There is a small but important exchange between him and Sanshirō toward the end of the novel that sheds light on the origins of the stray sheep as spectator. Hirota recounts a dream of a forest reunion with a beautiful young girl whom he had seen in a funeral procession twenty years before. He has never seen her since; he has also never married. When Sanshirō suggests that he never married because of love for that girl, Hirota laughs at the idea. He then tells an anecdote to explain his skepticism about marriage. The year after he saw the girl, his mother told him on her deathbed that his true father was someone other than the man whom he had always believed was his father. Hirota implies that he was hurt both by his mother’s infidelity and by her duplicity.
These two brief sketches are rich in suggestions about the nature of the relationship between love and society. One such thought is that an ideal love cannot exist within society; at the same time, it leaves its subject unfit for more mundane attachments. Another is that a deep disillusionment in love, whether filial or romantic, may leave one permanently incapable of serious intercourse with society. In both cases, the result is alienation.
In contrast to Mineko and Hirota, Sanshirō has little understanding of himself as a stray sheep. Early in his Tokyo life, he identifies three worlds at his disposal: the world of his mother, which he has left behind but will not jettison altogether because of its comfortable familiarity; the world of learning, represented by Hirota and Nonomiya and the library; and, most exciting of all, the world of action and beautiful women. He thinks that he was meant to play a central role in the last, yet somehow, he cannot find his way in. In fact, he belongs to none of these worlds. He will never be able to go home again, and he is not dedicated enough to occupy the scholar’s world. His timidity, if nothing else, bars him forever from the third world. At the end of the novel, we sense that Sanshirō has been touched in some fundamental, unalterable way by his experience with Mineko. We also sense that he is one of those destined to stand wistfully between worlds, never able to step in. What we cannot tell is how much of this he will ever understand. This is what keeps him from being a great Sōseki character, and this is why Mineko and Hirota make better guides to the world of And Then, whose hero Daisuke is an acutely self-conscious stray sheep.
And Then opens ominously with a red double camellia falling on the floor. The camellia flower, which drops as a whole rather than petal by petal, was distasteful to samurai because it reminded them of falling heads. Daisuke is introduced to us as a healthy young man neurotically concerned with his physical well-being—so much so, in fact, that he cannot take for granted the life that flows through his body day after day.
It is not just his body, of course, that Daisuke views with detachment; he stands outside every aspect of his life—his family, society at large, and most importantly, his own heart and mind. What is responsible for this state of affairs?
Daisuke himself would probably point to the state of Japan and the world as the principal cause. The novel is set four or five years after the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), perhaps the Meiji government’s proudest international moment. The Japanese victory was widely taken to mean Japan’s coming of age, its right to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the nations of the West for the first time since the humiliating years of the forced opening. The postwar years were a bombastic, ostentatious period for the nation as a whole, and Daisuke’s skepticism and disaffection may be taken as an accurate reflection of his creator’s views.
It is not so much the question of Japan’s standing in the world that troubles Daisuke and Sōseki but rather the dislocation of values brought on by the breathtaking changes since 1868. Unlike his father, Daisuke recognizes that the hierarchical, well-ordered world of feudal Japan, in which loyalty to one’s superiors was the supreme value, fostered tremendous hypocrisy. Modernization swept away the old value structure without creating anything in its stead. Daisuke cannot identify any ideals on which to base his conduct with others, though of course, by the time we meet him, he is probably too sophisticated and too jaded to admit to a desire for such ideals. Still, there is a perceptible vacuum in him, and this vacuum is dangerous, not only for Daisuke but for all Japanese, because industrialization— that is, Westernization—has dazzled the eye with the possibility of hitherto undreamed of material comfort. This is the content of what Daisuke refers to as the conflict between the life appetites and the moral appetites.
These passages of social commentary, pedantically written and awkwardly interpolated, are part of what sustains Sōseki’s reputation as a social critic. They are convincing as a partial explanation for Daisuke’s disaffection; but in order to truly understand his malaise— and Sōseki’s wisdom as an artist—we must go further. Sōseki himself encourages us to do so by saying to Daisuke through Michiyo, “I think you’re cheating a little.”
