Kusamakura Read online

  Kusamakura undoubtedly does achieve its aim of impressing the reader with a pervasive sense of beauty. Its intensely visual writing gives us a rich experience of the world filtered through the double aesthetic consciousness of “East and West” that the artist-protagonist embodies. Woven through is the voice of the first-person consciousness that experiences and comments, thinking through implications, sometimes opinionated and posturing, a gently ironic yet deeply serious voice that both is and is not the voice of Soseki himself. This sometimes difficult discursive style (which holds echoes of Western writers Soseki admired, such as Laurence Sterne) brings a strong philosophical dimension to the work. The constant digressions are also a foil to any latent urge toward plot. They hold the reader firmly inside the terms of the novel: to explore experience rather than be swept along by it. We, like the protagonist and Soseki himself, emerge from this journey with its larger questions left unanswered, but with a wealth of fresh understanding and experience that has made the journey well worthwhile.

  MEREDITH MCKINNEY

  A Note on the Translation

  It is, of course, impossible to reproduce adequately in English the effect of Soseki’s prose, particularly the frequent passages of elevated diction and parallel syntax in the Chinese style, which contrast with sections, such as the farcical barbershop scene of Chapter 5, that draw on the alternative tradition of a comic and “vulgar” mode. In much of Kusamakura, Soseki’s style is consciously elegant and literary, carefully distinguishing itself from the modern Japanese of the Naturalist writers of his day (although in other ways the writing is contemporary and even innovative in the history of the modern novel). I have attempted to preserve its tone with a rather more old-fashioned literary language than contemporary written English. My primary aim has been to give some sense of the elegance of the Japanese, although reproducing its beauty is impossible.

  Most of the novel is written in the present tense. Since English, unlike Japanese, cannot sustain occasional shifts to past-tense narration, I have chosen to retain the present tense throughout, in order to reproduce the effect of the journey’s open-ended experiment that asks the reader to experience the protagonist’s moment-by-moment feelings and thoughts.

  A final word about the title. This novel was previously translated by Alan Turney with the title The Three-Cornered World, a reference to the quirky nature of the artist found in Chapter 3. The Japanese title, Kusamakura (literally “grass pillow”), is a traditional literary term for travel, redolent of the kind of poetic journey epitomized by Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North. I have chosen to retain the original Japanese title.

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to the Australian National University’s Japan Centre, which provided me with a haven as a Visiting Fellow while I worked on this translation.

  Nobuo Sakai generously spared me his precious time to read through the translation and carefully check for errors.

  I also owe a debt of gratitude to Elizabeth Lawson, whose perceptive comments and suggestions helped the manuscript to achieve its final form.

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  OTHER WORKS BY NATSUME SOSEKI

  Brodey, Inger Sigrun; Ikuo Tsunematsu; and Sammy I. Tsunematsu, trans. My Individualism and the Philosophical Foundations of Literature. Tokyo: Tuttle, 2005.

  Cohn, Joel, trans. Botchan. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2007.

  Ito, Aiko, and Graeme Wilson, trans. I Am a Cat. Tokyo: Tuttle, 2002.

  McLellan, Edwin, trans. Grass on the Wayside. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1971.

  ———, trans. Kokoro. Washington, D.C.: Gateway Editions, 2003.

  Rubin, Jay, trans. Sanshiro. Ann Arbor: Michigan Classics in Japanese Studies. Michigan University, 2002.

  WORKS ON NATSUME SOSEKI

  Beangcheon, Yul. Natsume Soseki. London: Macmillan, 1984.

  Brodey, Inger Sigrun. “Natsume Soseki and Laurence Sterne: Cross-Cultural Discourse on Literary Linearity.” Comparative Literature 50, no. 3 (Summer 1998), 193-219.

  Brodey, Inger Sigrun, and Sammy I. Tsunematsu. Rediscovering Natsume Soseki. London: Global Books, 2001.

  Iijima, Takehisa, and James M. Vardaman, Jr., eds. The World of Natsume Soseki. Tokyo: Kinseido, 1987.

