INTRODUCTION

“Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious,” proclaimed Sigmund Freud, suggesting that we find hidden aspects of ourselves through dreaming. But in the case of Natsume Sōseki’s beautiful and eerie fantasy collection Ten Nights Dreaming, we might perhaps ask, “Whose unconscious do you mean?” Is it Sōseki the writer’s unconscious? Or is it the collective unconscious of Japan at a crossroads moment in its history? Or could it even be the reader’s own unconscious, because this collection of dreams stirs and provokes us in complex and memorable ways each time we read it?

In fact, all of the above probably are true. Reading Ten Nights Dreaming we gain access to the many-layered mind and imagination of Sōseki, one of modern Japan’s greatest—and most anguished—writers. And we also gain entry into the uneasy, multifaceted world of Japan during the Meiji period (1868–1912), a time when Japan pulled and pushed itself out of a tradition-bound feudal society to confront the challenge of modernity brought on by its recent contact with the West. Sōseki’s concerns were not merely culturally specific, however: Most of the anxieties and challenges he chronicles are universally experienced by modern human beings, and the strange, uneasy dreams he recounts flicker and resound across our own brains even a hundred years later.

It is little wonder that issues of identity abound throughout the dreams. Mirrors, a hat, blindness, and a shadowy sinister child appear, signifiers of the self or at least of the search for the self. These images relate both to Sōseki’s own personal and aesthetic experiences and to the deep transitions convulsing his country as a whole. Later on Sōseki would write about these issues in a number of realistic novels for which he is most famous, but in many ways the fantastic, grotesque, and occasionally lyrical imagery in Ten Nights Dreaming and other early fantasy works expresses these concerns in more profound and memorable ways. The fantastic, as scholars and psychologists from Bruno Bettelheim onwards have reminded us, can be an extremely effective method of processing traumatic issues in a safely displaced fashion. By [dis]placing our deepest fears, anxieties, or hopes into the realm of the fantastic, we can work through them at a secure psychological distance, removed from the sometimes too painful directness of realistic fiction or art.

Certainly, Sōseki had ample reasons for using the fantastic mode to work through trauma. His life contained a number of traumatic events, beginning in his infancy. Sōseki was born in 1867 to aged parents who, embarrassed to have a child at an advanced age, farmed him out to another couple. When he later returned to his parents, they pretended for a while that they were his grandparents, and he only learned the truth through a late-night whisper from a kindly maid. Fortunately for Sōseki, he escaped his unhappy household through his brilliance as a student, first mastering Chinese and then going on to become one of a handful of Japanese students to become truly literate in English literature.

Sōseki’s success in English, however, led to one of the most traumatic periods in his life, a two-year stint in London arranged by the Japanese government. Although he arrived boasting that he would out-master the English in their own language, he soon realized that his spoken English would never achieve fluency. As all his biographers chronicle, these two years were the most miserable in Sōseki’s life. By his own account he lived “like a stray dog among wolves,” lonely and fearful, ashamed of his own failure and resentful of the English. The dream of “The Seventh Night,” with its vision of an alienated Japanese man on a ship full of Westerners steadily moving towards the setting sun, undoubtedly expresses the disturbing, even despairing, emotions that Sōseki felt towards his own encounter with the West.

But it is also true that his time in England provided Sōseki with some of his most memorable and beautiful material for his early fantastic literature. Visits to the Tower of London not only gave him the inspiration to write the ghostly tale “The Tower of London,” but also may have inspired the themes of claustrophobia or outright entrapment evident in the dreams of the second, fifth, and tenth nights. “Tower” also deals with the inescapable power of a dark past that still shadows the present, a theme that appears as the climax of the dream of “The Third Night,” widely acknowledged to be the most gripping and haunting of all the dreams.

More positive inspirations from Sōseki’s time in London also exist and are at least as important as the dark shadows of the Tower. Most significant were his visits to the Tate Gallery in London and his encounters with the poetry and art of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Arthurian poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Both Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites looked back to a pre-modern world of beauty, grace, and chivalry often embodied in the figure of a beautiful, and sometimes dying, woman. Sōseki apparently spent many hours at the Tate transfixed in front of John William Waterhouse’s picture of the Lady of Shalott, the legendary lover of Lancelot who died tragically (and beautifully) of unrequited love. The Lady and her Arthurian equivalent, Elaine, were both associated with lilies, and it is easy to see another incarnation of her in Sōseki’s flower-woman of the lyrical “Dream of the First Night.”

