The Gate Read online

  NATSUME SŌSEKI (1867–1916) was born the youngest of eight children during the last year of the Tokugawa shogunate in Edo, the city shortly to be renamed Tokyo, and became the defining writer of the Meiji period (1868–1912). Raised by foster parents until he was nine, he made a faltering start at school but soon displayed a special aptitude for Chinese studies and later for the English language, ultimately earning an advanced degree in English literature. As an undergraduate at Tokyo Imperial University, he published an essay on Walt Whitman that introduced the poet’s work to Japan. After teaching for several years, Sōseki was sent in 1900 to England for two years by the Ministry of Education. Upon his return he succeeded Lafcadio Hearn in the English department at Tokyo Imperial University. Sōseki published his first work of fiction in 1905, the opening chapter of what would become the famous satirical novel I Am a Cat. In 1907, offered a position with the Asahi Newspaper publishing company, he left teaching to become a full-time writer, and proceeded to produce novels at the rate of one a year until his death from a stomach ulcer in 1916. Other major works to have appeared in English translation include Botchan, Kusamakura, The Miner, and Kokoro.

  WILLIAM F. SIBLEY (1941–2009) was a professor of East Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago. A translator of Japanese fiction and nonfiction, Sibley was at work on Sōseki’s First Trilogy, comprising Sanshiro, And Then, and The Gate, at the time of his death.

  PICO IYER is the author of several books, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, and, most recently, The Man Within My Head. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and Harper’s. He lives in Japan.

  THE GATE

  NATSUME SŌSEKI

  Translated from the Japanese by

  WILLIAM F. SIBLEY

  Introduction by

  PICO IYER

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Edward Fowler contributed to the editing of this translation.

  Translation copyright © 2013 by William Sibley

  Introduction copyright © 2013 by Pico Iyer

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Fukuhara Shinzō, Untitled, 1927; the Shōtō Museum of Art, Tokyo

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

  Natsume, Sōseki, 1867–1916.

  [Mon. English]

  The gate / by Natsume Sōseki; introduction by Pico Iyer ; translation by

  William F. Sibley.

  p. cm. — (New York Review books classics)

  “Edward Fowler contributed to the editing of this translation.”

  ISBN 978-1-59017-587-3 (alk. paper)

  1. Japan—Fiction. I. Sibley, William F. II. Title.

  PL812.A8M6132012

  895.6'34—dc23

  2012028093

  ebook ISBN 978-1-59017-600-9

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  The Gate

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  Sōseki and the Art of Nothing Happening

  JAPANESE literature is often about nothing happening, because Japanese life is, too. There are few emphases in spoken Japanese—the aim is to remain as level, even as neutral as possible—and in a classic work like The Tale of Genji, as one recent translator has it, “The more intense the emotion, the more regular the meter.” As in the old-fashioned England in which I grew up—though more unforgivingly so—the individual’s job in public Japan is to keep his private concerns and feelings to himself and to present a surface that gives little away. That the relation of surface to depth is uncertain is part of the point; it offers a degree of protection and makes for absolute consistency. The fewer words spoken, the easier it is to believe you’re standing on common ground.

  One effect of this careful evenness—a maintenance of the larger harmony, whatever is happening within—is that to live in Japan, to walk through its complex nets of unstatedness, is to receive a rigorous training in attention. You learn to read the small print of life—to notice how the flowers placed in front of the tokonoma scroll have just been changed, in response to a shift in the season, or to register how your visitor is talking about everything except the husband who’s just run out on her. It’s what’s not expressed that sits at the heart of a haiku; a classic sumi-e brush-and-ink drawing leaves as much open space as possible at its center so that it becomes not a statement but a suggestion, an invitation to a collaboration.

  The reader or viewer is asked to complete a composition, and so the no-color surfaces make for a kind of intimacy: “Kyoto is lovely, isn’t it?” is one of the most important sentences in Sōseki’s novel The Gate, and the other protagonist’s response to it, quintessence of Japan, is to think to himself, “Yes, Kyoto was lovely indeed.” For the visitor who has just arrived in the country of conflict avoidance, the innocent browser who’s just picked up a twentieth-century Japanese novel, it means that the first impression may be of scrupulous blandness, an evasion of all stress, self-erasure. For those who’ve begun to inhabit this world, it means living in a realm of constant inner explosions, under the surface and between the lines.

  It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that Sōseki (his family name is Natsume, but he’s usually known by his pen name, derived from a Chinese term meaning “stubborn”) is still, ninety-six years after his death, the Japanese novelist most honored in his nation’s classrooms and until recently featured on the back of every thousand-yen note (equivalent to our ten-dollar bill). His protagonists are masters of doing nothing at all. They abhor action and decision as scrupulously as Bartleby the scrivener does with his “I prefer not to”; the drama in their stories nearly always takes place within, in secrets revealed to or by them. This creed of doing nothing is a curious one in a country that seems constantly on the move, but in Sōseki’s world doing nothing should never be mistaken for feeling too little or lacking a vision or doctrine.

