NINJŌ AND THE LATE-MEIJI NOVEL
Recontextualizing Sōseki’s Literary Project
Natsume Sōseki is widely thought of today as one of the greatest novelists of modern Japan, but it is less well known that throughout his writing career he was highly ambivalent, if not suspicious, of the novel and may not have even thought of himself as a novelist. An early masterpiece by Sōseki is the acclaimed Wagahai wa neko de aru (I Am a Cat, 1905–1906), which he labeled shaseibun (sketch prose).1 In his short essay “Shaseibun” (1907), a key reflection on his literary writing, Sōseki defined the difference between shaseibun and the novel in primarily emotional or affective terms. He argues that the novelist is strongly affected by, or drawn into, his or her characters and their emotions. The stance of the shaseibun author, on the contrary, is one of gentle and humorous detachment, like that of a parent toward a child. Even if the child cries, Sōseki remarks, a good parent does not cry with the child. Similarly, the shaseibun author observes and describes (or “sketches”) his or her figures and their emotions—their love, their tears, their greed—not coldly but with amused interest, unlike the novelist, who passionately sheds tears together with his or her characters.2 In short, Sōseki envisions the shaseibun genre in emotional terms as a type of prose writing that allows for more affective distance from the narrated world and its emotions than the novel.
Sōseki defines the novel in reference to ninjō, through its propensity not only to represent emotions (“tears”) but also to incite them in readers and even authors. This generic understanding must be contextualized in the literary and discursive space of the late Meiji postdating Tsubouchi Shōyō’s reform of fiction. The realist depiction (mosha) of emotions and customs (ninjō setai), key to Shōyō’s critical discourse, had become the major concept defining the novel as a genre. Concurrently, discussions beginning in the 1890s promoted a new understanding of literature (bungaku) as imaginative writing focused on the representation and expression of emotion, particularly love and desire. In his 1907 essay, Sōseki complicates this understanding by conceiving of shaseibun as a genre that belongs to literature as a type of writing representing and mediating emotion, but in a more detached fashion than the novel. In other words, he defines shaseibun as a genre less exposed to ninjō and its dangers. Sōseki’s interest in shaseibun in the first decade of the twentieth century idiosyncratically reconfigures the earlier awareness of ninjō as the problematic, if not licentious, core of the novel and literature more broadly.
This chapter has two goals. First, it surveys the discourses through which a focus on ninjō became constitutive of the Meiji novel and the concept of literature in the wake of Shōyō’s reform. I outline the increasingly sentimental aesthetic of the novel to which Sōseki refers by highlighting the genre’s tearful quality. I also trace the contemporaneous transformation of the literature concept. Critical discourses in the 1890s continued to denounce the novel for depicting frivolous love and failing to promote moral and social ideals, thus extending Shōyō’s suspicion about the novel’s realism. At the same time, an increasingly naturalized, new understanding of literature based on the categories of emotion and love (ren’ai) made the traditional anxieties about ninjō recede into the background. It was in reaction to these developments that the notions of shasei (sketching) and shaseibun, first promoted by Sōseki’s friend and poetic mentor Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), emerged around the turn of the century. Shaseibun presented an alternative type of prose that, instead of on love and desire often focused on the natural landscape as well as human beings and their emotions embedded in that landscape. This allowed for an affectively more detached narratorial stance that questioned the naturalized primacy of emotion in contemporary literary discourse.
The chapter then moves to the literary and critical writings by Sōseki that elaborated on shaseibun and its critique of the novel and literature. Sōseki’s interest in shaseibun was part of a broader theoretical and literary project that sought to redefine, with a strong awareness of the contemporary novel and in distinction from it, various genres of literature in terms of their capacity to represent, express, or relate to emotion. While previous scholarship has pointed to Sōseki’s resistance to the novel, his appropriation of the discourse on emotion in an attempt to experiment with alternative genres or literary modes in distinction from the novel and the newly naturalized regime of literature has been largely overlooked.3
My discussion focuses on Sōseki’s experimental work Kusamakura (The grass pillow, 1906) and on his critical writings, demonstrating that throughout these works he engaged in a persistent investigation of the ways in which literary writing in general and specific genres in particular mediate and produce emotion. Kusamakura is a text that critically highlights, in exemplary fashion, various genres—shaseibun, haiku, kanshi (Sinitic poetry), and even English verse—as literary media representing and conveying emotion. The work’s narration performs and investigates the emotionally loaded quality of these genres, probing and dramatizing their relative proximity to, but also their distance from, the novel and new literature concept. I also examine how a similar investigation lies at the heart of Sōseki’s critical writings, in particular his seminal treatise Bungakuron (Theory of literature, 1907) and essay “Sōsakuka no taido” (The attitude of the literary writer, 1908). These texts theorize literature in general as well as specific literary modes in terms of their capacity to represent and convey emotion, and they thus complement the Kusamakura project in important ways. In particular, I pay attention to the literary mode that Sōseki, in highly idiosyncratic fashion, defines as “idealist” or “romantic.” In Bungakuron, he subsumes under this label those writings that, unlike the novel, do not exclusively focus on the human element but instead juxtapose, as did haiku and Sinitic poetry or shaseibun prose, the human element with the landscape. This juxtaposition allows for a more indirect representation of emotions than that found in what he defines as the “realist method” (shajitsuhō) of the novel, with its exclusive focus on human content. At the same time, he argues that the emotional impact on the reader produced by idealist or romantic texts is stronger than that engendered by realist writings.
While Bungakuron meticulously defines the criteria that enhance or reduce the emotional impact of literary texts, Kusamakura consciously highlights, reflects, and objectifies the amount of emotion inherent in the various genres that it performs. Kusamakura itself constitutes a literary performance of Sōseki’s theoretical writings. At the same time, his analytical deconstruction of various literary modes and genres, including the novel, highlights their commonality as literature that represents emotion. Sōseki’s project was to define literature as a universal category that could potentially subsume all genres. It sought to deconstruct, but also to reintegrate, the new Meiji discourses on the novel and literature, thus attempting to come to terms with ninjō as literature’s increasingly naturalized core.