  McLellan, Edwin. Two Japanese Novelists, Soseki and Toson. Tokyo: Tuttle, 2004.

  Miyoshi, Masao. Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.

  Rubin, Jay. “The Evil and the Ordinary in Soseki’s Fiction.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 46, no. 2 (December 1986), 333-52.

  Turney, Alan. “Soseki’s Development as a Novelist Until 1907 with Special Reference to the Genesis, Nature and Position in His Work of Kusa Makura.” Monumenta Nipponica 41, no. 4 (Winter 1986), 497-99.

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

  CHAPTER 1

  As I climb the mountain path, I ponder—

  If you work by reason, you grow rough-edged; if you choose to dip your oar into sentiment’s stream, it will sweep you away. Demanding your own way only serves to constrain you. However you look at it, the human world is not an easy place to live.

  And when its difficulties intensify, you find yourself longing to leave that world and dwell in some easier one—and then, when you understand at last that difficulties will dog you wherever you may live, this is when poetry and art are born.

  The creators of our human world are neither gods nor demons but simply people, those ordinary folk who happen to live right there next door. You may feel the human realm is a difficult place, but there is surely no better world to live in. You will find another only by going to the nonhuman; and the nonhuman realm would surely be a far more difficult place to inhabit than the human.

  So if this best of worlds proves a hard one for you, you must simply do your best to settle in and relax as you can, and make this short life of ours, if only briefly, an easier place in which to make your home. Herein lies the poet’s true calling, the artist’s vocation. We owe our humble gratitude to all practitioners of the arts, for they mellow the harshness of our human world and enrich the human heart.

  Yes, a poem, a painting, can draw the sting of troubles from a troubled world and lay in its place a blessed realm before our grateful eyes. Music and sculpture will do likewise. Yet strictly speaking, in fact, there is no need to present this world in art. You have only to conjure the world up before you, and there you will find a living poem, a fount of song. No need to commit your thoughts to paper—the heart will already sing with a sweet inner euphony. No need to stand before your easel and limn with brush and paint—the world’s vast array of forms and colors already sparkles within the inner eye. It is enough simply to be able thus to view the place we live, and to garner with the camera of the sentient heart these pure, limpid images from the midst of our sullied world. And so even if no verse ever emerges from the mute poet, even if the painter never sets brush to canvas, he is happier than the wealthiest of men, happier than any strong-armed emperor or pampered child of this vulgar world of ours—for he can view human life with an artist’s eye; he is released from the world’s illusory sufferings; he is able to come and go at ease in a realm of transcendent purity, to construct a unique universe of art, and thereby to destroy the binding fetters of self-interest and desire.

  When I had lived in this world for twenty years, I understood that it was a world worth living in. At twenty-five I realized that light and dark are sides of the same coin; that wherever the sun shines, shadows too must fall. Now, at thirty, here is what I think: where joy grows deep, sorrow must deepen; the greater one’s pleasures, the greater the pain. If you try to sever the two, life falls apart. Try to control them, and you will meet with failure. Money is essential, but with the increase of what is essential to you, anxieties will invade you even in sleep. Love is a happy thing, but as this happy love swells and grows heavy, you will yearn instead for the happy days before
love came into your life. Splendid though he is, a cabinet minister must bear a million people on his shoulders; the weight of the whole nation rests heavy upon his back. If something is delicious, it goes hard not to eat it, yet if you eat a little you only desire more, and if you gorge yourself on it, it leaves you unpleasantly bloated. . . .

  The vague drift of my thought is abruptly interrupted at this point, when my right foot slips on a loose piece of sharp rock. I try to retain balance by shooting my left leg forward to compensate—and wind up landing on my bottom. Luckily, however, I have managed to come down on a wide boulder about three feet across. The painting box slung over my shoulder goes flying out from my side, but otherwise I escape any damage.

