Light and Dark Read online

  Light and Dark

  WEATHERHEAD BOOKS ON ASIA

  WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

  Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Pushkin Fund toward the cost of publishing this book.

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Copyright © 2014 John Nathan

  All rights reserved

  EISBN: 978-0-231-53618-9

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Natsume, Soseki, 1867–1916.

  [Meian. English]

  Light and dark : a novel / Natsume Soseki; Translated, with an introduction, by John Nathan.

  pages cm.—(Weatherhead Books on Asia)

  “Originally published in Japanese with the romanized title of “Meian.”

  Previously titled: Light and Darkness: An Unfinished Novel in parts in a Japanese serial publication.

  ISBN 978-0-231-16142-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-231-53618-9 (e-book)

  I. Nathan, John, 1940– translator.

  II. Title.

  PL812.A8M413 2013

  895.6'342—dc23

  2013013779

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  COVER IMAGE: Designed by Natsume Sōseki for the cover of his novel Kokoro (1914), the pattern is based on a rubbing of an ancient Chinese inscription on stone, done in the style of calligraphy known as seal script.

  COVER DESIGN: Milenda Nan Ok Lee

  FRONTISPIECE: Natsume Sōseki (age forty-five), September 13, 1912. Tokyo: On the occasion of the Meiji Emperor’s funeral. (Photo by Ogawa Kazumasa; courtesy of the Museum of Modern Japanese Literature)

  SPOT DRAWINGS: Illustrations by Natori Shunsen, published in the daily serial of Light and Dark (Meian) in Asahi shinbun, May 16–December 14, 1916.

  (Collected in Natsume Sōseki ibokushū bessatsu [Tokyo: Kyūryūdō, 1980], 64–69)

  To my son, Jeremiah

  Contents

  Introduction

  A Note on the Translation

  Light and Dark

  Introduction

  JOHN NATHAN

  NATSUME SŌSEKI1 (1867–1916) endured the transformation of Japan, during the span of his lifetime, from a feudal society into a modern state modeled on Western blueprints and poignantly chronicled the emotional and intellectual turmoil that accompanied it, the paralyzing cost, in his words, of “incurring” a culture from the outside.2 Between 1905 and 1916, Sōseki—in Japan he is known by his pen name alone—conveyed his bleak vision of life in thirteen novels, each one a giant step forward in his effort to elevate the fledgling Japanese novel to a level of observation that would make it “true to life” in the manner and degree of Western realism. A number of his early efforts were, as George Eliot might have said, more diagram than picture: characters are scantily revealed, and they step forward to deliver monologues that are thinly disguised lectures on themes he wants to promulgate. The narrator also intrudes didactically, delivering set speeches of his own. But book by book, Sōseki is to be observed refining the art of his fiction, merging identifiably Japanese shades of indirection and reticence with the obtrusive approaches to inquiry he adapted from the Western novel. No other writer of the Meiji period (1868–1912) was so well equipped to achieve this synthesis: steeped in the Japanese and Chinese classics, an accomplished calligrapher and brush painter and a gifted haiku poet, Sōseki was at the same time possessed of an impressive command of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English poetry and fiction, particularly after two years in London, from 1900 to 1902, that he devoted to reading in English. His later novels are informed by his deep reading of Jane Austen, about whom he wrote at length, and of George Meredith and Henry James.

  LIGHT AND DARK, Sōseki’s final novel, unfinished at the time of his death, began appearing in daily installments in the Tokyo and Osaka editions of the Asahi shinbun on May 16, 1916.3 It was the ninth novel he had serialized in the Asahi since he had contracted in 1907 to publish at least one novel a year in the newspaper in return for an annual salary substantially higher than his stipend as a senior lecturer at Tokyo Imperial University.4 A letter to an Asahi editor dated May 21 suggests that he had begun work on the novel a mere week in advance of the first scheduled day of serialization: “I have been feeling poorly recently, in and out of bed, and apologize for my slightly delayed start with the new novel.”5 The illness to which he stoically refers was the gastrointestinal malaise—an infernal combination of intestinal catarrh, bleeding ulcers, and hemorrhoids—that had plagued him his entire adult life. On June 10 Sōseki writes to the same editor that he has mailed off installment 24; on that day installment 15 was published, indicating that he had managed to accumulate nine installments in advance of their serialization, a slim lead that he maintained until the final outbreak of his chronic condition overcame him on December 9.6