TOWARD THE TEARFUL NOVEL
As noted, Shōyō’s notion of the realist depiction of emotion and customs became a major concept in critical discussions surrounding the novel throughout the 1890s and beyond. The mainstream of the Japanese novel in the wake of Shōyō’s reform emerged as what literary historian Hiraoka Toshio has labeled “novels of human emotion and social customs” (ninjō setai shōsetsu), revolving around plots of love, often with the satirical depiction of manners.4 The most important and one of the earliest examples was Futabatei Shimei’s novel Ukigumo. Owing to its experimentation with genbun itchi (literally, unification of the spoken and written languages), the modern Japanese vernacular style, and its exploration of the hero’s delusional interiority, this novel has traditionally been hailed as the first Japanese masterwork of psychological realism.5 But influenced by Shōyō, Futabatei’s novel also critically highlighted the shortcomings of modern civilization in a plot of failed romance. As in Shōyō’s works, the realist depiction of ninjō and setai was here largely synonymous with what contemporary criticism qualified as “satire” (fūshi), the partly humorous depiction of not yet civilized, licentious gender relations and customs. Another early work in a satirical vein was written by Miyake Kaho (1868–1944), a young female writer, and titled Yabu no uguisu (Warbler in the Grove, 1887). This was the stated rewriting of Shōyō’s Tōsei shosei katagi with upper-class female students as protagonists, a literary experiment that critically engaged with the new enlightenment ideals surrounding marriage and love. Like Ukigumo, it also shed a satirical light on the depravity of superficially enlightened customs.6
The major upsurge in the production of novels of human emotion and social customs began in the late 1880s. The years 1889 and 1890 were particularly important, witnessing, among other works, the publication of Mori Ōgai’s Maihime (The Dancing Girl, 1890), which restaged, fully aware of Shōyō’s critical ideas, the bildungsroman’s contradictions.7 The work is about a young elite Japanese bureaucrat who, while studying in Berlin, starts a relationship with a local uneducated dancing girl, neglecting his studies and almost giving up his career in service of the nation. Although he ultimately leaves the pregnant woman behind and embraces a career in Japan, his decision produces resentment (urami) in him that keeps validating his passion. The resentment also motivates him to write a first-person memoir—the text of Maihime—that reflects on the unsolvable inner conflict between love and ambition. This conflict subsequently became a major indicator for Maihime’s modernity, cementing the text’s literary-historical fame, as it epitomized the emergence of the modern individual as the subject of passion resisting subjection to social utility and the nation. Love here did not refer so much anymore to licentious customs but instead signified the individual’s enlightened freedom challenging social and moral norms.8
Maihime’s lasting fame notwithstanding, the most immediately influential appropriation of Shōyō’s ideas was by Ozaki Kōyō (1867–1903) and the group of young authors around him known as the Ken’yūsha (Friends of the Inkstone Society).9 The most widely read novelist throughout the 1890s until his death in 1903, Kōyō cemented his fame with Ninin bikuni: Iro zange (Two nuns: A love confession, 1889). He started this short piece of historical fiction, centering on two beautiful young nuns who tearfully reminisce about their love for the same man, with a prefatory remark that boldly redirected Shōyō’s terms: “The main focus of this novel is on tears” (Kono shōsetsu wa namida o shugan to su).10 Kōyō’s reappropriation of Shōyō’s famous dictum (“the main focus of the novel is on human emotion”) epitomized the increasingly sentimental quality of the new realist novel in the 1890s. This type of fiction formed the new mainstream of novels of human emotions and social customs, from the largely Ken’yūsha-based Shincho hyakushu series (1889–1891) well beyond the turn of the century—what Ken Ito has aptly called “an age of melodrama.”11
The novel in the late nineteenth century thus underwent a subtle qualitative shift. Throughout the 1890s and later, the earlier enlightenment and civilizational anxieties about ninjō receded to the background. This was linked to the broader sociocultural climate marked by the consolidation of the Meiji nation-state, perceived by many as a major civilizational achievement. With the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution and the opening of the National Diet in 1890, Japan’s successive victories in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, and the revision of the unequal treaties, completely realized in the early twentieth century, the need to civilize and enlighten, to become on a par with the Western powers, was less acutely felt. Instead, other issues surfaced, especially “social problems” (shakai mondai) that Carol Gluck has identified as the central concern of ideological discourse in the late Meiji period—problems of the family, social class, or the capitalist divide of poverty and wealth that also increasingly dominated novels.12 The mode of representation for these problems in 1890s novels, often in conjunction with the representation of gender relations and love, tended to be sentimental or melodramatic, as in works by authors as famous as Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939), Higuchi Ichiyō, and Kunikida Doppo (1871–1908). The depiction of sentiment was often predicated on a social critique that in Doppo’s case was even close to socialist concerns.13 At the same time, ninjō became discussed in terms of a literature that incites both readers and novelists to tears.
Another aspect of the novel’s new focus on sentiment was its increasing commercialization, in response to the development of a mass readership associated with widely distributed new magazines and an ever-expanding newspaper industry. Kōyō’s cooperation with the Yomiuri shinbun was emblematic of this development. Two particularly successful examples of turn-of-the-century melodramatic novels published in newspapers were Tokutomi Roka’s Hototogisu (Cuckoo, 1898–1899) and Kōyō’s Konjiki yasha (Gold demon, 1897–1903).14 Hototogisu culminated in the tearful death of the heroine, forced by an unfeeling mother-in-law to divorce her loving husband because of her tuberculosis. Konjiki yasha sensationally weighed the lure of capital against the power of passion. In Kusamakura, Sōseki pointed to these two contemporary works as typical examples of the novel as a genre.15 It was melodramatic works of this kind, in addition to Western novels with which he was familiar as an English-literature scholar, that Sōseki had in mind when, in his 1907 essay on shaseibun, he characterized the novelist as passionately crying with his or her characters. His suspicion was thus directed against a novel of human emotion and social customs, whose tearful and sensational sentimentality, focused on love and social problems, had become the genre’s increasingly naturalized core.
TOWARD A LITERATURE OF EMOTION
Concurrently, the concept of bungaku underwent a transformation by which it came to refer to a mode of textuality expressing and representing emotion. Traditionally, bungaku had designated mainly the study of the Confucian classics and the highbrow literacy of Sinitic poetry and prose, genres ascribed social, moral, and political value.16 It was still from the perspective of such an understanding that contemporary discussions criticized the new novel in the 1890s. Various critics, even those who were rather open to Shōyō’s reform and the novel’s focus on ninjō, attacked the “smallness” of recent fiction and its frivolous love and tears, claiming the need for a “great” literature with moral and civilizational standards that would benefit the nation.17
For example, in an essay titled “Bungaku sekai no kinkyō” (The current state of the world of literature, 1890), an anonymous author bemoaned the fact that novelists depict the tears of beautiful women and “small love” (shōai) instead of the “great love for the nation and the people” and the tears of men of high purpose (shishi).18 In the same year, the important critic Kitamura Tōkoku (1868–1894) wrote the following:
The novels by Aeba Kōson [1855–1922] seem to satirically criticize customs in the world, but ultimately they are not better than the product of an inebriated brush.19 Kōyō skillfully depicts human emotion in an old-fashioned way, but his skillfulness ends there, and no other particular light is to be seen in his writings. How talented are the authors in the literary world! Their wondrous ability to understand the principle of love [aijō no tetsuri] and to write long novels [about it] truly deserves our admiration. It is true that there is nothing greater than love [airen] in the great universe, and its exploration is the novelist’s duty. But I also do not believe that the novelist’s duty simply ends there. There is no difference between the hero of literature and the hero of arms. If he does not have the courage to drink up the four oceans, the strength to have great ideas containing the whole universe, it will be hard for him to become a hero of letters [moji no eiyū]. Does fearfully scrutinizing the small details of the world and piling up beautifully embroidered words fulfill the duty of a man of letters?20
Tōkoku’s ambivalence is worth noting, as his essay subsumes the novel and its representation of love under the conceptual banner of bungaku while emphasizing the need to embrace “great ideas” worthy of a “hero of arms,” transcending love and the novel. Tōkoku agreed with Shōyō’s reform and recognized the importance of Tōsei shosei katagi as a new model for the novel depicting emotions and customs, but without the expression of great ideas, in his view largely absent in Shōyō’s texts, such literature would remain superficial and problematic. Iwamoto Yoshiharu, too, while not rejecting novels depicting emotion emphasized the need for ideals (risō), which he understood in the vein of the ideas propagated by earlier political fiction.21 Tōkoku’s and Iwamoto’s views were symptomatic of the literary criticism in the wake of Shōyō that acknowledged the realist depiction of ninjō in the novel while asserting the moral-didactic necessity of a literature of great ideas. These debates clearly replicated Shōyō’s own concern with the novel’s idealism that could not be fulfilled by the mere depiction of vulgar customs and licentious love. In 1898, critic Uchida Roan still urged novelists to turn their attention away from the world of love (ren’ai sekai) and instead write political fiction. Roan valued realism (shajitsu), but instead of love the type of novel he promoted should realistically and satirically depict the politics of the new Diet.22
Out of their awareness of the idealist limitations of the novel, critics like Iwamoto, Tokutomi Sohō, and Tōkoku devised the new concept of the “poet” (shijin) as a transcendent savior figure that could embrace the political and social ideals that contemporary fiction lacked. Sohō, whose rhetoric was informed by his Christian faith, defined the poet as a “purifier, preacher, teacher, comforter, and transformer of human society.”23 Tōkoku’s thought experiment of the poet was even more radical and derived from a new type of transcendent inner experience predicated on religion (Christianity) and love.24 Ironically, one of the major concepts that became associated with the poet and literature through Tōkoku was love (ren’ai). In his essay “Ensei shika to josei” (The disillusioned poet and women, 1892), published in Jogaku zasshi, Tōkoku famously exclaimed, “Love is the secret key to life. Only after there is love is there a human world; without love, human life would be flavorless.”25 In this essay with a deep impact on contemporary and later readers, Tōkoku postulates love as the totalizing, spiritual experience of the poet, opposed to the licentiousness depicted by “pseudonovelists.” Love is also the “citadel giving refuge to the defeated general of the world of ideas.”26 This points to the important continuum of Tōkoku’s social and political ideals, especially those of the People’s Rights Movement, in which he had been involved as a youth.27 However, Tōkoku also asserts the irreconcilability between love and society as epitomized by marriage, which “vulgarizes” love, producing the poet’s “disillusionment.” Unlike earlier enlightenment discussions linking civilized love to marriage, as well as the family and the nation, Tōkoku reverts to a notion of absolute passion irreducible to social norms. This spiritual transcendence of the poet as the subject of love radically widened Shōyō’s earlier notion of the realist depiction of ninjō in the novel. However, both together became greatly influential in redefining bungaku, now including chiefly poetry and the novel, as concerned with the representation of emotion and love.
