To the Spring Equinox and Beyond (44 page)

Translator's Afterword

A great deal has been written about the life of Soseki Natsume (1867-1916), so there is perhaps no need to recount a detailed biography here. It may be sufficient to remind readers that his boyhood was psychologically though not materially painful; that he seriously began to study English at the famous First Higher School in Tokyo; that he majored in English at Tokyo University; that he studied for almost two years in London as a government scholar; that he succeeded Lafcadio Hearn as lecturer at Tokyo University; and that he jolted academic and literary circles in 1907 by resigning from the University and other institutions at which he was employed as a teacher and by accepting an offer from the
Asahi Shimbun,
the largest daily newspaper in Japan at the time, to begin serializing his novels in its columns. His nine major novels were written for the
Asahi.

Not enough has been written in English, however, about Soseki's newspaper career. That a prestigious member of a prestigious university could take the "inferior" role of a newspaper novelist did indeed jolt the intellectuals of the Meiji era, a time when a journalist's status was quite lower than it is today, but the move seems typical of Soseki. Early in his career, in 1895, he had taken an "inferior" position as a high school teacher of English in Matsuyama, a town on the island of Shikoku—a relatively remote part of Japan—removing himself by choice from the active literary and intellectual scene in Tokyo. It would seem that life in Matsuyama would be a total decline for one with Soseki's brilliant academic record and artistic, philosophical, and creative bent. Yet because of his own belief in self-assertion and independence and because of his own insistent questioning of life and its perpetual opposites, what seems startling to us had begun in the early Soseki and persisted until his death. Soseki continues to fascinate us because of the tensions between what a public expects and what the writer's own inner world makes immediate and imperative.
^*

Soseki's life as a lecturer at Tokyo University and a full-time professor at the First Higher School, he discovered, lessened the time that he could devote to writing, despite the fact that he had been able to create his satiric work
I Am a Cat
(1905-6) and several stories, in addition to poems and scholarly articles. He revealed in letters that teaching brought him less and less satisfaction. On May 9, 1905, he wrote, "I am a teacher, but it seems more agreeable to my nature to establish myself as a hack writer than to be a successful teacher. So henceforth I intend to make an effort to cut a figure in the literary world." And on September 17, 1905: "My time is wasted every day over visitors. On reflection, I've come to remember that I ought not to be doing this until my death. It is going against nature unreasonably to try to do so many things at once—teaching at three different schools, receiving so many guests and visitors, studying freely for myself, and doing creative work as well. I'm essentially a man of few wants who will be content if I am able to write during my whole life two or three works that will seem satisfactory to myself; if this is possible, I don't care in the least about other things. But to do that I've got to eat beef and eggs, and because of such a requisite, it has come about that I have been forgetting my own nature in that I am following, to my infinite regret, a profession against my will. (This sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?) Anyway, what I want to quit is teaching, and what I desire to do is creative work."

It was not until the spring of 1907 that Soseki actually undertook the move to the
Asahi.
Overtures had been made by the
Yomiuri,
another influential Tokyo daily, to take charge of its literary columns, and by the
Hochi
and
Kokumin
newspapers. In addition, Tokyo University offered Soseki a professorship in March 1907. His rejection of all these had been immediate, for to enter the new profession meant to be plagued by various political aspects of literary partisanship and rivalry that would not allow him the personal freedom he wanted, and to continue in the other meant extending the burden of teaching. Furthermore, he was of course concerned about the welfare of his family if he were to leave teaching, so he was cautious and would not give his consent to any proposal from the newspapers unless they would guarantee following through on all his conditions, namely, that his remuneration (at a level at least equivalent to what he was receiving from teaching) was guaranteed and that there would be no dismissal without cause by the editors or the owner of the newpaper. Evidently, the
Yomiuri, Hochi,
and
Kokumin
were not prepared to fully meet these requirements.

