Theme and Tone in Kokoro

     The title of Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro was translated by Lafcadio Hearn as “the heart of things,” but it is not entirely clear what exactly lies at that heart. Is it is collective experience of history that governs the events of the novel, or rather does each individual have a separate inner heart shaped by individual tendencies and experiences? Or is there a single and unchanging “heart of things” for all human experience in all ages. The judgment can only be made by comparing “hearts,” yet how can one gain access to another’s innermost core?
     These questions suggest a set of thematic preoccupations to which nearly every text of any length is susceptible. Since all writing occurs within a social context which never fails to leave its traces, a historical reading is available even if the text does not explicitly engage social questions. A psychological reading may always be adduced analyzing the writer of not the fictional characters or persona for the simple reason that all literature is composed by a human mind. Taking the largest perspective, a general philosophical view may generally be inferred as well, since every “take on reality” suggests an entire world-view. A fourth approach is also almost universally available. Since every text is made of words, it always suggests implications about the nature of language and writing. These possibilities are all evident in Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro.
     The book [1] was published in 1914 Japan during a time of transition. Emperor Meiji had died two years earlier, and the loyal Gen. Nogi shortly thereafter committed suicide, marking the end of an era. Japan had turned toward the West since Meiji’s accession to the throne in 1868. The samurai behind the throne reorganized society in basic ways seeking to modernize with the goal of becoming a power like the European colonial nations who had obliged Japan to sign markedly unequal treaties. The period was marked by this considerable sympathetic interest in Western culture as well as reaction from writers like Okakura. [2]
     These historical events are specifically mentioned in the novel and the challenge of Western culture is consistently in the background. Apart from the consistent internal details that reflect the changes Japan was experiencing such as when the narrator first sees Sensei in the company of a European, the very form of the novel is consciously European. Soseki was well-qualified to introduce the foreign style as he had lived in the U.K. and had succeeded Hearn as professor of English literature at Tokyo Imperial University.
     Sensei explicitly associates his suicide with his loyalty to the spirit of the Meiji era. He felt he had outlived his time and tells his young friend we belong to different eras. He calls out the word “Junshi! Junshi!” (246) in what seems an ecstatic anticipation of his own death. The death of Gen. Nogi provides the final sufficient impetus for his own suicide. The narrator’s highly conformist traditional father had also identified with both the emperor’s illness (90) and as death approaches, he says to Gen. Nogi, “I am coming soon.” (117) Continuing life might seem bleak to one like Sensei to whom “loneliness is the price we pay for being born in this modern age.” (30)
     Much comment on the book thus begins with a view of it as a marker of cultural change, the records of a consciousness adrift, unable to embrace the old assumptions and yet equally ambivalent about European values. Yet, significant though suicide may be in Japanese culture, it is most commonly approached from the viewpoint of abnormal psychology. One might consider Sensei and the narrator a pair of linked case studies of depressives. Sensei is habitually melancholy, noting that he is a lonely man (14) who must resort to sake for temporary cheer. (16) He feels he is suffering a “divine punishment (17) for which he is himself to blame. (39) Though he feels the narrator needs love (25-6), Sensei is unhappy in his marriage though he thinks they “should be” (22) the happiest of couples. He accounts for his isolation by saying, “I don’t trust myself. And not trusting myself, I can hardly trust others.” (30) As a result, he is a “misanthrope.” (149) One might trace the similarities between Sensei, K, and the narrator as a study in comparative depression.
     The narrator’s father, on the other hand, though stricken with a terminal illness, is comforted by his conventional views and better able to cope with his suffering. Clearly, the individual’s belief system plays a role in reaction to vicissitudes. Sensei means “teacher,” and the narrator clearly feels his friend possesses extraordinary qualities that justify his discipleship. To his young friend “Sensei . . .was primarily a thinker.” (3) Like an ancient sage, Sensei lives in a frugal manner, thinking he does not “have the right to expect anything of the world,” for the most part in “complete obscurity,” (22) withdrawn from the world, hardly sparing any warmth even in the company of his devoted younger friend. He is “weary of the world.” (37) His alienation is certainly a keynote of twentieth century European culture more akin to Prufrock’s malaise or Beckett’s immobile heroine in Happy Days than to the heroes of the Chushingura. His testament begins by saying (like Camus) that death is the only issue. (125) His smile while speaking of mortality (103) is a reflection of his sense of its absurdity.
     At times Sensei seems almost like one of the Buddhist or Daoist sages of antiquity due to his reserve, his evasive or noncommittal answers, and his life of “complete obscurity.” (22) Yet he never achieves the acceptance that could bring tranquility. He calls himself “an ethical creature” (128) yet he blames his weakness for his failure to live up to his own standards. He respects the narrator’s inquisitiveness while trying to “grasp something that was alive within my soul.” Though he had sought to lead a life free of any obligations, (127) he found that impossible. Through his writing Sensei can “cut open my own heart, and drench your face with my blood.” (129) Through sharing his suffering and inadequacy, he hopes to find some redemption in a link with another other than his relation with his wife which is only cool and formal.
     Sensei says that he composed his testament to help his young friend “and others to understand even a part of what we are.” (247) In this way words on a page represent “heart” and influence lived experience. Had the text never have existed, the meaning of the storyteller’s life would have evanesced. Without the label Meiji and the newspaper accounts of the emperor and Gen. Nogi, the passing era could hardly have maintained its distinctness and emotive power. Without the term junshi, would K’s suicide or his have occurred? Yet this serious issue is instantly ironized. Sensei has no sooner provided his functional excuse for writing than he compares his production to a painter’s who, by an effort of will, prolonged his own life long enough to produce a work titled Illusion.
     Some critics have chosen to emphasize one or another of these three thematic territories: the historical/social, the psychological, or the philosophical, but the reason their discussions have proven inconclusive is that all are correct. [3] The three possibilities are all united by the tone of helpless resignation whether it arises from an individual’s inability to halt history, personal pathologies either inborn or acquired through trauma, or a stark and forbidding quasi-existentialist position. The genius of metaphor (and figurative speech in general) is, in fact, specifically the transferability of a paradigm across varied realms, generating a rich polysemy. Were literature to bear meaning no more dense and complex than other forms of discourse, there would be no point to poetry.