“The First Night” also contains an image of entrapment, but in this case the male observer seems content to stay spellbound by the woman’s power. In “The Second Night,” the male is imprisoned by his own ego, although there may be a hidden sexual element as well, given his references to his “nine and a half inch knife.” Sexuality and entrapment reach a crescendo in the grotesque black humor of the dream of the “Tenth Night,” in which a mysterious woman leads “Shotaro” (perhaps the dreamer’s alter ego) to a hideous fate of being charged by an endless stream of pigs and then licked by one. It seems that all that will be left of Shotaro is his beloved Panama hat, a last fragmented image of identity. Critics have long known that Sōseki’s own marriage was an unhappy one, and these conflicting images of beauty and entrapment are suggestive of his psychological state at that time.

But the image of a pure and dying woman etched in “The First Night” may have larger cultural references as well, suggesting a general need among modernizing nations for an image of organic purity and beauty removed, at least momentarily, from the taint of industrialization. Across cultures this image is often embodied in the vision of a dying or vanishing woman, and it is perhaps not surprising that Sōseki returns to this image in his later realistic novel And Then, and in his last, unfinished novel, Light and Dark.

The popularity of these later novels with his contemporary Japanese audience attests that Sōseki’s work struck a major chord in the hearts of the citizens of the Meiji period. His later work was famous for its themes concerning the increase in isolated egotistical individuals, the relentlessness and bewildering quality of technological progress, and the disappearance of faith. All these themes appear in the earlier Ten Nights Dreaming. We have already mentioned the dream of “The Seventh Night,” with its vision of a ship and its alienated passengers steaming relentlessly toward an unknown future, a metaphor for Meiji Japan as much as for the dreamer himself. The relentless vision of the final dream with its nonstop stream of pigs goes beyond issues of sexual insecurity to hint at a deep unease with progress in and of itself. Similarly, the dream of the “Eighth Night” limning a busy barbershop in which the protagonist attempts to change his appearance as he gazes at the reflections of passersby in a mirror suggests the crazy pace and insecurities of the newly modern world.

The dreams of the second, fifth, sixth, and ninth nights depict their protagonists’ attempts to believe in something beyond themselves, only to end up frustrated or betrayed. The woman in the dream of “The Ninth Night” prays to a god to help her samurai husband, not realizing that he is already dead. The old man in “The Fifth Night,” perhaps a Taoist immortal, seems unable to wield his magic, and, similar to the dreamer in “The Seventh Night,” ends up disappearing beneath the surface of the water. Most poignant of all is the dream of “The Sixth Night,” in which a sculptor of the Meiji period attempts to summon medieval “Benevolent Kings” from the wood of modern logs, only to ruefully conclude that “Benevolent Kings simply were not buried in Meiji trees,” a resigned acknowledgment of the absence and emptiness that signify the modern world.

Sōseki wrote Ten Nights Dreaming three years after his return from London and two years after the publication of his first major work, the satirical and somewhat fantastical I Am a Cat, the story of a Meiji household told from a cat’s point of view. The somber little piece “The Cat’s Grave,” which ends the present collection, is told in entirely realistic terms, giving the reader a hint of Sōseki’s later fiction. The piece acts as a bridge between his fantastic pieces and his realistic fiction, since it concerns the very real death of a previously fantastical cat.

At the same time, the story’s placement in this collection also reminds the reader of the power of dreams and fantasy. A realistic account of a cat’s death and burial memorializes a specific cat at a specific time and place. Compare this with the death and burial that provide the framework of the story in the dream of “The First Night,” which begins this collection. It is up to the reader to use his or her imagination to play with the image of a fragment of a star worn round “through its long passage through the sky” or the vision of a woman transforming into a flower for a final kiss. These images reach into our unconscious, opening up roads and realms beyond ourselves and inspiring, perhaps, our own dreams, be they lyrical, grotesque, terrifying, or, as with Sōseki’s dreams, all of the above.

Susan Napier

April 2015