Even before the publication of Tōkoku’s essay, however, and under the impact of Shōyō’s reform, a new discourse had started to emphasize the emotional and imaginative quality of literary writing. In the first literary history of Japan, published in 1890, the university graduates Mikami Sanji (1865–1939) and Takatsu Kuwasaburō (1864–1921) defined “pure literature” (junbungaku) as what “skillfully expresses thought, emotion, and imagination.”28 Their broader notion of bungaku comprised the humanities in general, including disciplines like history, philosophy, and political science.29 But they also specified that especially emotion (kanjō) and imagination (sōzō), rather than thought, befit literature in the narrower sense of pure literature—a term they use in reference mainly to poetry (shiika) and the novel (shōsetsu).30 Writing in 1890, Mikami and Takatsu were clearly aware of the recent boom in novels of emotion and customs following Shōyō’s reform.31 Unlike other contemporary discourses, they referred to emotion and imagination as positive qualities. But like Shōyō and other critics, they also highlighted the need for a didactic “great purpose” and “practical benefit” of literature in “elevating the spirit of the nation.”
However, it was only with Tōkoku’s discourse and its wider dissemination through the writings of the young authors associated with the romantic movement in the 1890s that the narrower concept of “pure literature,” defined primarily by emotion and love, became naturalized as literature tout court.32 This process was more or less completed by the time Fujioka Sakutarō (1870–1910) published his comprehensive history of Heian literature in 1905, shortly after Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War. This study presents an already established notion of literature predicated on emotion (jōshu) as love. Historically, Fujioka finds this notion exemplified in its purest form in works like The Tale of Genji. He privileges the Heian period as an “age of emotion” that valued love over moral righteousness and beauty over goodness, and he notes that Heian courtiers were able to live an “aesthetic life” (biteki seikatsu) grounded in emotion, nature, and the “satisfaction of instincts” (honnō no manzoku).33 The term “aesthetic life” had been coined by the young critic Takayama Chogyū (1871–1902), who appropriated Tōkoku’s notions of love and the poet in a more specifically turn-of-the-century context. Chogyū had been influenced by his eclectic readings of Nietzsche and fin de siècle European authors like Zola, Sudermann, and Ibsen, and he wrote essays that provocatively questioned contemporary civilization and its values, including morality and truth.34 He promoted instead the new formula of an aesthetic life based on the pursuit of beauty, nature, individuality, love, and the satisfaction of instincts, including sexual desire. He particularly highlighted love as “one of the most beautiful” aspects of the aesthetic life, and he saw the poet and artist (bijutsuka) as privileged subjects to realize it.35
Chogyū’s essays and their reception by literary historian Fujioka Sakutarō were part of the discursive production of the new literature concept in the wake of Shōyō and Tōkoku. Like Tōkoku and other romantic critics, Chogyū continued to emphasize the high-cultural significance of literature, the “sublime and grand calling” of the literary writer (bungakusha) and poet as critics of contemporary civilization and culture (he uses the German term Kulturkritiker). He also dismissed contemporary Japanese novelists for their inability to pursue high “ideals.”36 However, unlike earlier critics, Chogyū attacked the Japanese novel not for its depiction of small love but for its inability to engage in the critique of civilization and to embrace the aesthetic life grounded in love and the satisfaction of instincts. By the early twentieth century, emotion and love as the content of literature had become naturalized and were no longer perceived as licentious.
The most radical formulation of this new understanding was provided by the critical discourse and literary writings of so-called naturalism (shizenshugi) in the first decade of the twentieth century. Influenced, like Chogyū, by contemporary European authors like Zola and Nietzsche, naturalist critics equally promoted terms like nature (shizen) and instincts, but instead of emphasizing beauty and the aesthetic life, they highlighted the need to depict desire, even if ugly, dark, and animalistic.37 For example, in the afterword to his 1902 novel Jigoku no hana (The flowers of hell), the young Nagai Kafū (1879–1959), under the spell of Zolaism, expressed his determination to “vividly depict without hesitation the multiple dark facets of desire [jōyoku], aggression, and sexual violence resulting from the [figures’] milieu and ancestral heredity.”38 Other critics and writers hailed the power of nature and sexual instincts while relativizing socioethical norms. In his acclaimed 1902 novel Jūemon no saigo (The End of Jūemon), which cemented his fame as a naturalist author, Tayama Katai (1871–1930) celebrated the abnormal sexuality and the criminal, antisocial violence of his protagonist as manifestations of the “greatness of nature,” thus realizing in a slightly altered sense Chogyū’s earlier call for literature as a critique of civilization. In distinction from the earlier 1890s and turn-of-the-century sentimental novels of human emotion and social customs, naturalist novels and criticism brought back an explicit focus on sexual passion reminiscent of Shōyō’s discourse. But, whereas for Shōyō and other critics such a focus recalled the ninjōbon’s problematic licentiousness, naturalist criticism came to literally naturalize it as an artistic program.
The naturalization of emotion—tearful sentiment, spiritual love, or dark sexualized passion—as the novel’s and literature’s new core was the context for the emergence of shasei and shaseibun. Shaseibun has often been discussed in terms of its promotion of realism and the genbun itchi style, but it also presented a literary mode of mediating emotion in a way that radically differed from the novel and what contemporary discourses postulated about literature.39 In his essay “Jojibun” (On narrative description, 1900), for instance, Masaoka Shiki defined the object of shasei as either natural landscape (keshiki) or human affairs (jinji).40 He argued that the lively narrative description or realist depiction (mosha or shajitsu)—that is, the “sketching”—of natural objects and human beings, when freed from the conventions of traditional poetic diction, would have great power to move the reader. This type of narrative prose did not revolve around plots of ninjō but instead highlighted the visuality of narrative description, which treated human beings more distantly like a landscape or, as Shiki emphasized, part of a “painting” (kaiga) of a landscape.41 Similarly, in Kunikida Doppo’s “Wasureenu hitobito” (“Those Unforgettable People,” 1898), the narrator predicates his sketches (suketchi) of nature on a stance that distances the human beings encountered in the landscape. His “unforgettable people” are ironically those who lack individualized features and do not affect him emotionally.
