6. ENGLISH AND NATIONAL LANGUAGES IN THE INTERNET AGE
The phrase “the end of literature” is now a cliché. And it has been a cliché, not only in Japan but all over the world, for half a century if not longer. Yet in recent years, voices bewailing the end of literature are gaining new urgency. Fewer and fewer people read literature deserving of the name; even the classics, novels once considered must-reads, are increasingly shunned. In this chapter I will start by departing from Japan to examine what the end of literature might mean for all concerned.
Laments about the end of literature can no longer be dismissed as the pastime of old fogies who have nothing better to do than reminisce fondly about “the good old days.” These laments come amid three significant historical changes that have indubitably weakened the status of literature: the advancement of science, the diversification of cultural goods, and the spread of mass consumer society. These factors affect people’s behavior where literature is concerned—their literary reading habits—now as never before.
Let us begin with the advancement of science. Today, people who wish to explore the eternal question that haunts the human race—what is a human being?—are turning increasingly to the latest scientific advances, particularly in fields such as genetics and brain science. The more personal question—who am I?—can also be answered to a significant degree with a DNA test or a brain scan. Scientists can objectively measure our likelihood of becoming an alcoholic or our sensitivity to others’ pain. The growing importance of science is manifest in universities around the world that are relentlessly downsizing the humanities, especially literature.
Second is the diversification of cultural goods. By “cultural goods,” I mean products that function at once as art and entertainment. At one time, seeing famous paintings and sculptures entailed traveling long distances, listening to music meant attending live performances, and only city dwellers could enjoy the theater regularly. For most people, by far the most accessible cultural goods were books, especially novels. Printed books gradually fulfilled their potential as mass products and came to be widely spread among the population. In retrospect, the golden age of national language and of the novel, from the latter half of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, was the time when novels monopolized the market of cultural goods.
Within the last hundred years, however, new technology has led to the emergence of other mass-produced cultural goods. In the first half of the twentieth century came records, radio, and film, followed by television, videos, CDs, DVDs, video games, music downloads, streamed videos, and more. Particularly significant as cultural goods competing with novels are films and television dramas. In addition to stimulating our audiovisual senses, these cultural goods explore the meaning of human life and thus, like novels, address the question of how one should live. Dethroned, the novel has become merely one of many affordable mass-produced commodities.
All this was compounded by the emergence of the third factor, a mass consumer society. Ever since the written language became a cultural good that circulates in the form of books, every book has had two different values. On the one hand is its “intrinsic value”—how it enriches humanity in the long run—and on the other hand is its “market value.” Even the Gutenberg Bible, as Marshall McLuhan and Benedict Anderson so rightly inform us, circulated not only as a sacred text but also as the first “mass-produced industrial commodity.”
In a mass consumer society, the relationship between those two values becomes more and more arbitrary, for when it comes to affordable cultural goods, what sells is simply what the greatest number of people prefer. Someone who passionately loves a certain tea bowl favored by Sen no Rikyū, the famous seventeenth-century tea ceremony master, will probably have to settle for one that resembles it. Rikyū tea bowls are only for museums. But when it comes to affordable cultural goods, those replicable on a mass scale, things are different. Fans of Maria Callas’s rendering of “O mio babbino caro,” say, or Dean Martin’s “Mambo Italiano” don’t have to consult their wallets and resign themselves to buying a recording of somebody else singing it instead; all are equally affordable. People who choose differently do so not in resignation but out of preference. In the case of affordable cultural goods, sales are a direct reflection of consumer preference. And obviously, what sells the most does not necessarily reflect genuine discernment.
Art is not democratic. Art is sublime.
As consumerism increases, the disconnect between intrinsic value and market value only becomes more pronounced. In a full-fledged mass consumer society, information itself, along with cultural goods, becomes inexpensive—indeed virtually free, and thus ubiquitous. Everyone—rich or poor, aristocratic or common, highly educated or sadly ignorant—shares more or less the same information through the mass media, from newspapers to viral videos. In such a society, everyone, perhaps even royalty, forms part of the masses and ends up contributing to the craze and whirl of the mass phenomenon. Consumers inevitably know what book others are buying, knowledge that often prompts them to rush out and buy the same book, which, in turn, prompts still others to do the same. If this chain reaction gains enough momentum, it can trigger a mass phenomenon in which some books sell at an explosive rate—like the Harry Potter series.