Despite these refusals, the wide and great favor of the novels Soseki had published in rapid succession in 1906 must have made him feel confident of his powers in maintaining his life as a novelist. Thus, when the
Asahi
approached him in February 1907 with greater earnestness than its competitors had, he was satisfied that his conditions had been met and additionally that his novels would be published whether they were suitable for newspaper readers or not, whether he was fashionable or not. His monthly salary would be two hundred yen (equivalent then to about one hundred dollars; equivalent today to about one million yen, or four thousand dollars), and he would receive various fringe benefits. Apparently Soseki had agreed to write two novels a year, each in perhaps one hundred installments; if the novels were short, they might number three a year.

To the Spring Equinox and Beyond
(1912) was the sixth novel Soseki serialized in the
Asahi.
The five novels which appeared before this were
The Poppy
(1907),
The Miner
(1908), and the famous trilogy of
Sanshiro
(1908),
And Then
(1909), and
The Gate
(1910) (published in English under its original Japanese title,
Mon).
What seems clear is that Soseki in these novels was finding his way, experimenting, changing his emphasis. The first two show more experimentation and less staying power, whereas the latter three before
Equinox
reveal Soseki's evolutionary maturation as an artist, concentrating as he does on a kind of general though not strictly adhered to time span in which the lives of his main characters focus on the university world, the world outside the university, and the world of middle age.
Equinox
possibly relates more to
Sanshiro
than to the other two of the trilogy in that the hero, Keitaro, like Sanshiro himself, is on a journey through life. Nothing much seems to happen to him, yet everything he experiences is part of the maturation process of a young man.

A look at the Foreword to
Equinox,
which appeared in the
Asahi
in 1912, as well as at the immediately previous occurrences in Soseki's life, is revealing as background to the novel itself, both in terms of the writer's state of mind and the possible change in attitude toward the world that these momentous experiences wrought in him. In the Foreword, Soseki first refers to his stay at a Shuzenji spa. He had finished
The Gate
in June 1910 and immediately thereafter was hospitalized for a gastric ulcer for over a month. In August, he went to Shuzenji to try to recover, but on August 24, he vomited an enormous quantity of blood and was in a syncopal state for about half an hour. Even the doctors attending him thought the case hopeless. Miraculously, though, he mended, but had to remain in Shuzenji until October, whereupon he returned to Tokyo and was again hospitalized for further treatment until February 1911. A series of lectures in the Kansai district sponsored by the Osaka
Asahi
during the summer of the same year further affected his health, and he required additional hospitalization. Home in Tokyo in September, he had to be operated on again, for hemorrhoids this time, the treatment for which lasted about six months. The greatest trauma of the year, however, was the shock of the sudden illness in November of the Sosekis' fifth child, a daughter named Hinako, whose equally sudden death from an unknown cause brought Soseki to the brink of collapse. It is no wonder that no novel appeared in 1911.

What went through Soseki's mind during this period is revealed in his essays and diary entries. In "Things Recollected," a series of essays written during his hospitalization in 1910, he wrote, "Lying on my back and looking at the ceiling, I thought that other people in the world were kinder than I was. There came suddenly a warm breeze into this world I had thought too hard to live in, I who had so little dreamt of the busy world expending so much time and trouble upon a man over forty, a man going to be combed out by Nature, a man having few merits in his past returned to life not only in body but in mind as well. I thanked Heaven for this illness and I thanked those who had not spared trouble and time over my recovery. Would that I were a good man! That was my wish. And I swore within myself that one who would destroy this blissful thought would be my eternal foe!"

In a diary entry for September 26, 1910, Soseki noted, "As I become convalescent, I have all the more a hankering after illness. After complete recovery, my life of enjoying generosity without any stress and having my mind go wherever it will from morning to night, being indulged by all people, men in society, acquaintances and friends, and my employers who do me good turns and take every care while waiting on me day and night—all of these will vanish like a brief dream, leaving behind a world hard as iron, a will to be sharpened, and a society to be fought through. I don't at all like relinquishing the bliss I'm now having." And in a further diary entry for October 31, 1910, he commented, "The friends I want now are men of taste, not those who want to argue about life and art and other things of that sort. In my present state I prefer a bird's voice to that of a human, the color of the sky rather than the faces of women, flowers more than visitors and guests, meditation more than familiar talk, and reading more than playing games. What I wish to have is agreeable leisure; what I dislike is worldly business."