While appropriating loaded terms like “nature” and “realist depiction,” shaseibun discourse gave them a radically different significance. Instead of using shajitsu and mosha in reference to ninjō and setai, Shiki applied these terms to the depiction of natural objects or human beings as embedded in the landscape. His notion of “nature” (tennen) also did not refer to instincts or sexual desire. He instead realigned it with traditional poetic discourse, where the categories of landscape (kei) and emotion (jō) had been interlocked.42 This reflected the aesthetics of premodern poetic genres—Sinitic poetry, waka, and haiku—that, rather than directly expressing emotions, often represented them through the mediation of natural imagery. This aesthetics allowed for a more indirect and subdued representation of emotions than in the novel. In classical waka, for instance, love (koi) was, together with the four seasons, a major topic of poetic composition, expressed mostly in conjunction with natural tropes.43 Haiku, while less focused on love, as a rule juxtaposed human topics with seasonal tropes, often in a humorous manner.44 Sinitic landscape poetry differed from both waka and haiku by more strongly relying on an allegorical reading mode that saw in natural metaphors the expression of the poet’s moral and political feelings.
Both Shiki and Sōseki were highly proficient in haiku and Sinitic poetry (Shiki also in waka), and these genres’ poetic sensibility lay at the heart of their notion of shasei. Shiki, however, did not explicitly reflect on the distinction between shaseibun and the novel or the newly naturalized concept of literature. It was Sōseki who, in his essay “Shaseibun,” first theorized the sketcher’s stance toward the sketched human beings as emotionally more detached than the stance of the novelist, thus reappropriating the discourse on emotion that had hitherto been connected to the novel and literature. Sōseki had been experimenting with shaseibun prose from the turn of the century, and he cemented his fame as a literary author with the novel-length serialization of Wagahai wa neko de aru starting in 1905.45 His shaseibun texts indeed focused on what Shiki called human affairs, although less on landscape, in an affectively more detached mode mediated by humor, carefully distancing, even marginalizing, the theme of love that had been central to the novel.46 This experimentation was part of a broader critical investigation of literature through the lens of emotion. Kusamakura participated in this investigation while bringing back to the foreground, unlike Sōseki’s other early works, Shiki’s discourse on shaseibun that privileged landscape and nature, as well as painting and poetry. But Kusamakura ironically performed and parodied this discourse, thus investigating its critical parameters.
THE PERFORMANCE OF LITERATURE IN KUSAMAKURA
Kusamakura constitutes a performance of shaseibun prose that highlights constitutive elements of the genre.47 The narrator is an unnamed young male painter in the Western style and a poet.48 Traveling through the natural landscape of Kyushu, his stated goal is to not be strongly affected by the people and human affairs (jinji) that he encounters during his journey, thus seeking to realize the emotionally detached state that Sōseki envisioned for the shaseibun author.
An artist traveling through nature in the pursuit of beauty, an “aesthetic life” of sorts, Sōseki’s narrator parodically reenacts postromantic discourse. Ironically, however, what he seeks is not love and the satisfaction of instincts but detachment. He aims to experience human affairs or human emotion without becoming directly involved with them and by only sketching them in his landscape paintings, in his poetry, and in his shaseibun prose; he even goes so far as to specify that he will observe a distance of three feet between himself and the figures in his painting. His assumption is that this distant way of approaching the world will enable him to overcome the “suffering” (kurushimi) inherent in deep involvement with human affairs and that his encounter with the world will thus be rendered “charming” (omoshiroi). He states, “When I walk through the mountains and approach the objects of the natural landscape [shizen no keibutsu], all that I see and hear is charming. It is merely charming, and no pain whatsoever arises.… But why is it that there is no pain involved? This is because I am viewing the landscape just as I would see the scroll of a painting or read a volume of poetry.”49 A bit later, he also claims, “I intend to treat the human beings that I will encounter—farmers, village people, the clerks at the village office, old men, and old women—without exception as accessory figures in the big landscape of nature.… It is my design to observe the people whom I will now encounter at my leisure from a high vantage point so that there will be no electric current of human emotion [ninjō no denki] between us.”50
Sōseki’s presentation in Kusamakura of the narrator’s discourse and the shaseibun genre is both performative and ironic, constantly testing the limits of his postulated narratorial distance toward human affairs and the possibility of its being breached. At the beginning, for instance, the narrator stumbles over a stone on his path, which serves as a physical reminder that the landscape his discourse sought to reduce to the status of aesthetic artifact is capable of impacting him in painful ways.51 The stone, however, is only a metaphorical anticipation of the alluring and mysterious woman Nami, who jeopardizes the young man’s emotional detachment after he encounters her at the hot spring resort Nakoi. Nami, in other words, threatens to drag him into the suffering of love and desire. Her presence in Kusamakura serves a highly self-reflexive and critical purpose. Through his narrator’s increasing attraction to Nami, Sōseki investigates the subtle line of demarcation between shaseibun prose and the novel. Were the narrator’s affective distance to break down—were he to enter a love relationship with Nami and suffer—Kusamakura’s shaseibun prose would instantaneously transform into the plot of a novel, staging tearful sentiments or sexual passion. Although constantly playing with the possibility of such a turn, Sōseki consciously avoids it and instead continues to probe the ambiguous line between detachment and affective involvement, or shaseibun and the novel.
In a similar fashion, the narrator also investigates other genres as literary forms that might convey his attraction to Nami in a more detached fashion than is possible via the plot of a novel. He explores genres such as haiku, English verse, and Sinitic poetry as media of expression for precisely the type of emotion that had been most strongly associated with the novel and literature: male-female love. His exploration of haiku is particularly interesting, as it introduces the notion of objectivity, a central idea in Kusamakura with regard to the performance of various literary genres as emotionally detached modes of expression. The narrator asserts that any strong feeling, for instance one’s reaction to an event initially experienced as frightening, can be turned into poetry or painting and thus placed at an emotional distance if it is viewed “objectively” (kyakkanteki). If thus severed from the poet’s immediate experience, strong feelings such as heartbreak (shitsuren) can be transformed into an appropriate topic for painting and poetry because the initial suffering inherent in the feeling has been excised, with only its “gentle” aspect and less-violent emotions such as compassion and sorrow remaining.52
For example, on the night of his arrival at the Nakoi hot spring resort, Kusamakura’s narrator confronts the following scene: Nami, to tease him, hides in a dark corner of the garden and uncannily intonates a waka allegedly composed by a madwoman who once inhabited the place.53 Under the influence of Nami’s “frightening” performance, the narrator composes the following haiku poems:
春の夜の雲に濡らすや洗ひ髪
Haru no yo no / kumo ni nurasu ya / araigami
(The spring night’s clouds dampen the [woman’s] freshly washed [and untied] hair!)