Let us look first at Daisuke’s relationships with his father, Hiraoka, and Michiyo. In his study, The Psychological World of Natsume Sōseki (Sōseki no shinteki sekai, Tokyo: Shibundō, 1969) Doi Takeo, the well-known psychoanalyst, emphasizes the gravity of Daisuke’s disillusionment with his father. His point is well taken. We are told that Daisuke ceased to have temper outbursts at his father from about the time he graduated from the university. Perhaps this marks the beginning of Daisuke’s alienation. Recognizing and accepting one’s parent’s shabbiness of character is a serious business. Moreover, Daisuke can easily generalize from his father to the society around him, for his father is more the rule than the exception. His brother Seigo differs from him only in being less hypocritical, in claiming no values whatsoever. Such a realization understandably both dampens the desire and impairs the ability to deal earnestly with other human beings, let alone form attachments. Daisuke’s case is exacerbated by the position of dependence on his father in which he chooses to remain. Daisuke thinks he is too worldly to be disturbed by the contradiction of allowing himself to be supported by a man whom he respects not at all, and yet, he finds himself disturbed by the contempt he feels for his father.
These circumstances constitute part of the answer to Michiyo’s poignant question, “But why did you let me go?” when Daisuke at last declares his love. It is something of a vogue nowadays to posit a homoerotic relationship between Sōseki’s characters, perhaps supported by such overtones in the relationships between Sōseki and his disciples. Dr. Doi, in the above work, suggests such an under-current between Daisuke and Hiraoka and, as a corollary, reasons that Daisuke could not have truly loved Michiyo; he would never have given her up in that case, not even for the exalted ideal of friendship. The homosexual theory is debatable on two grounds. First, it is hard to imagine that Hiraoka, even before the changes brought on by his downfall, had any deep, enduring appeal for Daisuke. He is too much of a philistine, a member of Daisuke’s father’s and brother’s camp. Secondly, there are many specific suggestions of Daisuke’s longing for Michiyo. One example is the quality of his memories of her—the attentiveness with which he has observed and remembered her eyes, her clothing, her hair. We must also remember the subversive gold ring he gave her as a wedding gift. No, Daisuke did love Michiyo at the time he gave her up, but only within the limits of his ability to love. He let Michiyo go because he simply did not have it in him to take the initiative to marry her; moreover, he threw himself into arranging the match with Hiraoka in order to avoid having to confront that vacuum in himself.
In the three years following Hiraoka’s and Michiyo’s wedding, these circumstances—his ambiguous position with his father, and his (unacknowledged) inability to admit his love for Michiyo—have had a cumulatively debilitating effect. Add to this the more concrete reasons for which society at that time should appear repugnant to athoughtful, sensitive individual like Daisuke, and it becomes only too natural that he should be neurotically incapable of action.
Yet, having said this, I am still unconvinced that we have truly understood Daisuke. Is it not possible that Daisuke w
ould have been much the same even had he lived in a more sympathetic age and even had his father been warm and admirable? Has Sōseki given us in Daisuke a portrait of the most irredeemable stray sheep, the most radical form of alienation of all—that is, the individual who is burdened with an acute awareness of the impossibility of existence such that nonexistence appears more real and more natural? And, finally, what of the possibility that Daisuke is, after all, just a decadent coward? Let us examine what happens with Michiyo.
Daisuke’s declaration of love to Michiyo, with its implications of ostracism by family and society and consequent financial disaster, has usually been read as a redemptive, regenerative act. For one thing, it is beautifully written; the image of the lovers sitting opposite each other, motionless and wordless, has a secure place in the collection of memorable Sōseki scenes. Daisuke himself says that he is in heaven. Michiyo is undeniably a revitalizing force. This is emphasized by the recurrent water imagery, such as the water she drinks from the flower bowl or the rain that brings her to Daisuke’s and then shields and isolates the lovers. It is also unquestionable that acknowledging his love has a restorative effect on Daisuke. Still, in what way is Michiyo revitalizing, and to what is Daisuke restored?
