Kusamakura

experiment: to observe al he sees, humans included, with a detached, aesthetic eye, in the manner of the artists and poets of old. The novel traces this process, recording his experiences in the first person, most particularly his encounter with the startling, intriguing, and beautiful Nami, the daughter of the establishment. The scene is perfectly set for a romantic entanglementa€”but nothing happens. In the final chapter, he joins Nami and her family as they travel by boat down to the town, returning himself and us to modern civilization. The novel flirts with plot as Nami flirts with the young man, never intending any serious development, intent on its own ends. Nami, the center of the novel, is (as Soseki pointed out) the stil point, the enigma, around which the artist moves, watching and pondering the highly dramatized series of images of herself that she proffers him. When at last he glimpses in her a moment of unguarded pity, it completes the a €?picturea€? he has been working toward in his mind, and with it the novel.

Kusamakura embodies its own experiment: it sets off with the artist to explore just how and to what extent the serene beauty that was the artistic ideal of the past might be achievable in terms of a twentieth-century Japanese consciousness and its artistic products. The lofty a€?unhumana€

and a€?nonemotionala€ approach to which this artist aspiresa€”the ideal of a cool and uninvolved aesthetic response to al experiencea€”can only be compromised by experience itself, and this is indeed what happens in the course of the novel. Yet the original aim of this experimental journey, to attempt to keep a€?beautya€ as the central focus, is retained through al its testings. Kusamakura succeeds in embodying difficult balances.

Like Soseki, this artist is deeply imbued with an understanding of and respect for the traditions he has inherited, yet he is an artist a€?in the Western style,a€ a modern man with a wide-ranging grasp of Western culture. He has returned out of the very different present to bask for a brief time in the old world of beauty and serenity that the vil age of Nakoi embodies, but he necessarily brings with him the outsidera€™s eye of modern Japan, with al its yearnings and confusions and ironic knowledge of the wider world. The vil age, stil precariously maintained in a a€?timeless past,a€ is slowly revealed as a place whose dream is disturbed by the distant violent disruptions of the modern world. Like the artist with his problematic outsidera€™s vision, Nami, the central embodiment of the beauty that he encounters and with which he must come to terms, is also a €?returneda€ from the outside world, and her confusions and complexities cannot be contained by the vil age or by any simple portrayal of her. At the end of the novel she remains essential y elusive.

The artist in fact never succeeds in painting Nami (whose name itself means a€?beautya€), that potential amalgam of Western and Japanese artistic vision that has haunted him, and after the experiment of Kusamakura Soseki likewise did not pursue his vision of the new novel that takes a €?beautya€ as its central aim and premise. He seems to have abandoned his brave hopes for this a €?haiku-style novela€ as Japana€™s answer to the realistic novel of Western-style Naturalism. Honesty about the truths of modern experience compel ed him to focus his subsequent novels on the contemporary world of the a €?new Japana€? and to explore its lonely consciousness.

Kusamakura undoubtedly does achieve its aim of impressing the reader with a pervasive sense of beauty. Its intensely visual writing gives us a rich experience of the world filtered through the double aesthetic consciousness of a€?East and Westa€ that the artist-protagonist embodies.

Woven through is the voice of the first-person consciousness that experiences and comments, thinking through implications, sometimes opinionated and posturing, a gently ironic yet deeply serious voice that both is and is not the voice of Soseki himself. This sometimes difficult discursive style (which holds echoes of Western writers Soseki admired, such as Laurence Sterne) brings a strong philosophical dimension to the work. The constant digressions are also a foil to any latent urge toward plot. They hold the reader firmly inside the terms of the novel: to explore experience rather than be swept along by it. We, like the protagonist and Soseki himself, emerge from this journey with its larger questions left unanswered, but with a wealth of fresh understanding and experience that has made the journey wel worthwhile.

A

MEREDITH MCKINNEY

A Note on the Translation

It is, of course, impossible to reproduce adequately in English the effect of Sosekia€™s prose, particularly the frequent passages of elevated diction and paral el syntax in the Chinese style, which contrast with sections, such as the farcical barbershop scene of Chapter 5, that draw on the alternative tradition of a comic and a€?vulgara€ mode. In much of Kusamakura, Sosekia€™s style is consciously elegant and literary, careful y distinguishing itself from the modern Japanese of the Naturalist writers of his day (although in other ways the writing is contemporary and even innovative in the history of the modern novel). I have attempted to preserve its tone with a rather more old-fashioned literary language than contemporary written English. My primary aim has been to give some sense of the elegance of the Japanese, although reproducing its beauty is impossible.

Most of the novel is written in the present tense. Since English, unlike Japanese, cannot sustain occasional shifts to past-tense narration, I have chosen to retain the present tense throughout, in order to reproduce the effect of the journeya€™s open-ended experiment that asks the reader to experience the protagonista€™s moment-by- moment feelings and thoughts.

A final word about the title. This novel was previously translated by Alan Turney with the title The Three-Cornered World, a reference to the quirky nature of the artist found in Chapter 3. The Japanese title, Kusamakura (literal y a€?grass pil owa€), is a traditional literary term for travel, redolent of the kind of poetic journey epitomized by Bashoa€™s Narrow Road to the Deep North. I have chosen to retain the original Japanese title.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to the Australian National Universitya€™s Japan Centre, which provided me with a haven as a Visiting Fel ow while I worked on this translation.

Nobuo Sakai generously spared me his precious time to read through the translation and careful y check for errors.

I also owe a debt of gratitude to Elizabeth Lawson, whose perceptive comments and suggestions helped the manuscript to achieve its final form.

Suggestions for Further Reading

OTHER WORKS BY NATSUME SOSEKI

Brodey, Inger Sigrun; Ikuo Tsunematsu; and Sammy I. Tsunematsu, trans. My Individualism and the Philosophical Foundations of Literature.

Tokyo: Tuttle, 2005.