  As I get back to my feet, my eyes take in the distant scene. To the left of the path soars a mountain peak, in shape rather like an inverted bucket. From foot to summit it is entirely covered in what could be either cypress or cedar, whose blue-black mass is striped and stippled with the pale pink of swaths of blossoming wild cherry. The distance is so hazy that all appears as a single wash of blurred shapes and colors. A little nearer, a single bald mountain rises above the others, lowering over me. Its naked flanks might have been slashed by the ax of some giant; they plunge with a ferocious steepness to bury themselves in the valley floor below. That solitary tree standing on the summit would be a red pine. The very sky between its branches is sharply defined. A few hundred yards ahead of me the path disappears, but the sight of a red-cloaked figure moving along in my direction far above suggests that a farther climb will bring me to that spot. The path is appallingly bad.

  Of course the soil itself could quite easily be leveled; the trouble is that large rocks are embedded in it. Even were you to smooth the soil, there is no smoothing away these rocks, and even if the rocks were broken up, there would be no way to deal with the larger ones. They tower with serene indifference out of the broken earth of the track, innocent of any impulse to make way for the walker. Since they pay one no heed, there’s nothing for it but to climb over them or go around them. And even where there is no rock, the walking is far from easy. The sides of the path rise steeply, while the center forms a deep depression; you could describe the six-foot width as gouged into a triangular shape whose deep apex lies down the middle of the path. Making one’s way along it is more like fording a riverbed than walking a path. But it was never my intention to make this journey in haste, so I set off up the winding track, taking my time.

  Suddenly a skylark bursts into song, directly beneath my feet. I gaze down into the valley but can see no sign of the creature. Only its voice rings out. The rapid notes pour busily forth, without pause. It’s as if the whole boundless air were being tormented by the thousand tiny bites of a swarm of fleas. Not for an instant does the bird’s outpouring of song falter; it seems it must sing this soft spring day right to its close, sing it into light and then sing it into darkness again. Up and up the skylark climbs, on and on—it will surely find its death deep in that sky. On and up it climbs, slipping at last into the clouds, and there perhaps its floating form dissolves, so that finally only that voice is left hanging in the far reaches of the heavens.

  I turn a sharp rocky corner, then execute a swift, perilous swerve to the right to avoid a sudden drop into which a blind man would have tumbled headlong. Looking down, I see far below a vast yellow swath of wild mustard in flower. Perhaps, I think, this is the place that skylark would fall to in alighting—or no, perhaps it would instead soar upward out of that golden field. Then I imagine the tumbling skylark crossing paths with another as it rises. My final thought is that, whether falling or rising or crossing midair, the wild, vigorous song of the skylark would never for an instant cease.

  Spring makes one drowsy. The cat forgets to chase the mouse; humans forget that they owe money. At times the presence of the soul itself is forgotten, and one sinks into a deep daze. But when I behold that distant field of mustard blossom, my eyes spring awake. When I hear the skylark’s voice, my soul grows clear and vivid within me. It is with its whole soul that the skylark sings, not merely with its throat. Surely there’s no expression of the soul’s motion in voice more vivacious and spirited than this. Ah, joy! And to think these thoughts, to taste this joy—this is poetry.

  Shelley’s poem about the skylark immediately leaps to my mind. I try reciting it to myself, but I can remember only two or three verses. One of them goesWe look before and after

  And pine for what is not:

  Our sincerest laughter

  With some pain is fraught;

  Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest

  thought.

  Yes indeed, no matter how joyful the poet may be, he cannot hope to sing his joy as the skylark does, with such passionate wholeheartedness, oblivious to all thought of before and after. In Chinese poetry one often finds suffering expressed as, for instance, “a hundredweight of sorrows,” and similar expressions can be seen in Western poetry too of course, but for the non-poet, the poet’s hundredweight may well be a mere dram or so. It strikes me now that poets are great sufferers; they seem to have more than double the nervous sensitivity of the average person. They may experience exceptional joys, but their sorrows too are boundless. This being the case, it’s worth thinking twice before you become a poet.