A number of factors combined to make the Harry Potter series an unprecedented global marketing success. For one thing, the series was written in English. For another, it became a best seller in the United States. And it is certainly a product with its share of charm. Yet none of this can really explain why the books became the biggest sellers in history, sought by everyone from English aristocrats with libraries built up over generations to families in the burgeoning Asian middle class purchasing a children’s book for the first time. Only the snowball effect characteristic of a mass phenomenon can adequately explain the worldwide lightning success of the Harry Potter books.
Theoretically, a book that becomes such a global phenomenon might be of any quality. It might even be a fine work of literature. More likely, it will leave much to be desired, for to spawn such frenzy, it must reach precisely those people who are not in the habit of reading. The sight of stacks upon stacks of best-selling books whose market value far outstrips their intrinsic value makes discriminating readers viscerally aware of the end of literature.
And yet it is unlikely that literature, broadly defined to include works of philosophy and religion, will ever come to an end. None of the historical changes that have weakened literature can possibly end it.
The advancement of science will never bring about the end of literature. It will only clearly define the realm beyond which science cannot provide answers and the realm that literature takes on as its proper task: the realm of meaning. Science may explain how humans came into being, but it has no answer to the slippery question of how humans should live. Only literature makes it possible to pose such questions in the first place. And if there is no answer, only literature can point to the impossibility of ever finding one.
Second, even if literature becomes just one of many inexpensive cultural goods, it will not come to an end. Most of us find it rather ridiculous that there are people who, after seeing a film, would eagerly pick up a “novelization” of the film. There are even people who, after seeing a film based on a novel, would pick up not the original but the novelization. Such an act seems like a profanation of literature, but it is just the opposite. It proves that however unsophisticated readers may be, there are still things they want to understand through written words, still pleasures they know they can gain no other way. Reading offers levels of understanding and dimensions of pleasure that other media simply cannot.
Finally, even amid accelerating mass consumerism, literature will not come to an end. Plenty of people are and will continue to be born with an ability to appreciate good art if given the opportunity, and the same holds true for literature. No matter how many dime-a-dozen books inundate the market, there will always be those people who want to read good literature—“the Happy Few” in the words of Stendhal, one of my favorite novelists.
Nonetheless, what is troubling, what seems ominous even, for those of us whose mother tongue is not English, is that we have entered the age of English. One or two hundred years from now, what will have become of literature in other languages? Entering the age of English means reentering the linguistic double structure of the universal and the local that covered different regions of Earth before the emergence of national languages. But this time, English will be the one and the only universal language—and will remain so for a long time.
THE INTERNET
This is perhaps a good juncture to bring the Internet into our discussion. We cannot talk about the reemergence of the linguistic double structure without taking into consideration the advent of this technology. With the rise of the Internet, the English language has further secured its status as the universal language par excellence. This is not to say that other languages will eventually disappear from the Internet. Far from it. When the U.S.-invented technology made its first appearance, only English circulated on the Web, yet soon all manner of languages joined in. Among them were some that had been denied their rightful place in the world—languages suppressed by the nation-state, languages overshadowed by neighboring powerful languages, even languages on the verge of extinction because they had no written form. The Internet made it possible for all those obscure languages to circulate, making people embrace the new medium as a tool for multilingualism. There is no contradiction between the dominance of English on the Internet and the diversification of languages that circulate on the Internet, for English and other languages circulate on different levels.
Let us imagine a library that allows us to access all existing texts in the world—a Library with a capital L. Since the founding of the ancient library of Alexandria in the third century B.C.E., humanity has long dreamed of a library that would contain all the books of the world—an ultimate Library to store all of human knowledge. Thanks to the Internet, that dream is now being realized. Tools like scanning, search engines, and cloud storage are enabling the Internet to whisk us to an age in which, at almost no cost we can instantly access any and all texts that have been turned into digitized data—in fact, all cultural heritage. All we need is a screen. We humans are an ungrateful lot who quickly attune ourselves to new technological worlds; thus the idea of the Library no longer fascinates us. Yet when it first came into being nearly ten years ago, it was received with much excitement. People were agog and eagerly discussed what it would be like to live in this new world, a paradise of knowledge, a utopia of information.
