Semi-Appreciation: Soseki

Chez Buce just completed a readaloud Natsume Soseki's Kokoro, by all accounts one of the most populer, perhaps emblematic, novels of the Meiji Era in Japan. It was an unsettling experience. On the one hand, I have to agree that it is smoothly and competently written; that the characters are plausible and engaging, and that the story moves forward without effort. Beyond the bare bones, Patrick Smith puts it in a larger context: Smith argues that Soseki identifies and personalizes Japan's “new man” (Soseki wrote Kokoro in 1914):

In our own time he would aspire to a standard blue suit and a standard white shirt and a middling position at Toyota or Toshiba—section manager, assistant department manager, or some other precisely defined rank. ... [W]e see in him ... the odd intersection of economics and psychology that is unique, perhaps, to modern Japan. Soseki's character sacrifices everything to make himself a firm, resolute Japanese according to a tradition he finds elusive even as it consumes him.

--Patrick Smith, Japan: A Reinterpretation 107 (1997)

I'm not convinced that Smith's characterization of the novel is accurate, but I gather his view is widely held so I will accept it at something like face value—Soseki's novel is popular because his character is a kind of Japanese everyman.

And that is precisely why I find it so unsettling. For Soseki's novel is ultimately about suicide, its meaning and significance. I don't want to spoil too much plot here, but try this: there are many reasons for suicide, some of which, it seems to me, can be entirely rational. For the person in extremis who takes his life to put an end to unbearable pain—I can easily feel compassion and even regret but I can hardly call the act incoherent. So also for the person who thinks his life is done--perhaps including the “stoic suicides” of the Romans, though whether they actually exist outside of Plutarch or Shakespeare may be a question all its own.

But there are other classes of suicide that do not inspire the same sympathy: suicides that leave vulnerable dependents behind, or suicide designed to punish the survivor. I think Mrs. B has it right here: any suicide in the service of a grand idea is likely to lie at least on the nether edge of narcissism.

Again, I'll leave the details to the reader. Let's just say I'd love to have a conversation with Soseki or better, with one or more of his characters: do you understand what you are doing here? Do you understand how much of your supposed high principle is just a triumph of self-absorption, or self-delusion? I suspect I've got a lot more to learn about Soseki and the culture he undertakes to represent. But on the basis of what I've learned so far, I must say there is a whole lot more I'd like to know.