  The path continues level for a while, with the broadleaf forest on the mountainside to my right, and down to the left the endless fields of mustard blossom. My feet occasionally tread down a dandelion as I walk. Its sawtoothed leaves spread themselves expansively in all directions, and at its center it nurses a nest of golden balls. I turn to look back, regretful at having inadvertently trodden on it while my attention was held by the mustard blossom. But those golden balls are sitting there just as before, still enshrined in their sawtoothed circle. What insouciant creatures they are! I return to my thoughts.

  Sorrows may be the poet’s unavoidable dark companion, but the spirit with which he listens to the skylark’s song holds not one jot of suffering. At the sight of the mustard blossoms too, the heart simply dances with delight. Likewise with dandelions, or cherry blossoms—but now I suddenly realize that in fact the cherries have disappeared from sight. Yes, here among these mountains, in immediate contact with the phenomena of the natural world, everything I see and hear is intriguing for me. No special suffering can arise from simply being beguiled like this—at worst, surely, it is tired legs and the fact that I can’t eat fine food.

  But why is there no suffering here? Simply because I see this scenery as a picture; I read it as a set of poems. Seeing it thus, as painting or poetry, I have no desire to acquire the land and cultivate it, or to put a railway through it and make a profit. This scenery—scenery that adds nothing to the belly or the pocket—fills the heart with pleasure simply as scenery, and this is surely why there is neither suffering nor anxiety in the experience. This is why the power of nature is precious to us. Nature instantly forges the spirit to a pristine purity and elevates it to the realm of pure poetry.

  Love may be beautiful, filial piety may be a splendid thing, loyalty and patriotism may all be very fine. But when you yourself are in one of these positions, you find yourself sucked into the maelstrom of the situation’s complex pros and cons—blind to any beauty or fineness, you cannot perceive where the poetry of the situation may lie.

  To grasp this, you must put yourself in the disinterested position of an outside observer, who has the leisurely perspective to be able to comprehend it. A play is interesting, a novel is appealing, precisely because you are a third-person observer of the drama. The person whose interest is engaged by a play or novel has left self-interest temporarily behind. For the space of time that he reads or watches, he is himself a poet.

  And yet there’s no escaping human feelings in the usual play or novel. The players suffer, rage, flail about, and weep, and the observer will find himself identifying with the experience, and suffering, raging, flailing, and weeping with them. The value of the experie
nce may lie in the fact that there is nothing here of greedy self-interest, but unfortunately the other sentiments are more than commonly activated. Therein lies my problem with it.

  There is no avoiding suffering, rage, flailing, and weeping in the world of humankind. Heaven knows I have experienced them myself in the course of my thirty years, and I have had enough of them by now. I find it exhausting to be forced to experience these same tired stimuli yet again through a play or novel. The poetry I long for is not the kind that provokes this type of vulgar emotion. It is poetry that turns its back on earthly desires and draws one’s feelings for a time into a world remote from the mundane. No play, however brilliant, is free from human feelings. Rare is the novel that transcends questions of right and wrong. The characteristic of these works is their inability to leave the world behind. Particularly in Western poetry, based as it is on human affairs, even the most sublime poem can never aspire to emancipation from this vulgar realm. It is nothing but Compassion, Love, Justice, Freedom—such poetry never deals with anything beyond what is found in the marketplace of the everyday world. No matter how poetic it may be, its feet stay firmly on the ground; it has a permanent eye on the purse. No wonder Shelley sighed so deeply as he listened to the skylark.

  Happily, in the poetry of the Orient there are works that transcend such a state.

  By my eastern hedge I pluck chrysanthemums,

  Gazing serenely out at the southern hills.1

  Here we have, purely and simply, a scene in which the world of men is utterly cast aside and forgotten. Beyond that hedge there is no next-door girl peeping in; no friend is busy pursuing business deals among those hills. Reading it, you feel that you have been washed clean of all the sweat of worldly self-interest, of profit and loss, in a transcendental release.