On May 14, 2006, the New York Times Magazine carried a long and much debated article called “Scan This Book!” dealing with the Library, which author Kevin Kelly, a founder of the computer magazine Wired, calls the “universal library.” While the second half of the article takes up copyright issues expected to emerge when the Library actually materializes, the first half is an enthusiastic depiction of how rapidly it is evolving and how wonderful it will be when completed.
According to Kelly, the human race took its first step toward establishing the Library in December 2004, when Google announced that it would collaborate with five principal libraries in the United States and Britain to digitize all the books in their collections, place them in a single database, and make them accessible from anywhere in the world. This project is officially called the Google Book Search Library Project, but here I will call it simply the Google Library Project. Two years later, at the time of the article’s publication, Stanford University Libraries had already scanned eight million books, using a state-of-the-art robot made in Switzerland, at the rate of a thousand pages per hour. Other universities and companies had begun similar projects. Carnegie Mellon University was shipping its books to China and India to have them scanned there; Amazon had already scanned several hundred thousand books. Today, millions of books throughout the world are being scanned and digitized without cease.
Kelly says the Library will eventually carry not just books but also newspapers and magazines; reproductions of visual arts such as paintings, sculptures, and photographs; not to mention films, music recordings, radio and television programs, commercials, and of course personal videos. Also included will be Web pages or blog posts that no longer appear online. The list of items that will enter the Library is limitless, and here is how Kelly portrays this information utopia:
From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have “published” at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages. All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks. Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow’s technology, it will all fit onto your iPod. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet—if it doesn’t plug directly into your brain with thin white cords.
Needless to say, all information will be interlinked. With the swipe of a finger, you will be able to link to everything ever written about “petabytes,” and then with another click, link to everything written on everything you encountered in the course of learning about petabytes. (The Internet informs me that a gigabyte is 230, a terabyte is 240, and a petabyte is 250.) Thus the chain of information expands infinitely—an idea already familiar to us.
Meanwhile, new technologies that make the Internet even more useful and interesting pop up almost daily; the Internet is now almost like a part of our natural environment. The same is true with the notion of the Library. It now seems only too logical that such a Library should exist. Yet there is one consequence of these developments that Kelly does not properly examine: how people’s way of accessing the Library will further affect our use of language. I will not discuss the controversial issue of intellectual property that he raises. Nor will I discuss how easy it has proved to be for some governments to abuse the power of the Internet by boldly blocking certain information or secretly invading people’s privacy. What I want to do is to refocus our attention on the question of written language.
Kelly is full of enthusiasm as he discusses the revolutionary nature of what he calls the universal library. Until now, those with easy access to a library of any scale have been privileged, often the residents of college towns or big cities. But no more: “[U]nlike the libraries of old, which were restricted to the elite, this library would be truly democratic, offering every book to every person.” Once the universal library is realized, those who benefit the most will be the underprivileged—Kelly calls them the “underbooked”—billions around the world who do not have access to books in their physical form. “It is these underbooked—students in Mali, scientists in Kazakhstan, elderly people in Peru—whose lives will be transformed when even the simplest unadorned version of the universal library is placed in their hands.” All this sounds quite wonderful. Yet a critical question has not been asked.
In what language, really, will these people, “students in Mali, scientists in Kazakhstan, elderly people in Peru,” access this universal library? In Kelly’s long article, there are only two places that touch on the question of language. And both of them simply mention that the universal library will contain “all languages.” Kelly’s goodwill toward the underbooked is admirable, but here again, I am astounded by the naïveté of someone highly intelligent whose mother tongue is English—someone who is not condemned to reflect on language.
To be sure, one day the Library will come to contain “the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time.” Yet when Kelly wrote these words, it is unlikely that he meant literally that we will all be able to access the “entire works of humankind” by reading “all languages.” More likely, he just assumed that the universal library would include all the languages that people, including the underbooked, could read, and stopped there.
