tradition is a constant presence in Kusamakura and to a lesser extent in everything he wrote. A bright student, he later chose to concentrate on the study of English, which was an important prerequisite for a scholarly career, and at Tokyo University he majored in English literature, but the classics remained his first and deepest love. Here again he was haunted by a sense of dislocation between his inheritance and the world in which he found himself, which he embraced with an unwil ing fascination.
Where others were throwing themselves indiscriminately into the huge experiment of modernization, with a largely uncritical adulation of Western culture and its values, Soseki studied it careful y and was impressed and intrigued by it but found himself unable to embrace it wholeheartedly. He belonged to neither world and to both, and this uneasy, complex identity informs his writing, making him a uniquely Meiji voice.
Once he graduated, Soseki took up a series of teaching posts, although he felt himself to be more scholar than teacher. During the fol owing years he moved first to a school in Matsuyama in Shikoku (where he married) and then to Kumamoto in Kyushu. While there he paid a visit to the nearby hot spring vil age of Oama, which evidently formed the basis for his depiction of Nakoi in Kusamakura. Kumamoto was far from Tokyo, and such smal vil ages at the turn of the century would stil have preserved virtual y intact the traditional Japan that was Sosekia€™s first inheritance and love. Perhaps the visit to Oama stayed in his imagination as the epitome of a brief journey into the apparently idyl ic past, to set against the stresses and alienation of life in modern Japan. Although he had not yet begun to write, Soseki was already absorbing themes and material for his later novels.
In 1900 the Japanese government provided Soseki with a scholarship to study in England for two years, part of its design to send promising scholars abroad to bring back an informed understanding of key aspects of Western civilization. Unwil ingly, Soseki set sail for London, leaving behind his wife and baby daughter. The two years that fol owed were probably the unhappiest of his life. He was poor, he was intensely lonely, and he found nothing to love about the English or their way of life. England was aesthetical y depressing for hima€”we can guess that the occasional criticisms of England scattered throughout Kusamakura echo the authora €™s own sentiments. He took meager lodgings, spoke to few people other than his landlady, and spent most of his time reading in his room, since he had failed to enrol himself in any formal course of study. He read widely, not only in literature but also in art, philosophy, and science, al the while fervently attempting to formulate for himself a position that would al ow him to be true to his a€?Japanesenessa€? in relation to this very different culture whose influence was so rapidly transforming Japan.
Yet even in the unhappy depths of his time in London, Soseki never simply rejected the West, as a less diligently honest and inquiring person might have done. He found much that earned his respect, particularly in the realms of literature and art. Kusamakura is on one level a working-through of his complex and ambivalent relationship to Western culture. A quotation from Shel eya€™s poem a€?To a Skylarka€ springs as readily to the protagonista€™s mind as a quotation from Chinese poetry, and the novela€™s frequent long digressions are often devoted to much the same sort of pondering on the relative merits of the two cultures as would have fil ed Sosekia€™s thoughts and notebooks during his lonely days in London. These questions remained of intense concern to him throughout his life. To such questions there could be no final answer. Kusamakura can be read as a journey through this terrain, a philosophical novel that delicately probes important propositions about the two cultures but necessarily draws no conclusions.
When Soseki returned to Japan in 1903, he was required to take up a post teaching at the First National Col ege in Tokyo, as wel as lecturing in English literature at Tokyo University. His nerves, never strong, had been brought close to the breaking point by the London years. Partly, it seems, as a way of soothing and entertaining himself, he began to write fiction. In 1905 the gently humorous novel I Am a Cat ( Wagahai wa neko de aru) was serialized in a magazine and proved immediately popular. Botchan fol owed in 1906, sealing his reputation as a new and exciting novelist.
Kusamakura appeared in the same year.
By this time his four-year teaching term was almost over, and Sosekia€™s fame as a novelist was now such that the Asahi newspaper offered him a monthly salary to serialize al future novels. To everyonea€™s astonishment, Soseki accepted, turning his back on a likely professorship and honorable academic career. From 1907 until his death ten years later, at the end of 1916, he was a professional writer. During this time he wrote steadily, at the rate of around one novel a year, the works that would establish him as the foremost author of his time and the revered father of modern Japanese literature, whose works are stil read and loved today.
A
Kusamakura forms a kind of bridge between the first, lighthearted novels and the works Soseki wrote as an established and professional author, such novels as And Then ( Sore kara, 1909), The Wanderer ( Kojin, 1912), and Kokoro (1914), in which loneliness and introspection have become the dominant theme and tone. For al its seriousness of purpose, Kusamakura carries through from the early novels a delightful lightness and a wry, gently ironic humor. It is, however, in almost every way an anomaly, in terms both of Sosekia€™s work and of the modern Japanese novel. Written when Soseki was in his late thirties, balanced at the edge of a professional writing career, and self-consciously placing itself at the beginning of a new century, with Japan balanced on the edge of its own very different future, Kusamakura embodies a moment when Soseki, and Japanese literature, paused to look backward and forward and to play with possibilities.
It was, Soseki said, written in the space of a week. The claim seems hardly credible, yet a certain intensity and tightness of interwoven motifs certainly suggest concentrated and even feverish writing. By any standard, the prose is extraordinarily polisheda€”if it was indeed written in a week, it stands as supreme testimony to Sosekia€™s mastery of style and language.
The discursive passages often rise to a sonorous ornateness that echoes the classical Chinese-influenced prose of an earlier era, replete with the paral elisms and phrasal balancing of Chinese literary writing. This style was already dated and somewhat difficult in its time; to modern readers, it is sometimes almost impenetrable. The descriptive passages, on the other hand, are elegantly poetic in the best Japanese tradition. In style as wel as in content, Soseki was self-consciously experimenting with new forms by drawing on old.
In a brief piece entitled a€?My Kusamakuraa€ ( Yo ga Kusamakura), Soseki stated that his aim had been to write a€?a haiku-style novel.a€
Previous novels, he said, were works in the manner of the senryu, the earthier version of haiku that looks at everyday human life with a wryly humorous eye. a€?But it seems to me,a€ he wrote, a€?that we should also have the haiku-style novel that lives through beauty.a€ He had written Kusamakura a€?in a spirit precisely opposite to the common idea of what a novel is. Al that matters [in this work] is that a certain feeling, a feeling of beauty, remain with the reader. I have no other objective. Thus, there is no plot, and no development of events.a€?
The plot is certainly exiguous. A nameless young artist sets off on a purposely aimless walking trip across the mountains to the remote vil age of Nakoi, where he stays at a hot spring inn and indulges in an artistic