1. I used the paperback 1967 Gateway edition from Henry Regnery translated by Edwin McClellan. Page numbers in parentheses refer to that edition.

2. Kakuzo Okakura is best known for his Book of Tea. His nationalist sympathies are evident in his The Ideals of the East and The Awakening of Japan.


3. See Eto Jun, “A Japanese Meiji Intellectual” in Essays on Natsume Sōseki's Works. Japanese Ministry of Education (1970) for a psycho-historical-philosophical reading.

Notes on Recent Reading 22 [Waugh, Belloc, Okakura]

When the Going Was Good [Waugh]

     I am generally intolerant of abridgments, but I can recommend this volume, made of five long continuous excerpts from the four travel books Waugh wrote between 1929 and 1935. Waugh, whose portrait by Henry Lamb elegantly if casually dressed with a pipe and a drink, insouciantly held, manages in these works of his youth to alternate comedic and satiric episodes reminiscent of Mark Twain with anecdotes detailing the sort of weird disoriented experience the traveler often encounters. He is, in these latter moments, kin to Robert Byron and Bruce Chatwin and, I would venture, a late and dry descendent of Smollett’s “sentimental” traveler.
     He’s just fine on Istanbul and Cairo, but the book excels in the tropical boondocks. Describing his visits to British Guiana and in “Abyssinia,” where Waugh attended first for Haile Selassie’s coronation and later reported on the Italian invasion, he provides an excellent report of both the discomforts he underwent from climate and insects and the total dysfunction of government and, indeed, most aspects of life. He relays accurately the sensations of the outsider passing through, but, at the same time, these stories plant a suspicion that one’s own world might be at bottom little different than these remote places.
     If Waugh’s own vision was tinged with shadow, this dark side was emphasized by the final piece reporting on the coming of Italian fascism to a hapless African state and the devastating world-wide war that followed. His calling these pre-war books When the Going Was Good reflects not just a nostalgia for his younger days, but also a sense that the wholesale destruction from years of war, accented by the unprecedented horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, had aged not just the author but the world as a whole which never could be the same again.


The Road to Rome (Belloc)

     Belloc’s account of his pilgrimage on foot from Lorraine to Rome is clever, imaginative, and provocative. The book is embellished with his landscape drawings (he says he cannot draw people and includes these sketches for “fun”). A spirited stylist and a wit, he is perfectly willing to sound as often uncharitable or even harsh as he is sympathetic and generous-spirited. Though the Latin tags and religious musing had their own appeal, I read the book as a road chronicle, thinking of Jack London and Jack Kerouac as Belloc describes his disreputable appearance from days of walking and sometimes sleeping rough. His contemptuous dismissal of socialist and anarchist ideas recalled to me his fondness for fascism (though he had a peculiar variant of his own in Distributism as Pound did in Social Credit)and his easy expression of the most commonplace and thoughtless anti-Semitism. These interfered with my own appreciation no more than his odd and absolute notions of Catholicism, to him definitive of European culture. He runs the risk of all more or less accurate travel journal of dry patches (that need not correspond at all to what seemed tiresome in lived experience). Indeed he comments on the problem more than once in amusing dialogues between auctor and lector.


The Ideals of the East (Okakura)

     Kakuzo Okakura played a critical role in mediated cultural relations between the Far East and the West a hundred years ago. His Book of Tea popularized Buddhist and Taoist thought in the U.S. and Europe. This exponent of Asian art was himself profoundly bicultural. After attending mission schools, he was trained by Ernest Fenellosa (who meant so much to Pound) at Tokyo Imperial University. He wrote his most significant work in in English and, after founding the Japan Art Institute, headed the Asian arts division of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Associated with Heidegger, Tagore, Vivekenanda and other non-Japanese, he sought to define Asian art in broadest and most ambitious view.
     Though we are all familiar with the traditional presentation of European art that traces concepts and practices from origins in Greece and Rome through to the present, I think I have never before read a book that sought to present Asian culture as a whole from India to Japan. While Okakura’s book may be seen as an early attempt to explain Asia to the Occident, it is also an assertive statement of national pride. Okakura subtitles his work “with Special Reference to the Art of Japan,” and his nationalism along with his bias toward ethnic explanations seem to arise from the recent successes of the Japanese military against the Russians and to point ominously forward to the militarists who were to invade China and bomb Pearl Harbor a few decades after this 1904 work. This tendency is heightened in his The Awakening of Japan a few years later. It is also possible read these ideas backward to the influence of Hippolyte Taine and his “race, milieu, moment.”