Yes, no matter what your native tongue is, the Library/Internet allows you to see human pictorial, sculptural, and architectural accomplishments around the world: cave paintings in Altamira, statues in Angkor Wat, a mosque in the Alhambra. It also allows you to listen to musical accomplishments from Gregorian chant to the gamelan to Gershwin. People can all appreciate, to varying degrees, whatever appeals to their own visual and auditory senses. Language, however, is a different matter. Unless people can read it, written language is meaningless—a mere collection of dots and squiggles. Even if the universal library were to materialize tomorrow, people could use it to enter only the library of the particular language they can read. The Library will hold a great number of isolated libraries walled off by tall barriers of language. The towering exception will be the library in the English language—a library accessible not only to native speakers but also to a growing number of bilinguals for whom English is an “external language.” It is inevitable that the English library will function on a different level from all the rest.
The virtually unfathomable naïveté of those whose mother tongue is English is further revealed in Kelly’s reference to a similar project that is concurrently taking place in China. From the way Kelly describes the Chinese project, it seems as if the two great powers of the twenty-first century are engaged in a similar adventure. Yet their situations are quite different if you think twice about it. According to Kelly, a Chinese company called Superstar has already scanned all the books from two hundred libraries in China; this includes “1.3 million unique titles in China, which [Superstar] estimates is about half of all the books published in the Chinese language since 1949.” Chinese libraries may have quickly accumulated an impressive number of books from abroad in recent years, but given the country’s history, one could hardly expect these libraries to be comparable to those that participated in the Google Library Project from the outset: the libraries of Stanford, Harvard, Michigan, and Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library. Moreover, a preponderance of the books will be in Mandarin—the language with the greatest number of speakers, but not a universal language. As for “1.3 million unique titles” published in Mandarin since 1949—that is, since the establishment of Communist rule—what can we say? The Google Library Project will likely result in a library accessed by bilinguals from all over the world, including China. In contrast, it is all too evident that Superstar will become a library used by hardly anyone other than the Chinese—or scholars who specialize in China.
Moreover, in the age of the Internet, when it comes to making a library useful for those who seek knowledge, content is only half the story. The English-language library, which may already be the world’s richest, will grow still richer as an increasing number of nonnative speakers begin to write in English. But this utopia will also be a nightmare of flooding information. Science may one day extend the average human life expectancy to 120 years, but even so, human life is ephemeral. Given our limited time, we need to know what books are more worth reading than others. For seekers of knowledge, the question is urgent. The Library will therefore have to excel in its rating system, its ability to inform users which are the “texts to read.”
Unlike Latin, English has the double function of being at once a universal and a national language. As in libraries of other national languages, most items that enter the English-language library via the Internet probably will be no more than “chats.” Yet the English library, as the library of a universal language, will be accessed by seekers of knowledge from all over the world. Hence the imperative for it to come up with a rating system of the highest rigor, one of a completely different order from a mere popularity contest. Such a ranking system will have to renew itself continually; a ranking system of ranking systems will thus also have to emerge. English-language readers, whether bilinguals or English-only monoglots, will then be able to enjoy an unparalleled feast.
Wait, an idealist might say. Just because someone is a non-English-reading monoglot, that is no reason for him or her to be deprived of access to the English library with all its advantages; in fact, we can make the Internet truly open to the world: we can make it possible for all people to read all languages. The logical solution, our idealist will say, is machine translation of natural languages. The task has proved to be far more difficult than originally envisioned, but people’s efforts are slowly bearing fruit. Computer translation will no doubt become increasingly useful in the future, especially for translations between related languages. To think, however, that it will someday replace human translators is just as unrealistic as to think that the spread of audiovisual technology will someday make live musical performances passé.
Machine translation will always have severe limitations. When I consider the distance that separates English and Japanese, I can think of any number of reasons why asking a machine to bridge it would be like asking the sun to rise from the west. Let me just name two fundamental obstacles to machine translation of literature. First is the rhetorical function of language, a function that is essential to all natural languages and can be best summed up as “saying one thing and meaning another.” Whether a phrase is used rhetorically can be determined only by understanding the author’s intended meaning in context. “How can you translate with a machine?” an author might write. Is he asking a straightforward question? Or is he scoffing at the impossibility of machine translation? An automatic translation machine cannot be trusted to come up with a translation of that sentence in which the authorial intention is clear. Second, and perhaps even more important, a text that is translated by a machine simply cannot provide pleasure for the reader, and a text devoid of pleasure for the reader is simply not a real text. No one would actually read it.
