Kusamakura

Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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This translation first published in Penguin Books 2008

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Translation and introduction copyright A© Meredith McKinney, 2008

All rights reserved

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Natsume, Soseki, 1867-1916.

[Kusamakura. English]

Kusamakura / Natsume Soseki ; translated with an introduction by Meredith McKinney.

p. cm.a€”(Penguin classics)

eISBN : 978-1-101-09755-7

1. McKinney, Meredith, 1950- II. Title.

PL812.A8K813 2008

895.6a€™342a€”dc22 2007024784

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Introduction

Kusamakura (1906) is an extraordinary work, written at an extraordinary time in Japana€™s history, when the nation was tumbling headlong into the twentieth century and toward its a€?modern miracle,a€ even as its traditional past everywhere stil haunted it. Kusamakura was conceived out of this double consciousness and embodies it in fascinating ways. It is very much a novel of its historical moment, a literary experiment that was as new and exciting as the great experiment that was Meiji-era Japan.

Until 1868, when the Meiji era began, Japan had maintained a fiercely isolationist policy that kept it cultural y and political y intact for centuries.

When the nation final y chose, after a brief internal struggle, to submit to external pressure and open its doors, this largely untouched world of a€?old Japana€ was suddenly subjected to violent upheavals, with the immediate rush to modernize and Westernize. In Kusamakura the powerful and inexorable transforming impetus that was impel ing Japan out of its past and into a very different future is embodied in the image of the steam train of the final scene a€?hurtling blindly into the darkness aheada€ with its freight of hapless passengers, an image of the sinister a€?serpent of civilizationa€ that carries the novel off into its open- ended future. In this final scene the steam train is bearing away men who are leaving to fight in the Russo- Japanese War of 1904-5, a war that had just drawn to its victorious end when Natsume Soseki wrote this work. Though written at the height of the nationalistic fervor that fol owed this victory, the novel portrays the war as a bloodbath whose distant echo of guns has penetrated even the idyl ic peace of a mountain vil age that is otherwise virtual y untouched by the modern world. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Soseki had a complex and deeply uneasy relationship with the new modernity.

Kusamakura is at odds not only with the generalized euphoric embrace of modernity but also more specifical y with the contemporary trends in Japana€™s modern literature. Japanese prose writers had rushed to reject the earlier traditions and set about forging a new literature modeled on Western concepts of the novel. The Naturalism of nineteenth-century French writers such as A‰mile Zola provided the model for works that aimed at a gritty realism and an emphasis on human entanglements. Soseki, however, instinctively rebel ed against this unthinking rejection of Japana€™s native literary tradition and the focus on the more squalid aspects of the human world. Kusamakura is his attempt at an answer to this literary vogue, reaching back into Japana€™s literary past to bring its riches to bear on the possible evolution of the new Japanese novel.

Soseki was in an ideal position to seek a new literary synthesis of a€?East and West.a€ Natsume Kinnosuke (Soseki was his nom de plume) was born in 1867, the final year of the old regime, into a family of minor bureaucrats whose fortunes declined rapidly with the onset of the Meiji era.

A late and unwanted child in a large family, he was adopted the fol owing year by a childless couple, then returned nine years later, when the couple divorced, to his parents (whom he believed to be his grandparents). This loveless and lonely childhood marked him with a sense of estrangement and dislocation that haunted him through his adult years and that echoed the dislocations and questioning of identity that were hal marks of Meiji-era Japan.

Sosekia€™s education too epitomized the split consciousness of his time. As a child, he was given a traditional education with a strong grounding in the Chinese and Japanese classicsa€”his love of this rich literary