  One can scarcely imagine the effort it must have cost Sōseki to create a book as minutely observed and unsparing as Light and Dark in daily installments while suffering bleeding and intestinal pain that required him to bind his stomach with a belly band. Small wonder that he sought respite in Japanese brush painting and composing Chinese poetry in the afternoons from the demanding, largely unpleasant characters he was tethered to each morning. He makes reference to this in a letter dated August 21 to two of his disciples living in the same boarding house, Kume Masao, unknown to Western readers, and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, whose sardonic short stories are well represented in translation:7

  As before, I am at work on Light and Dark every morning. I feel a mixture of pain and pleasure but proceed as if mechanically. I am grateful above all for the unexpectedly cool weather. Even so, writing a thing like this every day, nearly one hundred installments now, leaves me feeling vulgarized. For several days I have been making it my business to work on Chinese poetry in the afternoons, assigning myself one poem a day if possible. Seven characters a line, not easy. But I quit when it gets hard so I don’t accomplish that much.8

  In a second letter written just days later, on August 24, he counsels the young writers to carry on doggedly with an analogy distinguishing a cow from a horse, an exhortation that was obviously addressed no less to himself:

  It’s necessary by all means to become a cow. Somehow or other we want to be horses; it’s not easy to become thoroughly a cow. Even a cunning old dog like me is scarcely more than the half-breed spawn of a horse and a cow….

  You mustn’t hurry. You mustn’t muddy up your mind. Come out fighting and persist. In the face of persistence the world will bow its head; fireworks are accorded only an instant’s memory. Push hard until the end. That’s all there is to it. A cow proceeds phlegmatically with its head down.9

  Toward the end of the summer, Sōseki’s physical decline becomes evident in the pages of his manuscript:10 his hand begins to waver, the characters grow fainter, and revisions scrawled between the lines increase conspicuously. Nonetheless, he was resolved to follow the novel wherever it should lead him, though increasingly troubled by his inability to conclude it. On November 16 he conveys his frustration to another disciple, studying in New York at the time, Naruse Seiichi: “It troubles me that Light and Dark gets longer and longer. I’m still writing. I’m sure this will continue into the New Year.”11

  Sōseki did not live to see the New Year. Too ill to write more, he took to his bed on November 21 after completing what was to be the final installment, number 188. He had intended to continue: a page of manuscript with the number “189�
�� inked in the upper-right corner was found on his desk. In 188 installments—745 pages in the first edition published by Iwanami Shoten the following year—Sōseki’s final novel, though unfinished, was 200 pages longer than his next longest, the bitingly comic I Am a Cat (1905), and twice the length of anything else he wrote.

  Light and Dark is unlike any of Sōseki’s thirteen antecedent novels, and entirely unlike anything else in Japanese fiction of the same period (or, for that matter, later periods). Thematically, it may be read as vintage Sōseki: an exploration of the conflict between selfishness and love in which the victory inevitably goes to the former. What distinguishes and, indeed, qualifies it as perhaps the only work of fiction in twentieth-century Japanese literature that can be called a “modern novel” in the Western sense of the term is the degree of interiority it achieves. The protagonists, Tsuda Yoshio, thirty, and his wife, O-Nobu, twenty-three, are revealed at a depth that Sōseki had never achieved in his previous work, and they emerge onto the page with a gratifying complexity that qualifies them as the first three-dimensional characters in Japanese fiction. If this is true of Tsuda, an emotional dullard (the critic Hirano Ken described him as a tsumarananbō, a “nonentity”), it is startlingly true of O-Nobu. Coquettish but not exactly beautiful (Sōseki alludes to her “small eyes” thirteen times), O-Nobu is quick-witted and cunning, a snob and narcissist no less than her husband, passionate, arrogant, spoiled, insecure, vulnerable, naive, idealistic, and, perhaps above all, gallant. Sometimes she reminds us of a Japanese version of Emma Woodhouse, or Gwendolen Harleth, or even Scarlett O’Hara (if one can imagine a less than ravishing Scarlett); in any event, under Sōseki’s meticulous scrutiny she emerges as a flesh-and-blood heroine whose palpable reality has no equal in other Japanese fiction.