However sophisticated machine translation becomes, it is unlikely that any translation device will hinder the increasing circulation of English as the universal language of the Internet. Added to this is the fact that English is the universal language of Internet technology itself: it is its meta language. People from all over the world inevitably find it easier to use English when communicating about the Internet.
FROM ACADEMIA TO LITERATURE
The dominance of English is most keenly felt in academia. There was no behind-the-scenes agreement among scholars of the world, nor was there any conspiracy on the part of native English speakers. Rather, the very nature of scholarship is gradually and inevitably unifying academic language into English. That various disciplines have become increasingly mathematicized in recent years is accelerating this shift even further.
Of the universities in the English-speaking world, top American universities today are in a class all their own. With its history as an immigrant nation, the United States has drawn talented scholars from the world over. Of the twenty universities reputed to be the world’s best, seventeen are in the United States; 70 percent of Nobel laureates have taught or are teaching in American universities. The spread of the Internet, however, will bring about a change in the opposite direction, for there will be less need for scholars to be physically concentrated in English-speaking regions. Already some American universities are building branch campuses overseas in non-English-speaking regions, while top universities in those regions are beginning to conduct some of their courses in English. Just as universities scattered around Europe once became centers of learning through Latin, so now universities scattered around the world are on their way to becoming centers of learning through English.
The shift to English is naturally taking place at a much faster pace in the natural sciences. Yet, given the nature of scholarship, this linguistic shift is inevitable in other fields as well, such as the social sciences and humanities—two fields in which the permeation of English is sometimes already visible. This change will entail unexpected consequences, making even “sacred texts” in academia circulate in English.
Going back to the difference between “textbook” and “text,” and the two kinds of “truths” existing in the world, Aristotle, as mentioned before, continues to be read today precisely because his writings are also texts that cannot be reduced to a textbook. To understand Aristotle, one must ultimately go back to his texts. In years to come, specialists in Greek philosophy will surely continue to read Aristotle in Greek. Yet as more scholars in social sciences and humanities begin to write in English, they will increasingly quote Aristotle in English from the translations they think are the best, making these translated texts circulate as new authoritative texts. The oldest extant text of the New Testament is in Greek, the universal language of the Mediterranean civilization at the time, but when the New Testament spread to western Europe, it did so as a Latin text. Similarly, Buddhist scriptures were originally handed down in Pali and Sanskrit, the universal languages of India at the time, but they spread in the Sinosphere as Chinese texts. Such is the power of the universal language, then and now. A growing number of canonical texts will begin to circulate in English in academia.
And there is no reason that what is already taking place in academia should not gradually affect how we look at our ultimate text—our literature. At some point in history, humans created national languages. With the arrival of an age that celebrated national languages, people began to look up to literature and see it as a conveyer of higher truths than scholarly knowledge. Today that age may be coming to an end. We who have learned to read and write in our own language are no longer what we were. We have become deeply attached to reading and writing in our own language. Nonetheless, when one’s own language circulates concurrently with a universal language in society, and when it is apparent that the latter is gaining force, an ever greater number of knowledge seekers will become bilinguals. In the process, how these bilinguals engage with their literature will inevitably be affected, which in turn will inevitably affect their literature—and their language. For the fall of language is first set in motion when these bilinguals unknowingly begin to read English and their own language on two different levels.
Let us bear in mind the essentially asymmetrical relationship between the act of reading and the act of writing. Writing in an “external language” requires an effort that most people would find too burdensome; most people have other business to attend to besides learning how to write in English. These bilinguals will continue to write e-mails and blogs in their own language. The fall of a language is set in motion when such people begin to take more seriously what they read in English. It is set in motion when, for example, they turn to English-language media to learn about critical international events—they may or may not be conscious of the Anglophone bias there—and use the media of their own country only to find out the results of home sports games or follow home celebrity gossip. It is set in motion when they hurry to order a heavyweight English-language book attracting media attention before it comes out in translation, while neglecting fine books written in their own language. (Watching American or British television dramas rather than their own is not unconnected to this process.) Finally, it is set in motion when, because they have gradually become accustomed to making light of what is written in their own language, bilinguals start taking their own country’s literature less seriously than literature written in English—especially the classics of English literature, which are evolving into the universal canon.