春や今宵歌つかまつる御姿
Haru ya koyoi / uta tsukamatsuru / onsugata
(This spring night [I see] an elegant form humbly offering a poem [to me].)54
In these poems, the narrator’s feelings triggered by Nami—his attraction and his fright—are encapsulated in expressions like “freshly washed hair” and “an elegant form.” Such images point to the aspect of human affairs, or the danger of emotional entanglement, in the poems. At the same time, these faintly eroticized expressions are set alongside natural imagery such as the “clouds,” which, through elegant poetic superimposition, seem to fuse with and dampen the woman’s hair. The objectification of feeling through poetry, as theorized by Kusamakura’s narrator, consists of this merger of human affairs (and emotions) with specific objects in the landscape, which also reduces the intensity inherent in emotion and renders it gentle and even elegant. However, although poetry thus produces detachment, the narrator’s discourse on objectivity and his poetic compositions simultaneously highlight haiku composition as a medium that carries erotic attraction.
Sōseki’s narrator even amplifies the dynamic of self-reflexive emotional objectification by quoting English poetic intertexts. A good example is George Meredith’s (1828–1909) poem “Sadder than is the moon’s lost light,” which first appeared in Meredith’s novel The Shaving of Shagpat: An Arabian Entertainment (1856). In Kusamakura, the first two stanzas of the poem are cited in the English original after a scene in which the narrator has unexpectedly encountered Nami’s seductive gaze. After a brief moment of intense silent communication and Nami’s sudden withdrawal from the scene, the narrator reflects in the following manner:
Suddenly what came to my mind was the following poem:
Sadder than is the moon’s lost light,
Lost ere the kindling of dawn,
To travellers journeying on,
The shutting of thy fair face from my sight.
If I were in love [kesō shite] with the woman [Nami] wearing the gingko-leaf hairstyle [ichōgaeshi] and wished to meet her at all costs and if, shortly before being able to meet her, I had to part from her with this one glance that, so overwhelmingly unexpected, would fill me with joy and regret, I think I would compose exactly such a poem. And I would probably also add these two lines [from the same poem]:
Might I look on thee in death,
With bliss I would yield my breath.
Luckily, I have already left behind me the realm of what is called longing or love [koi to ka ai to ka iu kyōgai], and even if I wished to feel this kind of suffering I could not. But the poetic flavor [shishu] of the incident that just occurred now for a brief moment is very well captured in these five or six lines. Even without such a painful longing between me and the woman with the gingko-leaf hairstyle, it would still be charming to match our current relationship to the content of this poem. Or it would also be pleasing to interpret the meaning of this poem with our case as an illustration.55
In this scene, a dynamic of objectification unfolds, similar to the one that was possible with the haiku poetry previously. Strong feelings that could potentially develop between the narrator and Nami are transposed into and contained within the poem so that the real relationship remains playful and “charming.” Whereas the haiku objectified their composer’s feelings by reducing their intensity and rendering them gentle, Meredith’s poem introduces a strongly subjective first-person voice, absent in the haiku, that intensifies the feeling of longing not only by dramatically staging a determination to die but also by producing an intense dialogue between the male speaker and his imagined female interlocutor.
The narrator’s reflections in this scene resonate with Sōseki’s “theory of literary distance” (kankakuron) as developed in Bungakuron, his treatise on literature that I take up in detail in the next section. There, he asserts that in “lyrical poetry” (jojōshi) the main function is to “sing feelings” (jō o utau), and the speaker should be the “I” of the poet. Sōseki states,
If one wishes to sing one’s feelings in poignant fashion, then the one who sings must be oneself. This is because there is [no speaker] who would possess feelings [jōsho] as poignant as one’s own. For this reason, lyrical poetry starts with “I” [yo] and ends with “I.” “I” should be the composer of the poem, and if this cannot be, it should be the poem’s protagonist, with whom the composer has become one. This is why, with a lyrical poem, we are always able to enjoy the flavor of poetry with the least amount of distance possible.56
A first-person voice, as in Meredith’s poem, is the most authentic medium for conveying a subjective stance and for reducing the distance between the reader and the text.
Moreover, in Bungakuron, Sōseki posits literary “illusion” (genwaku) as the power that enables a text to impact the reader, or, in other words, the means by which the reader becomes subjectively and emotionally involved with the text. Because of the strongly subjective first-person voice in Meredith’s poem, the literary illusion it produces is also strong and lets poetry come to the fore as a privileged medium for producing emotional immediacy. However, Sōseki’s narrator in the scene ironically highlights the emotionally loaded nature of the medium of poetic expression only to again objectify and neutralize it through his critical reflections. This ambiguous oscillation between subjective expression and affective noninvolvement is even more complex with regard to the Sinitic poems quoted in Kusamakura. Before examining these, however, a discussion of Sōseki’s literary theory is in order.
ROMANTICISM VERSUS REALISM: MEASURING FEELING AS THEORY OF LITERATURE
The attempt of Kusamakura’s narrator to objectify—to self-consciously highlight and measure—the “electric current of human emotion” in the poems he cites is an inherently theoretical endeavor. A different, albeit comparable, endeavor of emotional objectification occurs in Sōseki’s critical writings, which investigate the amount of emotion produced by literature and various literary genres. In Bungakuron, Sōseki broadly defines literature as the product of the association between specific content-related “ideas,” which he labels with a capital F (probably for “focus”), and “emotions” (jōsho), which he labels with a lowercase f (probably for “feeling”).57 The stronger the volume of feeling (jōsho no bunryō), or f, that is associated with an idea (or multiple ideas) in a literary text or genre, Sōseki argues, the more powerful the literary “illusion”—the emotional impact of a text or genre on the reader—becomes. More important, the stronger the volume of feeling in a text, the more literary (bungakuteki) the text becomes. In short, Sōseki defines literariness by the volume of emotion that a text is able to produce and to convey, as literary illusion, to its readers. As scholars have pointed out, Sōseki’s understanding of the quantification of emotion in Bungakuron was indebted to his reception of contemporary scientific and psychological models, especially as found in the work of American psychologist William James (1842–1910).58 At the same time, his theoretical project must be seen as an idiosyncratic reinvestigation of the newly naturalized concept of literature as an emotionalized textual practice.
An important objective of Bungakuron is to determine the “means” (shudan) by which literary illusion is produced. Sōseki offers a detailed discussion of these means in the fourth section of his treatise, “Bungakuteki naiyō no sōgo kankei” (The interrelations between literary contents). His fundamental argument is that in most cases literary illusion and the emotional impact (f) of a text increase if two types of content (F)—most often a human and natural content—are combined in the text. The various possible combinatory modes, or “interrelations,” between types of literary content are the means by which illusion is produced. In contrast, both emotions (f) and literary illusion are reduced if only one content type—for instance, human affairs—is the text’s focus. This is the case in what Sōseki defines as the “realist method” (shajitsuhō), which is the only means he posits that does not rely on a combination of two types of literary content but focuses only on one.59 Although Bungakuron does not explicitly state this, it is clear that genres combining human and natural content include shaseibun and traditional poetry (haiku, waka, and Sinitic poems), whereas the only genre that exclusively focuses on human affairs is the novel.