  The Gate is a perfect example of this. On its surface, it’s just the story of Sōsuke and Oyone, a determinedly self-effacing couple in a small house in Tokyo in the first decade of the twentieth century, when the book was written. Sōsuke, for reasons that furnish the gradual drama of his story, has all but stepped out of the official world, even though (and sometimes because) he feels such a rich sense of duty toward so many of its members. The book delights, more than any Sōseki book I’ve read, in the everyday details of the late-Meiji landscape, from gas lamps to cigarettes and men in greatcoats to the sound of a wooden fish-block from the local temple. Yet its author, unexpectedly, goes out of his way to stress that his protagonists are living in “mundane circumstances,” as befits those who are “lackluster and thoroughly ordinary to begin with.” In a certain light, the entire story is about what never comes to pass: a character falls ill, and then nothin
g much happens; a long-feared reunion fails to take place; a search for spiritual revelation seems to reveal very little.

  Look closer, however, and you can see how everything is happening, between the spaces and in the silences. To take an example almost at random, chapter 5 begins with Sōsuke’s aunt, much discussed but always somewhere else, finally visiting his house, and exchanging pleasantries—you could call them platitudes—with her nephew’s wife. Nothing could be more ordinary or without effect. Yet notice that the aunt’s first comment is about how unnaturally “chilly” the room is, and recall that the external temperature, and especially the slow cycling of the seasons, are always telling us something about mood and tone in this book. Part of the beauty of the novel comes from the way that it begins, very carefully, in autumn, takes us through the dark and cold of winter, and ends, in its final passage, with the arrival of spring.

  We also learn, in the chapter’s opening paragraphs, that Sōsuke’s aunt (on whom his welfare seems to depend) looks strikingly young for her age; we’ve already been told that Sōsuke—as his aunt likes to stress—looks unreasonably old for his. We read that Sōsuke ascribes his aunt’s healthy appearance to her having only one child, yet even that thought underlines the fact that he and Oyone have none. As the laughter of kids drifts down from the landlord’s house up the embankment—the location itself is no coincidence and sounds coming in from outside are at least as important here as the words that are never exchanged—Sōsuke’s wife can’t help feeling “empty and wistful.” The aunt then says that she owes the couple an apology—which conspicuously prevents her from actually offering one—and refers pointedly to her son’s graduation from university (since Sōsuke, we’ve already been told, owes much of his present predicament to having dropped out).

  The whole scene might be taking place around me, every hour, in the modern Western suburb of the eighth-century Japanese capital, Nara, where I’ve been living for twenty years. “Oh, you look so well,” a woman says to another, outside the post office, emphasizing, with a craft worthy of a Jane Austen character, that she didn’t before, and might not be expected to now. “It’s only because I have so little to worry about,” the other will respond, to put the first one in her place. “It’s hot, isn’t it?” the first will now say, perhaps to suggest that nothing lasts forever. “Isn’t it?” says the second, and no observer could find any evidence for the combat that’s just been concluded.

  As Sōsuke’s aunt, in The Gate, goes on about how her son is getting into “com-buschon engines,” and on his way to profits so “huge” they could ruin his health, she’s drawing attention to the money she’s not giving to Sōsuke, the success of her son by comparison, and, in Meiji Japan, the fact that her progeny is eagerly taking on the Western and the modern world, and is not stuck in his Japanese ways and the past, as Sōsuke seems to be. Sōsuke himself, meanwhile, is characteristically absent, at the dentist’s office, taking care of a problem that his wife ascribes to age.

  One magazine he picks up in the dentist’s waiting room is called Success, and in its pages he reads of the furious forward movement that is exactly what seems closed to him. He also reads therein a Chinese poem, about drifting clouds and the moon, and finds himself at once moved by the realm of changeless acceptance and natural calm it describes, yet excluded from its quietude, too. When the dentist appears—he also has a “youthful-looking face” despite his thinning hair—he tells Sōsuke that his teeth are rotting and his condition is “incurable.” He then removes a “thin strand” of nerve. Back home, Sōsuke picks up a copy of Confucius’s Analects before going to sleep, but they have “not a thing” to offer him.

  Nothing much has happened, you might say, if you consider the seven pages that have just passed. But we’ve learned more about Sōsuke, his anxiety, his relations with his aunt, his premature sense of decay, and his (and his culture’s) inability to commit themselves either to Success or to old China than any amount of drama could provide. Everything is there, if only you can savor the ellipses.

