No easy answers await the reader of Sanshirō, a novel that contains only the palest hint of mythical elements. The protagonist himself gives little sign of being poised to do battle with someone or to take something into his own hands. Indeed, he still has no idea what might be out there for him to take. Making such a person the hero of a myth would be virtually impossible. In this sense, Sanshirō is rather different from a typical modern European Bildungsroman, in which a young person—usually, like Sanshirō, an unspoiled young man or woman from the provinces—encounters many obstacles, endures many wounds and defeats, internalizes new psychic and erotic values, matures as a human being, and passes through the gates to a broader society, now a fully fledged “citizen,” as in Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe or Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale.
Compared with such novels, the course of Sanshirō’s growth seems to have little straight-line continuity. He does experience his stumbles, and his expectations are undercut, but though things fail to go as he might wish, the story never really clarifies whether such experiences amount to defeat for him—or whether, indeed, a clear standard exists in Sanshirō’s own mind as to what would constitute “defeat.” To confront a situation thrust before him, to experience anguish from it, to demand answers from it: such a posture is wholly lacking in Sanshirō. If something unexpected occurs, Sanshirō merely feels surprised or moved or baffled or impressed.
In Tokyo, Sanshirō re-encounters Professor Hirota, the man he chanced to meet on the train, and he comes to regard him as a kind of mentor. There is little hint, however, that Sanshirō feels anything like a resolve to learn something important from the older man as someone who has preceded him to a (seemingly) superior state in life. He simply observes the Professor the same way he would watch a majestic cloud sailing through the sky. He does a similar thing with his small circle of acquaintances, viewing them as he would particularly beautiful or interesting clouds. He is more or less drawn to the Professor’s lifestyle, but it never occurs to him to take him as a role model. He falls in love with one member of his circle of his own age, the beautiful and intelligent Mineko (and she seems attracted to Sanshirō’s radiant innocence), but he takes no positive steps to make her his own. With regard to both psyche and eros, he always keeps himself in a warm zone of comfort. Never once does he corner himself with logic.
Perhaps Sanshirō harbors too little longing for maturity for a young man, and it may well be that he lacks any conception of what constitutes a “citizen.” From a Western point of view, his stance may appear all too immature and irresponsible, both individually and socially. He is already twenty-two (twenty-three by Japanese numbering), and as a Meiji period student at Tokyo Imperial University, he is a member of the super-elite, one of those groomed to shoulder the burdens of the nation. How can such a character stay this way, arms folded, vacillating, unable to choose a path through life? If a foreign reader were to press me with such questions, I would probably have little choice but to answer, “You may be right.” And yet, quite honestly, that arms-folded, lukewarm life stance of Sanshirō’s that wraps logical and ethical complications in the softest possible emotional cloak is strangely comfortable for me and probably for most Japanese readers.
It may be possible, in that sense, to define Sanshirō as a novel of growth without maturity. The innocent Sanshirō enters a new world, and he moves toward becoming an adult by meeting new people and having new experiences, but it is doubtful that he ever grows to the point of entering society as a “mature citizen” in the European sense. Nor is there any strong expectation in the society that surrounds him that he will do such a thing, for Japanese society had slipped sideways from a feudal system into the authoritarian emperor system that held sway until the Second World War without experiencing the maturation of a middle-class citizenry. This is something I feel very strongly.
Western “modernity” in that sense had not yet taken root in Meiji Japan, nor, perhaps, is it all that firmly rooted even in our own day. The concept of the “mature citizen” does not seem to hold much importance among us now, for better or worse (not that anyone can say for sure what is “better” and “worse”). This may be precisely why Sanshirō has become a perennial classic for the Japanese, attracting over the years a steady stream of readers who identify with it strongly. Such thoughts come to mind almost inevitably as I read the novel.