A vicious cycle then begins. The more palpable this trend becomes, the more non-English writers would feel that writing in their own language will not reach the readers they are aiming for. To make matters worse, this would be correspondingly truer for writers who take their writing seriously. Without a trusted readership, those writers would have less and less incentive to write in their own language, and there would be fewer and fewer texts worth reading in that language. Through the process of negative selection, writers who continue writing in their own language would be those whose books do not deserve to be called texts. They would write books that are read one day and forgotten the next. This cycle, once it began, could only gain in force. Not only bilinguals but true readers of literature—not mere consumers of books—would eventually cease to expect their own language to bear the intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic burdens it once did.
Literature in the broad sense of the term will never come to an end. Yet now in the age of English we face the possibility that, depending on how people treat their national languages, some countries’ literature may witness a gradual fall. What was once a national language may be reduced to nothing more than a local language; a national literature, to nothing more than a local literature that no discriminating person takes seriously.
SŌSEKI: WHAT IF HE WERE ALIVE TODAY?
A sad fate might be in store for someone like Natsume Sōseki in the age of English.
In the past, when Europe’s three principal national languages still circulated as universal languages, Japanese scholars in the humanities faced a huge linguistic challenge. Many felt pressured to learn all three, as if they themselves were European—this on top of reading Chinese, their legacy from the past. Some even went so far as to learn Greek and Latin in an attempt to capture the soul of Europe. And yet Japan’s immense physical and psychological distance from the West, combined with the “ideology of national language,” meant that hardly any of them attempted to write in Western languages. The state of academics that Sōseki portrayed in Sanshirō did not change in essence for nearly a hundred years, although the phenomenal accumulation of translations greatly lessened the need to read original texts quite as avidly. Forced to be content with translating and introducing new Western scholarship to their compatriots, Japanese scholars would cross the ocean once in their lifetime to visit the Western scholar whose works they had studied, have their photograph taken next to him all smiles, shake the great man’s hand, and return to Japan.
Now in the age of English, Japanese scholars are finally free from the pressure of modeling themselves after multilingual European scholars of the past. Now a single foreign language—English—will do. Even scholars in the humanities have finally begun to write in English, rare though the instances still may be. For the first time, this small number of scholars is making a transition from being mere translators on the sidelines to being real players in the game: what they write can finally enter the chain of the world’s “texts to read.” The transformation now taking place within Japanese academia is still largely ignored by the general public, but in time it will likely be too obvious to miss. Even when writing about Japan, the more important the subject, the more meaningful it will be to write in English.
This is not necessarily good news for either the Japanese language or the Japanese people.
History is full of irony. A century and a half ago, Japanese universities served as major institutions for translation and transformed the Japanese language into a suitable vehicle for the pursuit of scholarship. Today, in the age of English, universities are inviting back foreigners to give courses in English. In some instances, even Japanese professors are being assigned to give courses in English. Within the top echelons of academia, Japanese is slowly turning into a second-class language.
A new challenge, no less frustrating than the previous one, awaits Japanese scholars in the humanities. For the difficulty of writing in an “external language” is proportionate to how different that external language is to one’s mother tongue. It is no easy task for a Japanese scholar to write a “text” in English, one that conveys truths irreducible to and irreplaceable by “textbooks.”
What of the unusually gifted scholar? Let us reimagine Natsume Sōseki as our contemporary and try to envision the path he might follow if he were born today. First, let us establish his credentials as a passionate seeker of knowledge. Like Fukuzawa Yukichi—who hardly slept properly while learning Dutch, who grasped the importance of electricity as soon as he saw an entry on it in a Dutch book, who had the grit to start all over with English as soon as he saw the uselessness of Dutch—Sōseki was a knowledge seeker of the first rank. He truly wanted to know everything there was to know. His two-and-a-half-year stay in London gave him for the first time in his life unlimited access to newly published books in English, and hence to the most recent research in diverse fields. He concluded soon after his arrival that attending classes was a waste of time; he spent nearly all his money buying books, shut himself up in a rented room, and devoured them. It was during this time that his ideas for Theory of Literature were first taking shape. Believing that the treatise would be his magnum opus, he felt an obsessive need—a need bordering on madness—to be updated on every conceivable subject.