Once the blissfulness of declaring himself to Michiyo is past, Daisuke is beset with anxiety over the future. He is worried about money. In his mind he casts an eye over that region of life called work but finds nothing until he comes upon the domain of beggars. Indeed, it is virtually impossible to imagine Daisuke working to stave off starvation. Here the question of cowardice presents itself. Is Daisuke losing his recently earned redemption when he discloses his financial worries to Michiyo, or when he cancels his arrangements with the secondhand bookseller after receiving Umeko’s check? It is possible, of course, that Sōseki has taken such pains to present us with an interesting moral coward; still, the work suggests greater richness.
It can be no accident that Daisuke is able to commit himself to a woman with a heart problem, a woman from whom no children will issue, a woman who repeatedly states her readiness to die. In the very act of returning to his original self, Daisuke is embracing death. In fact, he was never seriously interested in existence; that is why he cannot fight for it, unlike his university friend Terao, or Hiraoka, or, for that matter, his father and brother. There are a number of indications (e.g., the flower-scented sleep in which he drowns himself when the “stimuli of the universe” become too much for him) that nonbeing was always attractive to him. Even his obsession with health is the other side of the coin of a fascination with death (evident, for example, in the delicious horror with which he contemplates the execution scene from Andreev). For Daisuke, to be consumed with Michiyo in the flames of society’s wrath is indeed an act faithful to his original being.
The end of the novel is unclear; it is unnecessary to specify whether Daisuke goes insane, commits suicide, or is destroyed passively. In any case, it is difficult to postulate a reunion with Michiyo. The ominous signs throughout the book—the surrealistic train rides at night, the earthquake, the motionless gecko above Hiraoka’s door— reach a climax in the brutal red imagery of summer, which blindingly reflects the red camellia at the opening.
The contrast between the burning sun with which we leave And Then and the lingering warmth of the autumn sun with which The Gate begins accurately indicates the distance between the worlds of the two novels. The Gate is a quiet tale about Sōsuke and his wife Oyone, who live in a house beneath a cliff. During their student days, Oyone had been with Sōsuke’s friend Yasui (as his wife? the novel does not say), but a moment of indescretion drives her and Sōsuke to the edge of society. Rather than support the possibility that Daisuke and Michiyo take up life together after his declaration of love, The Gate graphically illustrates the implausibility of that idea. Daisuke could not have endured for one minute Sōsuke and Oyone’s existence.
If Sanshirō was a novel about youth and And Then a novel about troubled adulthood, The Gate is a novel about middle age. Sōsuke and Oyone live without any dreams for the future in a shabby house on which the sun rarely shines. To get anywhere from the house, Sōsuke must go through mud. His shoes are old and leaky, just like the roof. He has a loose tooth for which the dentist can do nothing; it will simply fall out one day. He goes each morning to a lowly civil service job that barely pays enough to maintain the couple’s patchwork existence. When he comes home at night, he and Oyone share a modest meal and then, if it is warm enough, sit on the dark verandah and talk while watching the stars come out. They are Sōseki’s happiest couple, and it is with good reason that this work has often been characterized as idyllic.
The pair have few contacts with the outside world. They feel that they have no claims on anyone, not even the occasional strangers with whom they have impersonal dealings. It is not that they are guilt-ridden by their misdeed, for in fact, they do not feel responsible: fate took them unawares, and they found themselves at the edge of society before they knew it. Although they do not understand very well what happened, they accept their punishment and ask merely to be left alone.
There are two crises in the book. The first comes when Oyone falls acutely ill. She has never been healthy; the strain of trying to deal graciously with Koroku, her husband’s brother, who clearly blames her for her brother’s and therefore his own downfall, proves to be too much. After this seizure has passed, Oyone discloses to Sōsuke that she visited a fortuneteller after her last unsuccessful pregnancy. He confirmed her suspicion that she would never give birth to a healthy child and attributed it to her having wronged someone.