As an avid reader and outstanding scholar of English literature, Sōseki must surely have had a clear concept of the Western Bildungsroman, and his storytelling shows the obvious influence of Jane Austen. He willingly adopted such Western novel forms as models and modified them in his own way. In fact, with his profound knowledge of two cultures, he may have been the perfect writer to perform such a feat: Sōseki was deeply versed in English literature, and several of his compositions in the Complete Works display considerable mastery of the language, but he also wrote haiku through most of his adult life and was highly educated in the Chinese classics.
As a result, in Sanshirō, despite its Western framework, cause and effect become confused here and there, the metaphysical and the physical are jumbled together, and affirmation and negation are nearly indistinguishable at times. This is the author’s conscious choice, of course, and Sōseki keeps the story progressing smoothly while supporting this fundamental fuzziness by bringing into play his uniquely sophisticated sense of humor, his free-ranging style, the sheer rightness of his descriptions, and above all the simple honesty of his protagonist’s character.
Sōseki has long been known as a Japanese “national author,” and I would not dispute that designation. Into the format of the modern Western novel, he smoothly and very accurately transplanted the many forms and functions of the Japanese psyche he observed around him, and which we can easily recognize even now. He did so with great sincerity and, as a result, with great success.
Sanshirō is the only full-length novel that Sōseki wrote that focuses on the coming of age of a young man. One such novel may have been enough for him to write in his lifetime, but he had to write at least one. It thus occupies a special place among Sōseki’s works. Virtually all novelists have such a work. In my own case, it is Norwegian Wood (1987). I don’t especially want to reread it, nor do I have any desire to write another one like it, but I feel that in completing it, I was able to take a great step forward, that the existence of that work provides a solid backing for what I produced later. That feeling is important to me, and I imagine (based on my own experience if nothing else) that Sōseki must have felt the same way about Sanshirō.
I look forward to seeing how readers abroad receive Sōseki—and especially Sanshirō—in this highly accurate and lively translation. I will be happy if you enjoy the book. It is a personal favorite of mine, and I suspect you will find that, no matter where in the world you are, and no matter what the particular shape and direction of your adolescence, the special fragrance of that important stage in life we all pass through is just about the same.
Murakami Haruki
Further Reading
SŌSEKI’S WORKS IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
(arranged chronologically)
Wagahai wa neko de aru (1905–06), translated by AikoItō and GraemeWilson as I Am a Cat, 3 vols (Rutland and Tokyo: CharlesE. Tuttle Co., 1972, 1979, 1986).
“Rondon tō” (1905), translated and introduced by DamianFlanagan in the collection The Tower of London (London: Peter Owen, 2005). (Also contains short selections from 1901–09.)
“Koto no sorane” (1905): see “Yumejūya.”
“Shumi no iden” (1906): see “Yumejūya.”
Botchan (1906), translated by J.Cohn as Botchan (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2005).
Kusamakura (1906), translated by AlanTurney as The Three Cornered World (London: Peter Owen, 1965). Also translated by MeredithMcKinney as Kusamakura (London and New York: Penguin Classics, 2008).
“Nihyakutōka” (1906), translated by SammyI. Tsunematsu as 210th Day (Boston and Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing
, 2002).
Bungakuron (1907), partial translation in Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, edited by MichaelBourdaghs, AtsukoUeda and JosephA. Murphy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
Kōfu (1908), translated, and with an Afterword, by JayRubin as The Miner (Stanford University Press, 1988).
“Yume jūya” (1908), “Koto no sorane” (1905), “Shumi no iden” (1906), translated by AikoItō and GraemeWilson as Ten Nights of Dream, Hearing Things, The Heredity of Taste (Rutland and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1974).
Sanshirō (1908), translated by JayRubin as Sanshiro (Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 1977). Distributed by the Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Sore kara (1909), translated by NormaMoore Field as And Then (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978). Distributed by the Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
“Man-Kan tokoro-dokoro” (1909), translated as “Travels in Manchuria and Korea” by IngerSigrun Brodey and SammyI. Tsunematsu in their Rediscovering Natsume Sōseki (Folke-stone, Kent: Global Oriental, 2000).