Here is how he explained his project to his father-in-law in a letter from London: “I will begin with the question of how one should perceive the world and then go on to the question of how one should interpret life, addressing its meaning, purpose, and dynamics. I will then discuss what enlightenment is and analyze the elements that constitute enlightenment. I will then discuss how these elements combine and develop to shape the evolution of literature.”1 To do so, he declared he would have to be versed in “philosophy, history, politics, psychology, biology, and theories of evolution.”
When translated into English, the grandiosity of what Sōseki is trying to achieve sounds a bit comical. But the original is written in one heavily Sinicized sentence, full of Chinese characters, befitting such grandiosity. Anyone who reads the lines cannot but be struck by Sōseki’s impassioned craving for encyclopedic knowledge. The thought of returning to Japan, becoming a language teacher, and not having “the leisure for thought or the time for reading” was repugnant to him, he goes on to say. He even “sometimes dreamed that he found ten thousand yen on the street and built a library and wrote a book in it” (emphasis added). When I read Sōseki’s letters and diaries from his London years, what comes to mind is an image of a man from the distant Orient sitting alone in a poorly heated room, on fire with aspiration, reading book after book after book. He was eventually called back to Japan because of the rumor among his fellow countrymen that excess studying had driven him over the edge.
Sōseki’s passion for knowledge was not limited to literature or the humanities. Again like Fukuzawa—and unlike most novelists—he had the makings of a fine scientist. He had a lifelong friendship with the distinguished physicist Terada Torahiko (1878–1935), who is said to have been the model for the physicist Nonomiya in Sanshirō. In fact, the scene in which Nonomiya talks about his experiments on the pressure of light in his cellar-like laboratory was something Sōseki invented after hearing Terada describe the activities of researchers on the frontiers of science. In his essay “Natsume Sōseki sensei no tsuioku” (Memories of Natsume Sōseki), Terada expresses amazement that Sōseki was able to grasp the essence on one hearing: “The novel portrays with remarkable reality an experiment that Sōseki had only heard about but never seen. I think this [ability] is quite rare among Japanese writers.”2 In other scenes in Sanshirō, we see scientists debate about melting quartz threads in the flame of an oxyhydrogen blowpipe, about the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) and the Russian physicist Pyotr Lebedev (1866–1912), and about how “the pressure of light is proportionate to the square of the radius, but gravity is proportionate to the cube of the radius, so the smaller an object is, the less gravitational pull and the stronger the effect of light-pressure on it.” These and scenes from other of his novels give us a glimpse of Sōseki’s command of scientific concepts and his potential as a scientist.
As a seeker of knowledge par excellence, as someone with a scientific bent, and as a man driven by ambition, both unworldly and worldly, what would Sōseki have done if he had been born today? Let us assume that as he grew up, he would again decide to become a scholar. His scientific curiosity, hand in hand with his ambition to make a name for himself, might well have led him to become a scientist. He would then be writing articles in English, the universal language of academia, especially science—articles filled with mathematical formulas. Today, the international prominence of Asians is well recognized in all fields of science, from mathematics and physics to biology, engineering, and medicine. Sōseki, too, might have come to be known as a world-class scientist. Yet suppose he was not content to write scientific articles, which, however brilliant, can ultimately be replaced with a “textbook”? Suppose he aspired to work in the field of humanities and write texts in English so that his writings might enter the world’s chain of “texts to read”? How would he fare?
Probably not very well, I’m afraid. Our fictional Sōseki would still be Japanese, an East Asian, and not Indian, for example. Thanks in large part to India’s colonial past, many Indian nationals and ethnic Indians are now recognized not only as fine scientists but also as fine writers in English. That Hindi, Bengali, and Urdu all belong to the Indo-European family of languages, as does English, may also have something to do with it. Yet as far as the world knows, East Asians—Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese—are a race of people who have brains only for mathematics. This is mainly because, to a degree that Westerners can scarcely imagine, writing a good text in English is a nearly impossible task for those whose mother tongue is so distant. Our Sōseki may attempt to write texts in English, but the chance of those texts entering the world’s chain of “texts to read” will be slight. If he decides to persevere in his attempt, he will probably spend much of his precious time wrestling with the English language; cursing his mother tongue, so distant from English; and envying those more fortunate. To be sure, the actual Sōseki was not a happy soul, but a Sōseki who struggled to write literary works in English would have been even less so.