It seems Soseki wished to remain, if possible, in a world of complete peace and freedom aloof from the real world. This was the kind of Utopia he had had a longing for ever since his younger days. As a boy who had once gazed at the India-ink landscape of a
nanga
painting, he had wanted to dwell in such an idealistic, romantic place even if only once in his lifetime. In
Grass Pillow
(1906) (published in English under the title
The Three-Cornered World),
Soseki had cited lines from two Chinese poems and talked about the virtues of oriental poetry; his experience with Zen, equally related to the arts, made him aware of the life of meditation. Yet in his diary entry of December 3, 1911, he wrote, "My stomach has cracked. My mind, too, it seems, for I feel an incurable sorrow each time I recall [the loss of my child]." The poignant fourth section in
Equinox
depicts the death and funeral of Matsumoto's youngest child.

Soseki notes in the Foreword to
Equinox
that it was on New Year's Day, 1912, that he began what he felt was a disburdening of a duty he had long delayed, yet he wondered if he could bring the novel off successfully. He hoped to produce an interesting work, since he had satisfied neither his friends nor his readers for a long time. Nevertheless, he felt that it was in the nature of creative writing itself that an author might be unable to predict if the work would turn out as he himself wished. Soseki did not see any need, as he had in the announcement to
Sanshiro,
to state anything about the subject matter or his own view of the work or even what the work claimed to be attempting. He pointed out that he was neither a writer of naturalism nor symbolism, "still less one of those neo-Romanticists we often hear of recently. I am one lacking in confidence that his work will be dyed sufficiently in any definite color to attract the attention of passers-by. . . . Only I have a faith that I am working on my own. So long as I follow my own instincts, I don't care a bit whether I'm a naturalist or a romanticist wearing 'neo' on his head." He continued by expressing his fear that he might disappoint his readers by falling below the standards he had set for himself. He had no interest in trying to create something novel or unique or "brand new." Yet he equally feared that vanity might make him try something beyond his skills.

The title of
Equinox
is intriguing. Soseki seems to claim it was chosen because he intended to start the novel on the first day of the New Year of 1912 and to continue it until some day past the spring equinox. He writes in the Foreword, "It is indeed a meaningless title. But I have long entertained an idea that if individual short stories are piled one over another and these so interlaced as to compose themselves into one long story, it may be that such a story will, as a newspaper novel, be read with more interest than is expected from the usual long story."

That Soseki is again experimenting is obvious in spite of his earlier indication that he was not trying anything unique or new. Yet he seems to qualify even this approach to the content and structure of his work: "However, since a novel, no matter how unskillful the writer may be, must, unlike an architect's plan, have in it activity and development of its own, it does not progress as he had planned it beforehand." He concludes, ". . . going well or not, it may at least be anticipated that we are to have a series of short stories that will be difficult to classify definitely as short stories or as ones having a link between them. It now seems to me that such a form will be all right."

That Soseki, then, was attempting in
Equinox
a form of linked stories that somehow did double duty as individual story, yet as story forming part of a larger world of the novel, accounts for the division of the work into six books plus a conclusion. A glance, say, at the third section indicates that the novel superseded the individual story. What might have become purely picaresque adventures involving Keitaro did not take that less artistic shape; instead,
Equinox
assumes the form of a novel of education, the young university graduate Keitaro somehow stumbling through the world beyond academia eventually to experience, however directly or indirectly, the romantic, the practical, the philosophical, and the existential. The first choice Keitaro makes, that of becoming a detective, if even temporarily, he must in the end realize is a choice inferior to the kind of choices his friend Sunaga has available to him. It is through indirection that Keitaro proceeds and ultimately gets closer to the very core of life itself.