Mon (1910), translated by FrancisMathy as Mon (London: Peter Owen, 1972).
“Gendai Nihon no kaika” (1911), translated by JayRubin as “The Civilization of Modern-day Japan,” in EdwinMcClellan (tr.), Kokoro, A Novel, and Selected Essays (Lanham: Madison Books, 1992).
Higan-sugi made (1912), translated by KingoOchiai and SanfordGoldstein as To the Spring Equinox and Beyond (Rutland and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1985).
Kōjin (1913), translated by BeongcheonYu as The Wayfarer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967).
Kokoro (1914), translated by EdwinMcClellan as Kokoro (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1957). Also in Kokoro, A Novel, and Selected Essays (Lanham: Madison Books, 1992).
“Watakushi no kojinshugi” (1914), translated by JayRubin as “My Individualism,” in EdwinMcClellan (tr.), Kokoro, A Novel, and Selected Essays (Lanham: Madison Books, 1992).
“Garasudo no uchi” (1915), translated by SammyI. Tsunematsu, with an Introduction and Afterword by MarvinMarcus, as Inside My Glass Doors (Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 2002).
Michikusa (1915), translated by EdwinMcClellan as Grass on the Wayside (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).
Meian (1916), translated by V. H.Viglielmo as Light and Darkness (London: Peter Owen, 1971).
STUDIES OF SŌSEKI
DoiTakeo, The Psychological World of Natsume Sōseki, translated by WilliamJefferson Tyler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976).
Fujii,James A., Complicit Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
Gessel,Van C., Three Modern Novelists: Sōseki, Tanizaki, Kawabata (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1993).
Hibbett,Howard, “Natsume Sōseki and the Psychological Novel,” in DonaldH. Shively (ed.), Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture (Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 305–46.
Iijima,Takehisa and JamesM. Vardaman, Jr. (eds), The World of Natsume Sōseki (Tokyo: Kinseido Ltd., 1987).
Keene,Donald, “Natsume Sōseki,” in Dawn to the West: A History of Japanese Literature, Volume 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984–98), pp. 305–54.
Marcus,Marvin, Reflections in a Glass Door: Memory and Melancholy in the Personal Writings of Natsume Sōseki (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009).
MatsuiSakuko, Natsume Sōseki as a Critic of English Literature (Tokyo: Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1975).
Matsuo,Takayoshi, “A Note on the Political Thought of Natsume Sōseki in his Later Years,” in BernardSilberman and H. D.Harootunian (eds), Japan in Crisis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 67–85.
McClellan,Edwin, Two Japanese Novelists: Sōseki and Tōson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).
_____, “The Implications of Sōseki’s Kokoro,” Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 14 (1958–9), pp. 356–70.
MasaoMiyoshi, Accomplices of Silence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).
Rubin,Jay, Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984). (On Sōseki’s resignation from the University, rejection of the Doctorate of Letters and critique of the Committee on Literature, etc.)
Sakaki,Atsuko, Recontextualizing Texts: Narrative Performance in Modern Japanese Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). (See especially “The Debates on Kokoro: A Cornerstone,” pp. 29–53.)
Washburn,Dennis, “Translating Mount Fuji,” in Translating Mount Fuji: Modern Japanese Fiction and the Ethics of Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 71–106.
Yiu,Angela, Chaos and Order in the Works of Natsume Sōseki (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998).
Yu,Beongcheon, Natsume Sōseki (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969).