  Rendering the minute psychological observation at the heart of Light and Dark required Sōseki to forge a new language. The natural genius of Japanese is a proclivity for ambiguity, vagueness, and even obfuscation; Sōseki needed a scalpel capable of dissecting a feeling, a convoluted moment, and even, as here, a glance:

  The glance [O-Nobu] cast in O-Hide’s12 direction at that moment was lightly touched with panic. It wasn’t a look of regret about what had happened or anything of the kind. It was awkwardness that followed hard on the self-satisfaction of having triumphed in yesterday’s battle. It was mild fear about the revenge that might be exacted against her. It was the turmoil of deliberation about how to get through the situation.

  Even as she bent her gaze on O-Hide, O-Nobu sensed that she was being read by her antagonist. Too late, the revealing glance had arced suddenly as a bolt of lightning from some high source beyond the reach of her artifice. Lacking the authority to constrain this emergence from an unexpected darkness, she had little choice but to content herself with awaiting its effect. (124:273–74)

  “We don’t analyze a glance this way,” a Sōseki specialist at Waseda University assured me, “we direct a glance, aim a glance, and that’s as far as we go!” The sensei was suggesting that the focus of this passage was anomalous; Light and Dark abounds in similar passages, unfamiliar realism expressed in radically unfamiliar ways.

  The effect Sōseki achieves, subsuming not only the minute registration of his observation but also the mode of expression he developed to convey what he revealed, is in its way unmistakably Western.13 More particularly, it is informed by an understanding of irony as a device for revealing character that is not to be found elsewhere in Japanese fiction. Certainly Jane Austen was one of his teachers. In Theory of Literature (1903–1905), Sōseki declares Austen “the leading authority in the world of realism. Her ability to score points while putting the most commonplace situations to paper far outstrips any of her male rivals.” He demonstrates with an excerpt from chapter 1 of Pride and Prejudice, in which Mrs. Bennet effuses about the wealthy bachelor about to move into Netherfield Park to her husband, whose affectionate skepticism escapes her entirely. Sōseki comments:

  This really is the domain of our daily life, its customs and manners. By spreading this unaffected domestic scene out before our eyes, Austen permits us to take pleasure in the minute detail that lies behind objective appearances…. Austen does not simply portray the innocuous conversation between an ordinary married couple…. Anyone who can read will see that it is a matter of the character of the husband and wife in this passage, which is so vivid that it flies off the page.14

  The ironic revelation of character embedded in the “unembellished” details of quotidian life and manners that Sōseki admires in Austen is evident throughout Light and Dark. Even so, the novel’s narrative strategy recalls Austen’s exquisite deftness less distinctly than it does Sōseki’s contemporary Henry James’s tenacious (and somber) exactitude, a quality that Ezra Pound characterized, describing The Odyssey, as “Jamesian precisions.” In his 1907 preface to Portrait of a Lady, James wrote, about Turgenev, that “it began for him always with some person or persons, who hovered before him, soliciting him… interesting him and appealing to him just as they were.”15 The challenge, he continued, speaking now for himself no less than for “that beautiful genius,” was to find for his characters “the right relations, those that would bring them most out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the situations most useful and favorable to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to produce and to feel.”16

  Sōseki doubtless began reading Henry James during the two dismal years he spent studying English literature in London. At the time of his death, his library contained Partial Portraits, French Poets and Novelists, Notes on Novelists, and the 1905 Methuen edition of The Golden Bowl heavily annotated in classical Japanese.17 In a fragment entered in a notebook in 1908, he writes, “James is a writer who succeeds at revealing character without resorting to dialogue.”18 On another page he adds, “Henry James devotes more than a thousand words to describing a single instant in Charlotte Stant’s thinking,” and continues, “George Meredith takes an entire chapter to dissect the psychological interior of a character standing at London Bridge in the instant before he throws himself offit.”19 His remarks suggest that Sōseki’s attention was on the revelation of interior consciousness, a microscopic inquiry he achieved in Light and Dark.

  There is no basis for asserting that Sōseki was consciously emulating Henry James. But clearly he was resolved to reveal his characters in their however contradictory entirety, and clearly he was less concerned with a story—“plot, nefarious name!” James declared—than with surrounding the protagonists with “satellite characters” likely to draw them to the surface in the manner of an astringent.