The second crisis comes when Sōsuke discovers, almost by accident, that Yasui, the friend whom he had betrayed, is to visit Sōsuke’s landlord’s home. The news is so shaking that he takes ten days off from work to go to a Zen temple. He knows nothing about Zen and has no idea what to expect, but he goes with desperate hopes for a miraculous reordering of his life. Needless to say, the venture is unsuccessful. He is told to consider the nature of his soul before the birth of his parents, but he fails to come up with any thoughts.
Sōsuke returns home looking more spent than when he left. On the surface, however, things are not bad. He manages to hold on to his job through a personnel review and even gets a raise. Still, when his wife happily remarks on the coming spring, he can only think about the next fall.
Sōsuke’s and Oyone’s flaw is, essentially, lack of self-knowledge. Each is driven to a crisis, each seeks help, and each returns unenlightened. When Sōsuke hears about the fortuneteller episode, he tells Oyone never to go again, that it is foolish to pay money to hear such things. Oyone agrees that she never will, for it is too frightening. When Sōsuke returns from the Zen temple, he wishes he could change his name to lessen the chances of accidental encounter with Yasui. Both he and Oyone want to escape from their past, and, by extension, from themselves. They are stray sheep lost not only to society but to their own souls. The Zen temple episode is crucial in clarifying this theme. The seemingly irrelevant kōan assigned to Sōsuke was in fact directing him to think about a most urgent issue— the essence of his being, indeed, of life; but Sōsuke’s unexamined fear blinds him and he does not know that he must look into himself to right his skewed universe.
The question of self-knowledge raised here adds a new dimension to the trilogy as a whole. At the end of The Gate, as Sōsuke prepares to leave the temple, he is described as a man fated to stand at the gate, knock, and receive no answer. At the same time, he is not one of those permitted to go through life without seeking the gate. Might this not describe Sanshirō as well? Daisuke, on the other hand, is one who chooses not to seek the gate. Being far more introspective and analytically acute than the other two, he consciously shuns self-knowledge in order to make life tolerable. Yet, in the end, he, too, finds himself at the gate—with the door flying open in his face.
Sōseki is not severe with the patiently cowardly Sōsuke. Hi
s compassion is evident in the quiet love, the enduring devotion of the couple that permeates the novel. It is not a love to have satisfied the young Sanshirō, much less Daisuke. It is a love granted to a pair who have lost everything else. Sōsuke and Oyone are, in a sense, dead to society. We might think of this as Sōseki’s final comment on love in this trilogy.
In retrospect the trilogy can be seen as a web spun around the points of love, death, self-knowledge, and society. These points are linked to one another in a complex series of relationships that are examined from a different angle in each novel. Sōseki continued to examine these same ideas in his later works—what else is there for the novelist to explore?—but from a darker and darker perspective. His spectator-heroes become increasingly bitter and obsessed with the impossibility of existence until Sensei, the hero of Kokoro (the last novel of the second trilogy) has no choice but to commit suicide. Having let his hero die (and also having reached a technical impasse—the novels of the second trilogy are structurally awkward, as if the framework can no longer bear the weight of the content), Sōseki shifted gears in his next novel, the autobiographical Grass on the Wayside. By the time he died, while working on Light and Darkness (Meian, 1916), he was clearly headed in a new direction. It is regrettable that we cannot know where it pointed.
Even this brief examination of his works should indicate Sōseki’s complexity as a writer. Yet, one wonders how much of this complexity is appreciated today. As stated at the beginning of this discussion, Sōseki remains the great master of modern literature in Japan. He is different from other masters of modern literature in that he was a popular writer who touched upon popular concerns in an accessible manner. There are several Sōsekis whom posterity can choose to remember. No doubt, many, perhaps most Japanese readers today, read him for his humorous early works, I Am a Cat and Little Master (Botchan, 1906). Others read him for the so-called ethical messages in such works as Kokoro. Students of English literature must still find comfort in his struggles to make his English studies meaningful at the same time that they may envy his attainments. Finally, for anyone interested in the development of Japanese culture and society in the modern world, Sōseki will continue to be for some time to come an accurate and penetrating critic. Things have not changed that much between Japan and the West since he wrote, particularly from the Japanese viewpoint.