  Literary critics will tell you that Sōseki was almost unique among the writers of his day because he was sent on a Japanese Ministry of Education program to live in England at the age of thirty-three, and brought back from his two years there an even more pronounced taste for the nineteenth-century European fiction he’d already mastered at home. They will remind you that he was born in 1867, a year before the Meiji Restoration changed the face of Japan, releasing it from more than two hundred years of self-imposed isolation (since 1635 or so, it had been illegal for any Japanese to leave the nation). They will note that he became the defining novelist of the Meiji period in part because he embraced in his life the central question of the day, which was how his country could combine “Japanese spirit, Western technology,” as it called it, trying to elide through slogan-making what could be whole centuries of differences. The great novelists who would follow later in the century—Yasunari Kawabata, Junichirō Tanizaki, and Yukio Mishima—would all, in their different ways, be writing about how Japan had already lost its integrity and its soul to the West.

  Sōseki’s time in London was famously miserable—he felt himself “a poor dog that had strayed among a pack of wolves” and almost lost his mind amongst what seemed to him cold people and strange customs—but after his return to Japan, he took over Lafcadio Hearn’s position teaching English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, the country’s Harvard (and Sōseki’s alma mater, where he had been only the second Japanese to graduate in English literature). He left the university in 1907, after a series of nervous breakdowns, and then published nearly all his fourteen novels in nine years before dying in Tokyo, where he had been born, at forty-nine, in 1916, four years after the Meiji period ended. He dabbled in stream-of-consciousness narratives, Arthurian tales, satires, detective stories, and travel pieces, yet even the titles of his books often stress the fact of nothing happening. Sorekara simply means “And Then,” while Kokoro is an enigmatic word for “Heart.”

  A little as his life story suggests, the man himself seems at once profoundly Japanese and something of a rebel; over and over in his books we meet a quiet maverick who, because of some moment of passion that he feels he must spend his life atoning for, has all but opted out of society, and abandoned every trace of initiative. His withdrawal from action marks him as a failure in Japanese terms, but it may also suggest his deference to “the inexorable workings of karmic retribution,” as The Gate’s narrator puts it—and even a pride at not participating in a world of ambition and exploitation. Sōseki’s wounds are never far from the surface of his books—the hovering around a gate through which his characters will never pass, figures in dire financial straits with holes in their shoes and leaky ceilings, an obscure sense that there is “guilt in loving.” His characters defect from Japanese society without quite arriving anywhere else.

  The Gate puts us into its prevailing mood—and theme—with its very first paragraph. A man is lying on his veranda in the autumn light of a regular Sunday, and almost immediately we are in the relaxed, undramatic world of day-to-day life, while also feeling an edge to things, allied perhaps to that character’s “case of nerves.” The novel seems to abound in casual descriptions of Tokyo in 1909—we hear the “clatter of wooden clogs” in the street, see the ads in a streetcar (“WE MAKE MOVING EASY”), read of posters advertising a new movie based on a Tolstoy story. But of course none of these details is casual, and all intensify the sense of restlessness and regret that seems to haunt the man on his veranda. The more Sōsuke keeps insisting on how his is a life of no consequence, the more we may wonder what all this deliberate stasis is concealing.

  Thus the novel quickly establishes itself as a story of absences and withholdings, about all the things that aren’t spoken about, but that keep on ticking away in the background like the couple’s pendulum clock. The prematurely old and settled young partners, going through their unchanging motions, look at Sōsuke’s brother, Koroku, who is ten years youn
ger, and feel the impatience and drive they’ve lost. They carefully step around everything they’ve been thinking about—the fact that Sōsuke longs to find what you could call the courage of his non-conviction and that their lives seem already to be behind them. Sōseki builds a powerful kind of tension precisely by giving us so little (and this is conjured up with evocative grace in this new translation by the late William F. Sibley, whose text was completed just before his death in 2009).

  Observant readers of Haruki Murakami may recognize something of the highly passive, though sympathetic soul in the Tokyo suburbs bewildered by everything that seems to happen to him, or that appears to have abruptly vanished from his life (Murakami has named Sōseki his personal favorite among the “Japanese national writers”). Others may recall how even Kazuo Ishiguro, though writing in English and having left Japan at the age of six, wrote his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, about people from Nagasaki, a few years after the atomic bomb there, going through a whole book without mentioning it. The central fact of their lives is the one they never speak about.

  But perhaps the best way into this world may be to turn to some of the movies of Yasujirō Ozu, one of the defining artists of twentieth-century Japan, whose films are famously quiet, shot at tatami level, with a camera that seldom moves, in long, slow takes, about those pressures that are never explicitly addressed—and frequently draw their titles from the seasons. In Japan, as is often noted, there are separate words for the self you show the world and the one that you reveal behind closed doors; while we regard it as a sin to be reserved at home, the Japanese take it as much more cruel to be too forthcoming in the world. This reticence has little to do with trying to protect oneself and everything to do with trying to protect others from one’s problems, which shouldn’t be theirs; it’s one reason Japan is so confounding to foreigners, as its people faultlessly sparkle and attend to one another in public, while often seeming passive and unconvinced of their ability to do anything decisive at home.