ABSTRACT
Natsume So-seki (1867-1916) is frequently hailed as Japan’s greatest modern novelist. His major works are customarily grouped into threesomes: the first trilogy, consisting of Sanshiro-(1908), And Then. … (Sore kara, 1909) and The Gate (Mon, 1910); and the second trilogy, consisting of Until After the Spring Equinox (Higan sugi made, 1912), The Wayfarer (Ko-jin, 1913) and Kokoro (1914). It is a remarkable body of work, especially given So-seki’s relatively short career: he wrote fiction only during the last twelve years of his life. Moreover, there are many other brilliant stories, novellas, and novels that so far elude capture into this triangulating schema. But the critics (myself included) keep trying, of course, because that is what
critics do. Literally hundreds of books and thousands of articles have been written on So-seki in Japanese: he has remained a figure of fascination over the century since he published his first stories. A number of themes have been proposed as the key to his oeuvre. One widely held version is that So-seki is
the great Japanese novelist of psychological interiority, the first writer to capture the inner life of the modern subject. The Encyclopedia of Japan entry on the author gives the standard line: “At first his style was florid and pedantic, combining the traditional haibun (essay style employed by haiku poets, usually studded with haiku) and kambun (Chinese prose) styles with European modes of expression. Eventually he developed a more colloquial and flexible prose style better suited to examining the depths of human psychology.”3 In this version of modernization theory, So-seki marks the success of Japan’s mimetic identification with the West, so that his mature style of narrating individual interiority provides one benchmark for measuring the Japanese nation’s emergence as a modern national subject. Even critics of modernization theory tend to accept this definition of
So-seki. The respected Japanese scholar Kamei Hideo, for example, in an extended critique of the ideologies of interiority that have defined “modernity” in Japanese literary discourse since the 1880s, argues that:
Among the modern novelists of Japan, the most vigorous producer of the image of the human as burdened with an “interior,” embedded within the family, was Natsume So-seki. It is not without reason that So-seki studies have concentrated on this, cranking out author studies that forcibly project this “interiority” onto So-seki’s own life.