  The plot of Light and Dark is a paltry matter: its 700 languorous pages proceed in an atmosphere of insistently quotidian, if highly charged, stasis. Tsuda undergoes surgery for what may or may not be hemorrhoids (I shall return to this ambiguity). During the week he spends recovering in bed, he is visited by a procession of intimates: O-Nobu; his younger sister, O-Hide, antipathetic to O-Nobu, whose extravagance she blames for her brother’s financial difficulties; his importunate, self-lacerating friend, Kobayashi, a ne’er-do-well who might have stepped from the pages of a Dostoevsky novel; and his employer’s wife, Madam Yoshikawa, plump, conniving, a meddler with a connection to Tsuda that is unknown to the others. In the longest scene in the novel, Madam manipulates Tsuda into acknowledging that he still thinks about Kiyoko, the woman who left him abruptly for another man shortly before his marriage to O-Nobu. For reasons of her own, which are left unclear,20 the lady reveals to Tsuda that Kiyoko is recuperating from a miscarriage at a hot-springs resort south of Tokyo and urges him to visit her there, volunteering to pay his travel expenses. In the final 100 pages, Tsuda journeys to the spa for an encounter with Kiyoko. Light and Dark terminates with a scene in her room at the inn, during which Tsuda probes unavailingly for some indication that she retains feelings for him.

  In place of a compelling plot, Sōseki created an environment, a web of
interrelated characters designed to exert maximum social pressure on the two principal objects of his inquiry.21 While Tsuda’s and O-Nobu’s parents reside in Kyoto and do not figure directly in the action, the three Tokyo families with whom the protagonists are involved are well known to one another. Tsuda’s uncle Fujii, his father’s younger brother, raised him “more like a son than a nephew” while Tsuda’s father was posted to western Japan as a civil servant. The Okamoto family, O-Nobu’s aunt and uncle, looked after her in a similar way while she was growing up and sharing a room in their house with her younger niece Tsugiko, developing her sharp tongue at her uncle’s knee. Okamoto and Fujii graduated from the same college and are old acquaintances.

  Tsuda’s employer, Yoshikawa, is a crony of Tsuda’s father, who has asked him to keep an eye on his son while he is in Tokyo. Yoshikawa has provided Tsuda with a nondescript job in his unspecified business and, while he treats him no less perfunctorily than he would any subordinate, lets him know that he is watching him and will alert his father to any irregular behavior. Yoshikawa and Okamoto, in London together at the coronation of Edward VII in 1901, are “close as brothers.”

  Tsuda’s sister and her husband, Hori, the eccentric scion of a once wealthy merchant family, are also factors in the interpersonal equation in which obligation and deference determine the power to impinge. Hori has interceded with Tsuda’s father on Tsuda’s behalf, persuading him to lend his son money, and is being held responsible for Tsuda’s failure to keep his end of the bargain. O-Hide feels compromised by this burden on her husband and transfers responsibility to Tsuda, who feels constrained to save face with his brother-in-law.

  Tsuda’s friend Kobayashi is connected to the others in two ways: he works as an editor on Uncle Fujii’s coterie magazine and considers him his mentor, and he knows about Tsuda’s love affair with Kiyoko. Even so, he is an outsider, indeed an outcast, and it is precisely his otherness that enables him to unhinge Tsuda and O-Nobu. A failed writer on his way to self-imposed exile in the Japanese colony of Korea, Kobayashi is brined in self-pity and takes his bitterness out on Tsuda. He is a rebarbative figure, and the reader grows impatient with his tirades. But Sōseki has written him with passion and invested him with conviction and fluency that make him hard to dismiss; moreover, the substance of his attacks on Tsuda’s self-indulgent life of “latitude” have the ring of truth. Kobayashi may be the only moralist in the novel. Even as he torments O-Nobu with his knowledge of Kiyoko, he tells her, “It may surprise you to know that I consider myself a perfectly ingenuous person, a natural man. Compared with you, Mrs. T, I believe I’m guileless” (86:192), and we are tempted to believe him. It seems likely that Sōseki intended him to function as a beacon of integrity in the murkiness of dissimulation and self-interest.