Nature (shizen) and human affairs constitute independent categories of literary content (bungakuteki naiyō) in Bungakuron. Sōseki differentiates among four different categories of literary content: “sensory F” (kankaku F), “human F” (jinji F), “supernatural F” (chōshizen F), and “intellectual F” (chishiki F). However, he downplays the ability of the latter two categories to produce a strong sense of illusion in the reader; only the first two types of content are, in general, able to produce illusion. Sōseki specifies, moreover, that the material of sensory F consists of the “natural world” (shizenkai), while the material of human F consists of the “human drama mirroring good and evil, joy, anger, sadness, and delight.”60
The theoretical framework of Bungakuron thus resonates with the issues that lie at the core of Sōseki’s essay “Shaseibun” and the literary project of Kusamakura. While the novelist is deeply drawn into human F, or the drama of ninjō, the shaseibun narrator seeks to approach this drama more distantly, often through the mediation of the natural world. In Bungakuron, Sōseki argues that a literary means that combines two types of literary content, human and natural, increases literary illusion and makes the emotional impact of a text on the reader stronger. What he intends to convey, however, is not the emotional involvement of tears—the kind postulated for the novelist in the essay “Shaseibun.” In Bungakuron, Sōseki defines what he understands by illusion as “taste” (shumi), “poetic flavor” (shishu), or “poetic mood” (shikyō). Genres that, like traditional poetry, combine both natural and human content produce stronger poetic flavor and, to Sōseki, have a stronger emotional impact on the reader and therefore are more literary. At the same time, these genres allow for more detachment from the “drama” of ninjō than those, particularly the novel, that focus exclusively on the human element.61
A particularly interesting literary means that Sōseki discusses is the “harmonizing method” (chōwahō), where two different types of content are juxtaposed and therefore “harmonized” in a single text. The example that he cites to illustrate this technique is the following couplet excerpted from Bai Juyi’s (772–846) “Song of Everlasting Sorrow” (Changhenge), composed in 806:
玉容寂寞涙瀾干 |
Her [Yang Guifei’s] beautiful face looked desolate, and her tears were streaming down, |
梨花一枝春帯雨 |
the bough of a pear tree in flower bearing the rain in spring.62 |
Sōseki argues that the power of this couplet lies in the visual juxtaposition of the human image of the beautiful palace lady in tears with the natural imagery of a blooming tree under the spring rain. The aesthetic effect is heightened because the two “materials,” the human and the natural, are mutually amplified by their copresence in the text.63
Sōseki also argues that the harmonizing technique is particularly representative of the Japanese (or Eastern) poetic tradition, while it is rare in English literature:
When human material [jinjiteki zairyō] is matched with sensory material [kankakuteki zairyō] or when sensory material is juxtaposed to human material, they naturally fuse in the text, prevent monotony, and make the text livelier. This fusion also produces an emotion that is much superior to the one that these materials would have produced separately.… A scholar of Chinese letters [kangakusha], in an evaluation of a poem, once remarked that “both emotion and landscape are exquisitely executed,” meaning that he was praising the fact that the harmonization of human materials with sensory ones in the poem was particularly successful. Japanese people have always had an innate love for nature, and since ancient times poetry and literary prose [shiika bibun] could not be composed without this harmonization. As the background for human affairs, there always had to be nature, and the foreground for nature necessarily consisted of human affairs. People in the West do not take a particularly strong delight in the natural landscape, and the fact that they do not consider this harmonization to be a necessary ingredient for their literary compositions is indeed noteworthy for somebody from the East.64
The emotional effect that Sōseki associates with the Japanese and East Asian literary tradition is, as indicated, crystallized in expressions like “poetic flavor” and “poetic mood.” For this reason, he criticizes Samuel Richardson’s (1689–1761) novels for treating only a single kind of material—the human one—and for thus being less poetic. He characterizes the emotional impact on readers produced by “Eastern” poetry as stronger than that produced by Richardson’s novels.
At the end of his discussion of the different means by which literary illusion is produced, Sōseki subsumes all combinatory methods—the ones bringing together different types of literary content in a text—as belonging to what he calls the idealist school (risō-ha) or romantic school (roman-ha). He opposes these schools to the realist school (shajitsu-ha), or realist method, which uses only one type of literary material (F) with only one type of literary emotion (f) attached to it. In a numeric chart, Sōseki shows that, owing to the amplificatory effect brought about by the combination of different types of content and their emotions, the volume of feeling produced by romantic (or idealist) texts is necessarily higher than that produced by realist texts.65 As noted, although Sōseki does not explicitly relate the romantic or idealist school to a specific genre, it is clear from the majority of the cited examples that romanticism is associated with poetry, both English and Japanese. The realist school, in contrast, is the representational regime most suited to the aesthetic world of the novel. Sōseki by no means disqualifies realism, and he expresses a strong appreciation for the novel and individual novelists, including Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë. Moreover, he meticulously lists the respective strengths and weaknesses inherent in both literary schools.66 In Bungakuron, however, literariness—the ability of a text to produce illusion—is more strongly associated with romanticism (or idealism) and the language of poetry. Although the text cites mostly English literary sources, the section “Interrelation between Literary Contents,” which discusses the means that produce illusion, points back to the traditional aesthetic format of haiku, Sinitic poetry, and waka, which harmonizes human “foregrounds” with natural “backgrounds” in the same poetic text. Moreover, Sōseki’s terminology here recalls earlier Meiji discourse, where the realist depiction of licentious emotions in the novel—that is, human affairs—was criticized for its lack of idealism. But he also deftly blurs this discourse and its categories by reducing them to a purely formalist opposition of literary methods producing illusion in the reader.
Approaching romanticism from a slightly different angle is “Sōsakuka no taido,” a lengthy theoretical essay that is particularly relevant for understanding the way Sinitic poetry is explored as a medium of emotional expression in Kusamakura.67 In “Sōsakuka no taido,” Sōseki differentiates between two fundamental attitudes of the literary writer that subtly mirror those of the novelist and shaseibun author described in the essay “Shaseibun.” One is what he calls the attitude of the merchant or scientist, but it is clear that this is an indirect reference to the novelist. This stance entails a desire to perceive and describe the world directly as it is, using sensuous perception or (linguistic) concepts. It does not aim to “savor” or “enjoy” (tanoshimu) the world but merely to seek knowledge or material gain. The second is what Sōseki calls the attitude of the artist, a clear reference to both the poet and the shaseibun author.68 This stance always strives for enjoyment. Moreover, it never seeks to perceive or describe things in the world directly but always through the mediation of something else, using, for example, similes, metaphors, and symbols—literary figures that juxtapose and substitute one type of “idea” or “content” (to use Bungakuron’s terminology) with another. Sōseki considers this attitude of the artist characteristic of romanticism (romanshugi). Insofar as it combines different types of literary contents (for instance, human and natural) through the use of similes, metaphors, and symbols, this attitude resonates with Sōseki’s definition of the romantic or idealist school in Bungakuron.69
Especially noteworthy in connection with the romantic attitude is the problem of subjective expression or, more precisely, the question of how a subject’s emotions can be conveyed and expressed by representing them with different content. In his discussion of substitution through symbols (shōchō), for Sōseki the most complex form of romantic expression, he introduces the concept of “mood” (kibun). He defines mood as a subjective content (shukan no naiyō) originally linked to and produced by specific objects or situations in the exterior “world dissociated from the self” (higa no sekai). These original objects or situations, however, are often irretrievably lost, and as the mood becomes more complex the “I” has more difficulty relating it to corresponding objects in the exterior world. This then leads to a fundamental separation between the mood and the possibility of its objective representation, a gap that triggers what Sōseki defines, in English, as an “infinite longing”—or, in Japanese, mugen no shōkei—for this lost state of representation. Out of this situation, the need for symbolic expression arises.