And yet, however frustrating writing in English might be, would a man of Sōseki’s caliber today take to writing literature in Japanese? Would he do what Sōseki did over a hundred years ago—walk away from a prestigious teaching post to concentrate on writing novels in Japanese? What in the current Japanese literary scene would allure a modern Sōseki?
THE JAPANESE LITERARY SCENE TODAY
Today, if one goes into a Japanese bookstore and looks around, it is evident that Japanese as a written language is alive and well. Over seventy-five thousand new titles are published yearly, a robust number. A century and a half after Western languages first began to be translated into Japanese, concepts that were once foreign but critical in understanding and building a modern nation are now an integral part of the language, and the quality of Japanese that circulates in newspapers and magazines may be higher than ever before. The state of Japanese literature, however, is a different matter. In any mass consumer society, literature that circulates widely is seldom deserving of the name. It is the same in Japan—with one difference: the degree to which the status of literature itself has fallen in people’s minds. If the word “literature” still evokes some respect, it is only because it is associated with the works of earlier writers who made Japanese literature a “major literature.” In the past, Japanese people were avid readers of literature, including works in translation. Compared with that in other countries, the national reverence for literature perhaps bordered on the extreme. But now it is the national indifference to literature that borders on the extreme.
Today, Japanese seekers of knowledge still read books, but hardly any literature—not even the modern classics. The younger they are, the truer this is. They read books in Japanese when they want to know about alternative energy, say, or the latest discoveries in brain science, or what’s taking place in the world of Islam. They also read books in Japanese on issues like the aging country’s pension system and possible correlations between the sliding economy and the suicide rate. It’s as if knowledge seekers already sense that Japanese literature is turning into a literature of the local language—a local literature. Perhaps because they have lost interest in Japanese literature, their interest in literature of any kind has also waned, and even translations of Western literature, once so popular, languish unread. Translations do continue to be read, but the vast majority of them are nonfiction, and from English.
The demise of literature in Japan began sometime early in the 1970s, as members of the postwar generation (who, as we shall see in the next chapter, were steadily cut off from prewar society) first began writing. That is, the demise of Japanese literature began long before the unquestioned advent of the age of English and the steep decline of print media brought on by the Internet. Collected works of literature had already become a thing of the past, as had coterie magazines. Some of the major literary journals had also begun to disappear. Shinchō, the oldest and most prestigious of those journals, with a history of more than one hundred years, is one of the few still in circulation, but its numbers have plummeted from a peak of 100,000 immediately after the war to fewer than 10,000 now—many of which are sent out as complimentary copies.
A striking manifestation of this demise is the dwindling number and prestige of literary critics. In the past, someone like Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983) was all but deified, with photographs of his distinguished face appearing everywhere from literary journals to magazines to newspapers. He and his fellow critics not only wrote books and articles but gave public talks, alone or in pairs or threes, speaking of Japanese literature in the context of world literary trends. Yet for decades now, seekers of knowledge have had little interest in discussing Japanese literature. And who can blame them? Aside from genre fiction such as historical novels, detective stories, and science fiction, representative works of today’s Japanese literature often read like rehashes of American literature—ignoring not only the Japanese literary heritage but, more critically, the glaring fact that Japanese society and American society differ. One hundred years from now, readers of those works will have no idea what it was like to live in the current Heisei period (starting in 1989) of Japan. Though well received in the global market, such works contrast starkly with Sōseki’s writings, which have an uncanny ability to transport readers back to the Japan of the Meiji and Taishō periods. The idiosyncratic and inventive style of Sōseki’s texts makes them nearly impossible to translate, so they are little appreciated outside the country, although highly regarded by foreigners who read them in the original. Compared with Sōseki’s works, works of contemporary fiction tend to resemble global cultural goods, which, like Hollywood blockbuster films, do not require language—or translation—in the truest sense of the word. No wonder Japan’s best and brightest have turned their backs on literature.
Let me ask again: Today, would a man of Sōseki’s caliber even try to write novels in Japanese? I know this may sound ungracious to the many writers of Japanese fiction active today, myself included, but I strongly suspect that he would not. How literature suffered such a sharp loss of prestige in Japan, we will explore in the final chapter.