Translator’s Note
Sanshirō is a novel about a young man from the sleepy countryside who opens his eyes to the modern world of the city and to the women who are that world’s most alluring—and frightening—denizens. The opening phrases of the book, “He drifted off, and when he opened his eyes the woman…” are thus powerfully symbolic of Sanshirō’s journey as a whole, but they are securely anchored in the practical realities of travel in 1908, when the novel was serialized from 1 September to 29 December in the pages of the Asahi Shinbun newspaper. By the time we see him on an evening train, Sanshirō might well have been dozing because he would have been on the road for some thirty-one hours, with another twenty-six to go. (Travelers in 2008 could complete Sanshirō’s entire itinerary in under six hours by connecting to one of Japan’s famous bullet trains.)1
When he stops in Nagoya for his second night on the road, Sanshirō writes in the hotel registry that he lives in “Masaki Village, Miyako County, Fukuoka Prefecture,” an address in Japan’s southern main island, Kyushu, of which only the name of the village is fictional. It is based on the home of Sōseki’s “disciple,” Komiya Toyotaka (1884–1966), who came from the village of Saigawa.2 The train station nearest to Komiya’s home has been named Higashi-Saigawa Sanshirō to commemorate its connection with the now classic novel. Toyotsu, an actual town a few minutes away on the same line, is where Sanshirō occasionally went to the bank, as mentioned in Chapter 8. Like the name Masaki Village, however, most of Sanshirō is pure fiction, and Sōseki felt perfectly free to stipulate that the train to Nagoya was due in at 9.30 even though the “real” train was scheduled to arrive at 10.39, to mention only one of many divergences from fact that have been noted by Japanese scholars.3
The novel’s Tokyo setting is also quite real, and the layout of the University of Tokyo’s central campus in Hongō—the hospital, the athletic field, the faculty center on the hill above the pond—remains much as it was in Sōseki’s day, though few of the buildings described by Sōseki in such detail survived the devastating 1923 earthquake. The pond is now known as “Sanshirō Pond.” Sanshirō is one of Sōseki’s most beloved novels, both for its nostalgic view of student life and its panorama of Meiji-period Tokyo—or at least the University district. Edward Seidensticker wrote that “Sanshirō lives in Hongō, and does not have a very exciting time of it… students had to go to [the neighboring] Kanda [Ward] for almost everything, from school supplies to Kabuki… Hongō was dominated by more austere sorts, professors and intellectuals and the young men of the future.”4 Indeed, when Sanshirō and his friend Yojirō go out for a good time, they board the streetcar to leave the neighborhood. Sanshirō does a lot of walking throughout the city, and many place names are briefly mentioned in the course of his rambles, but only a few significant ones are annotated in the translation.
The action of the novel begins in early September and ends some time after the New Year, and most references to actual people and events suggest that the old year is 1907. The Literary Society’s drama performance near the end, for exampl
e, is clearly based on one that Sōseki attended on 22 November 1907, and the storyteller En’yū, who died in November 1907, is discussed in the present tense. The off-track betting system that allowed Yojirō to lose money on a horse race in November was outlawed in October 1908 but was still perfectly legal in 1907. The few details that date indisputably from 1908 are relatively unimportant.5
Verisimilitude has nothing to do with the sub-plot involving the University students’ campaign to hire a Japanese professor of foreign literature. The botched plan is a major source of humor in the novel, but it masks some bitter experience for Sōseki in the academic world and it gestures toward some intriguing parallels between the lives of Sōseki and his predecessor on the Tokyo Imperial University English faculty, Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904).
Hearn had been dead for four years by the time Sōseki wrote Sanshirō in 1908. Sanshirō and his friend Yojirō are walking by the University pond when Yojirō mentions “how the late Professor Koizumi Yakumo [Hearn’s Japanese name] had always disliked the faculty room. After his lectures he would walk around the pond.” Of Greek-Irish descent, Lafcadio Hearn made his reputation as a journalist in the United States until 1890, when, at the age of thirty-nine, he went to Japan, married a Japanese woman, and became world-famous for his imaginative writings on Japan, most notably his beautifully wrought retellings (and occasional inventions) of Japanese folk-tales. Hearn never felt fully accepted in Japan, however, and he was only able to achieve Japanese citizenship—with the name Koizumi Yakumo—in 1896, the year he began teaching at the University. From 1891 to 1894, he had taught at Sanshirō’s alma mater, the Fifth National College in Kumamoto, where Sōseki taught as a full professor from 1896 to 1900.