Sōseki provides the following reflection on the complex interrelation between the subjectivity of the mood and its objective representation through symbols:
It happens that you suffer and would like to give expression to your suffering, but this is just not possible. If you leave it this way, then that of course is it, but if you wanted to give at least one-tenth of it expression, be it only incompletely, then you would have to have recourse to symbols. You do not express all ten parts of it—“do not express” would be the wrong wording: you cannot express them—and so inevitably you leave it at one-tenth. Of course, if you only wanted to express your mood as mood, then you could merely say, “I am very sad” or “I am a bit happy,” and there would not be any need to discuss the possibility or impossibility of expressing it fully. However, if you attempted to find an object for this somehow deep, broad, and complicated mood in the objective world dissociated from the self, then you would have to substitute the ten parts of your mood with a form [keisō] corresponding to one-tenth of it; the remaining nine parts are alluded to by this symbol. But since this is difficult to do even for the person who has the mood, it is even more difficult for somebody else to understand. It sometimes happens that you hear only one part and then know all ten parts of it, but this works only if you are someone who can see one part and then feel the ten parts together. And even if you can see one-tenth and then feel ten-tenths, this does not necessarily mean that you feel exactly the same as the one who produced the expression. What you use as symbols may belong to the world dissociated from the self, but what these hint at is the mood of the self. It is my mood, and to say it very precisely, it is not the mood of anybody else and of course not the mood of an outside object.70
The “forms” of the “world dissociated from the self” through which the mood of the first-person subject (“my mood”) is, even if only incompletely, expressed are, most often, natural objects of the landscape. Nature is the privileged medium through which feelings can gain material form in poetic language.
The specific emotional quality of the mood, however, remains unspecified and thus a potentially overdetermined receptacle for different emotional types. In “Sōsakuka no taido,” Sōseki differentiates among types of emotion that an artist may seek to express—for instance, the sentiments (jōsō) associated with the beautiful (bi), the good (zen), and the sublime (sō). The good, or the feeling related to moral judgments, also often subsumes the sentiments of love (ai) and hope (kibō).71 At the same time, the fact that this romantic mood is nearly incommensurable with communication and representation—that its content remains largely indistinct—points to the extreme degree of emotional and subjective detachment that is inherent in symbolic expression. It is precisely this type of detachment that comes to the fore in Kusamakura’s Sinitic poems.
KUSAMAKURA’S SINITIC POETRY
In Kusamakura, Sōseki’s first-person narrator similarly analyzes his subjective “mood” (kokoromochi or mūdo) prior to composing a Sinitic poem. He describes his mood as “hard to grasp” and difficult to represent through either painting or poetry. He states that this subjective “feeling” (waga kanji) has not come to him from the exterior world and is also not reducible to a specific object in the landscape. Yet he is aware that, in order to express and represent this mood, he must symbolically substitute it with a symbol in the form of natural imagery. He defines this challenge in the following way: “The only problem is what kind of landscape and emotion [keijō] to bring into my poem to copy [utsusu] this broad and somehow indistinct inner state.”72 And although this state is highly subjective and individual—the narrator repeatedly points out that he is seeking the representation of only his “own mood” (jiko no kokoromochi)—it remains “abstract” (chūshōteki) and detached. Out of this mood, the following poem emerges:
青春二三月 |
In the second and third month of spring |
愁随芳草長 |
my melancholy grows along with the fragrant grasses. |
閑花落空庭 |
The quietly blooming flowers have fallen in the empty courtyard, |
素琴横虚堂 |
an undecorated zither is lying in the deserted hall. |
蠨蛸掛不動 |
A spider is hanging motionless |
篆煙繞竹梁 |
and incense smoke curling around the bamboo beams. |
独坐無隻語 |
I sit alone, not saying a single word— |
方寸認微光 |
in my heart, I perceive a small ray of light. |
人間徒多事 |
The world of men is full of useless matters, |
此境孰可忘 |
but who could ever forget this state [I am in right now]? |
会得一日静 |
Having by chance earned this one day of peace, |
正知百年忙 |
I now know exactly what a hundred years of restlessness mean. |
遐懐寄何処 |
Where is it that I could direct my deep feelings? |
緬邈白雲郷 |
I will send them far away to the realm of the white clouds.73 |
This poem is romantic or idealist, following Sōseki’s definition in Bungakuron, in that it couples human affairs with natural phenomena so that the emotions relate to, or speak through, the landscape. It takes a subjective, first-person stance that expresses an affectively unspecific and detached mood through the symbolic forms of natural imagery. This happens in the first and last couplets, where the vastness of the speaker’s “melancholy” and “deep feelings” is underlined and materially extended by movement through the natural landscape—the vast sweep of spring grasses in the first couplet and the limitless expanse of the sky in the last. The speaker’s mood and his feelings seem emotionally loaded, and a certain ambiguity permeates the tone of the poem. The setting suggests, on the one hand, a psychological state of peacefulness and equilibrium, which is underscored by the natural imagery: the stillness of the spider’s web and the quiet movements of the smoldering incense smoke in the hall are replicated by the poet’s tranquil, seated posture. On the other hand, this very tranquility also makes him intensely aware of the underlying tensions and restlessness of his life in the social world beyond the ephemeral idyll of his respite inside the hall, thus producing an atmosphere of unease and resentment.
The poet’s melancholia can be read as an indication of discontent resonating with certain strands in the East Asian poetic tradition, such as eremitic verse. In his early essay “Eikoku shijin no tenchi sansen ni taisuru kannen” (The conceptual attitude of English poets toward heaven and earth, mountains and rivers), written in 1893, five years before the preceding poem was composed, Sōseki defined romanticism (rōmanchishizumu) as the eighteenth-century English literary movement that sought to leave behind the poetic conventions and court-centered life of classicism. In his formulation, poets would leave the cities, go to the mountains and woods, and seek a mode of expression, often in nature-themed poetry, that reflected their true “Heaven-endowed nature” (tenpu no honsei).74 What fundamentally motivated each poet was a discontent (fuhei) whose origins might have varied from one to the next. While Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) resented society for economic reasons, William Cowper (1731–1800) felt a religiously motivated discontent with the vanity of the people, and Robert Burns (1759–1796) was driven by the egalitarian desire for social justice.75 Sōseki’s essay is interesting in that it appropriates, and deftly merges with English literature, a major motif in the East Asian poetic tradition: discontent with the social world and the conventionality of court-centered literary culture and the renunciation of a political career in favor of an eremitic life amid the “mountains and rivers.”76
Another Sinitic poem, composed by Sōseki in March 1898—around the same time as the two poems in Kusamakura, but not included there—brings to the fore in a more drastic manner the interconnection between romantic subjectivity, landscape, and social or political discontent. The untitled poem reads as follows:
吾心若有苦 |
My heart seems to harbor pain, |
求之遂難求 |
but although I examine it [my pain], it cannot be easily examined. |
俯仰天地際 |
When I survey the expanse between heaven and earth, |
胡為発哀声 |
why do I let out this plaintive cry? |
春花幾開落 |
The flowers of spring: how often have they bloomed and scattered? |
世事幾迭更 |
The affairs of the world: how often have they undergone change? |
烏兎促鬢髪 |
As sun and moon make their rounds, they urge my hair to turn white, |
意気軽功名 |
but my ambition looks down upon fame in the world. |
昨夜生月暈 |
Yesterday night a halo surrounded the moon, |
飆風朝満城 |
and a whirlwind was blowing through the town in the morning. |
夢醒枕上聴 |
I woke up in my dream and from my pillow I could hear |
孤剣匣底鳴 |
my solitary sword emitting a scream from the bottom of its chest. |
慨然振衣起 |
With stern determination I shook my robe and stood up, |
登楼望前程 |
and I climbed up the tower to watch the way ahead of me. |
前程望不見 |
But the way ahead of me I could not see— |
漠漠愁雲横 |
obstructing my view, only clouds of grief were floating.77 |
A strong emotionality, presumably linked to discontent and thwarted ambition, permeates this poem. It appears as if the speaker whose “ambition looks down upon fame in the world” once harbored a wish to participate in politics and in the government, as would have been appropriate for a man of worth in the Confucian tradition.
