannot substitute for a reading of the work, nor be used to paper over rhetorical difficulties. And they may be unnecessary. Who says contradictions need to be "explained"? There are in fact a thousand reasons why a book or an author may speak to us: it may be that, far from having to have the rough places smoothed over, we will ultimately find most appealing precisely these unmotivated obsessions and states of disgust that characterize Soseki's heroes, the shifting vectors that point in several directions, the sense of near- hysteria in his plots.

All authors who change our world-view are, in some important way, Other. Compared to the chasm we always have to bridge in order to see things their way, the more literal distances of time and place seem incidental. Writers give us smaller, graspable distillates of inchoate feelings, scale-models of life we can take down from the shelf and enter. What art does for us is make large abstractions seem small enough to grasp: for a time, we have the illusion of controlling our life, rather than being controlled by it, not least of all because we sense that another human being has sensed what we sensed, and arranged a world so as to produce that reaction in us. Yet the experience is not always smooth, or even pleasant: major authors change our angle of regard upon experience. We start by thinking them odd, and then come to realize that it is in fact they who have seen clearly, not us.

Soseki is such a writer. His world is strange, simultaneously tenebrous and clear-lit: nothing is hidden, yet nothing is understood. We search for rational explanations and find only their simulacra; we try to get a meaning out of the fragments of his characters' experience and find none. Our puzzlement regarding how to understand what is happening in his novels lies too deep for rational analysis, ignorant as we are whether what we do not understand is the result of ourselves or of the characters. We have all the facts. Why is it that when we add them up, we get a total but no sense of how that total came to be? But this is the nature of life, or so we come to realize by reading Soseki: a world that initially seemed alien to us, we realize, is actually our own, the glass no window but a mirror, the strange person before us no one but ourself.

Works for Further Study

Auestad, Reiko Abe. "The Critical Reception of Soseki's Kojin and Meian in Japan and the West." Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 27, 2 (1993): 229-57.

Clausen, Christopher. Faded Mosaic. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000.

Fleming, Bruce E. Caging the Lion: Cross-Cultural Fictions. New York: Peter Lang, 1993.

———. Structure and Chaos in Modernist Works. New York: Peter Lang, 1995.

Harper, Thomas J. "Introduction: An Invitation to Japan's Literature." An Invitation to Japan's Literature. Ed. Tohata, Seiichi, et al. Tokyo: Japan Cultural Institute, 1974, 5-9.

Jameson, Fredric R. "Soseki and Western Modernism." Boundary 2, 18 (1991): 123-41.

Jones, Sumie. "Natsume Soseki's Botchan: The Outer World through Edo Eyes." Approaches to the Modern Japanese Novel. Ed., Kinya Tsuruta and Thomas E. Swann. Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1976.

Keene, Donald. Japanese Literature: An Introduction for Western Readers. New York: Grove Press, 1955.

Lewis, Bernard. Islam and the West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

McClain, Yoko. "Natsume Soseki." Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 180: Japanese Fiction Writers 1868-1945. Ed. Van C Gessel. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998, 149-66.

McClellan, Edwin. "An Introduction to Soseki." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 22 (1959): 150-208. Also included, in revised form, in Two Japanese Novelists: Soseki and Toson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.

Natsume, Soseki. And Then, (Sorekara). Trans. with an Afterword by Norma Moore Field. Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1988.

———. Grass on the Wayside (Michikusa). Trans. with an introduction by Edwin McClellan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.

———. Kokoro. Trans. with a foreword by Edwin McClellan. London: Peter Owen, 1968.

———. The Three-Cornered World (Kusa Makura). Trans. Alan Turney. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1970.

———. The Wayfarer (Kojin). Trans. with an introduction by Beongcheon Yu. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967.

Pollack, David. "Framing the Self: The Philosophical Dimensions of Human Nature in Kokoro." Monumenta Nipponica 43, 4 (1988): 417-27.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.

Sakuko, Matsui. "East and West in Nastume Soseki: The Formation of a Modern Japanese Novelist." Solidarity 3, 3 (1968): 58-67.

Sparling, Kathryn. "Meian: Another Reading." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 42, 1 (1982): 139-76.

Tsuruta, Kin'ya. "Soseki's Kasamakura: A Journey to 'The Other Side.'" Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese. 22, 2 (1988): 169-88.

Viglielmo, Valdo H. "An Introduction to the Later Novels of Natsume Soseki." Monumenta Nipponica 19 (1964): 1-36.

Walker, Janet A. The Japanese Novel of the Meiji Period and the Ideal of Individuation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.

Yamanouchi, Hisaaki. The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Yiu, Angela. Chaos and Order in the Works of Natsume Soseki. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1998.

Yu, Beongcheon. Natsume Soseki. New York: Twayne, 1969.

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