This is particularly obvious when examining the original version of the poem’s fourth couplet, which was subsequently rewritten by Nagao Uzan (1864–1942), Sōseki’s mentor in Sinitic poetry composition in Kumamoto. The original couplet read,
菲才非国器 |
Someone as untalented as me could not become a vessel of the state. |
所願豈功名 |
How could I aspire to fame in the world?78 |
It is not clear whether the discontent in these lines is directed at the speaker’s lack of talent or at a degenerate, hostile world that will not let men of worth assume positions of responsibility. However, the poem creates a heroic discourse that symbolically relates to natural and cosmic imagery.
A martial stance somehow reminiscent of poetry written by bakumatsu samurai activists (shishi) comes to the fore in the personification of the sword, screaming in discontent and exhorting the poet to participate in politics.79 Moreover, the poem’s cosmic imagery is filled with foreboding, symbolized by the halo around the moon at night and the whirlwind in the morning, underlining the speaker’s martial desires. The only seasonal imagery—the blooming flowers in spring—serves as an allegory for the passing of time that gradually reduces the possibility of political participation.
A related theme that permeates this poem, indirectly at least, is youth as the period in life when political activism is possible, if not mandatory. The other Sinitic poem that Sōseki quotes in Kusamakura in fact explicitly mentions this theme. The second part reads,
孤愁高雲際 |
My solitary grief extends to the fringes of the high clouds |
大空断鴻帰 |
and on the vast sky a lonely goose, separated from its flock, is flying home. |
寸心何窈窕 |
My heart, how deep and calm it feels— |
縹渺忘是非 |
in its limitlessness it has forgotten about true and false. |
三十我欲老 |
I am thirty years old and about to turn old, |
韶光猶依依 |
but the spring colors are still young and fresh. |
逍遥随物化 |
I freely wander around and follow the transformation of things; |
悠然対芬菲 |
with a calm mind I face the fragrant spring grasses.80 |
This poem displays a more detached and reconciliatory tone than the previous one, but the original passion of the speaker’s ambition is still recognizable in the grandiose dimensionality of the first couplet. The poem also makes clear that the feeling of intense grief, as well as its appeasement through Zhuangzian “free and easy wandering” and an acceptance of constant transformation, is connected to the speaker’s youth—his age of thirty years, the approximate age at which Sōseki composed the poem and precisely the age of Kusamakura’s narrator.81
Youth is a particularly relevant motif in that it relates not only to the theme of discontent but also to love—the theme par excellence of the novel and the newly naturalized literature. In both instances where Sinitic poetry is composed in Kusamakura, the erotic presence of the woman Nami is indeed particularly important. In the first instance, Nami’s alluring dance in a long-sleeved kimono (furisode) playfully interrupts the narrator’s process of poetic composition. A potential emotional subtext for the narrator’s mood could, therefore, also be love.
In the poems taken up here, however, the potential emotional subtexts—political discontent or love—are extremely subdued. As Sōseki writes with regard to symbolic substitution in his essay “Sōsakuka no taido,” only one-tenth of the poet’s emotion seems to find expression through the poem’s imagery, while his general mood remains abstract and undecipherable—or calm and peaceful. This aesthetic format creates an effect of detachment that liberates the speaker from the vicissitudes of suffering inherent in the world. In orientalizing fashion, Sōseki performs Sinitic poetry as what he calls Eastern poetry (Tōyō no shiika), echoing a famous eremitic poem by Tao Yuanming (365–427) that he cites from earlier in his text as an example of strong detachment.82 However, Kusamakura also self-consciously reflects Sinitic poetry as a literary genre that, similarly to English verse and haiku composition, still transmits the “electric current of human emotion”—be it only one-tenth as strong and transparent as the current flowing through other genres, such as English verse and the novel.
Kusamakura critically highlights shaseibun, haiku, English verse, and Sinitic poems as “literary” writing in accordance with the definition in Bungakuron—writing particularly suited to move the reader and produce illusion. Meredith’s passionate love poem, by staging a first-person lyrical voice that “sings its feelings,” produces an affective immediacy that reduces the distance between reader and text and enhances illusion. Kusamakura’s shaseibun prose as well as the haiku and Sinitic poems cited by the narrator, while obviously either less lyrical or nonlyrical, also produce illusion by juxtaposing (or harmonizing) natural and human contents and thus conforming to Sōseki’s definition in Bungakuron of romantic or idealist writing. The various genres performed in Kusamakura, all their differences notwithstanding, converge in their quality as romantic writing that distances them from the novel. The novel, because of its exclusive focus on human affairs—the “human drama mirroring good and evil, joy, anger, sadness, and delight”—belongs to the literary mode that Sōseki defines as realist. As has been noted, he sees the volume of feeling produced by realist texts as weaker than that produced by romantic or idealist writings; the capacity of realism to move the reader, to inspire poetic flavor, and to be literary is less strong than that in romanticism.
The performance of genre in Kusamakura as well as Sōseki’s critical discussions leave little room for doubt about his general preference for romantic (or idealist) over realist writing. As mentioned, romantic writing offers a more detached stance toward the drama of ninjō in the way postulated by Sōseki with regard to shaseibun in his 1907 essay. That he was ambivalent, if not suspicious, of the novel and its affectively involved plots of ninjō reflects a literary sensibility grounded in the aesthetic world of traditional letters or writing styles (bun) as epitomized by Sinitic poetry and haiku.83 Moreover, through the exploration of these genres, Sōseki could envision an alternative type of literature that, while producing more poetic flavor and illusion, could allow for more affective detachment than the novel and the newly naturalized literature.
However, Sōseki by no means aimed for a nostalgic and naive return to traditional letters under modern conditions, nor did he simply reject the novel. The performance of various nonnovelistic and traditional genres in Kusamakura as media that convey emotion was possible only because of his strong awareness of the contemporary novel and new literary discourse. Through this performance, he objectified, distanced, and alienated the aesthetic world of traditional letters to distinguish it from, and weigh it against, the world of the novel. Kusamakura’s narrator no longer inhabits the world of traditional letters but instead ironically performs it to measure how much “electric current of human emotion” it can transmit. Similarly, Sōseki’s critical investigation of traditional literary modes under the banner of romanticism or idealism takes place in an inherently modern framework that relies on distinctions made between those modes and the novel and on a critical lexicon (including such terms as “romanticisim”) that was alien to traditional letters. Although the volume of feeling produced by romantic or traditional texts makes them more literary than realist writings, according to Bungakuron, both romanticism and realism still belong to a common literature that Sōseki defines by its inherent capacity to convey emotion.
While critically deconstructing the emotional quality of literature and thus questioning the process of naturalization through which its new concept had come into place, Sōseki’s literary and critical project simultaneously reasserted literature’s universally emotional nature. This paradoxical double movement was the idiosyncratic attempt to integrate, appropriate, and come to terms with not only literature but also ninjō as its newly naturalized core. This project remained a highly intellectual endeavor, however, fraught with self-reflection and irony. It is significant in this respect that, beginning in 1907, Sōseki started producing works that were more strongly akin to the novel, and he largely abandoned the writing of shaseibun, although not the composition of Sinitic poetry and haiku. However, whether in the interrogation of “natural love” in Sorekara (And Then, 1909), the breakdown of narrative plot and affectivity in Mon (The Gate, 1910), or the obsessive production of Sinitic poems while writing Meian (Light and Darkness, 1916), Sōseki continued to question the novel and the emotions it depicts. His interrogation of literature and its emotional distinctions never seemed to come to rest.