Introduction

Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro was published in 1914, two years before his death at the age of forty-eight. Sōseki, even then widely acknowledged as Japan’s leading novelist, was at the peak of his writing career, and Kokoro is unquestionably his greatest work. Today it is considered one of Japan’s great modern novels, known to every schoolchild and read by anyone serious about the nation’s literature.

The reasons for Kokoro’s importance lie not in its literary quality alone. Sōseki was a superb chronicler of his time, and Kokoro cannot be fully understood without some knowledge of the world from which it sprang.

Japan’s Meiji period (which ended with the emperor Meiji’s death in 1912) began in 1868 with the tumultuous overthrow of the old Tokugawa shogunate, which had ruled Japan unopposed for 250 years. The shift signaled far more than a change of power. Japan under the Tokugawas had been rigidly feudal and isolationist, a Confucian society cut off from the changes that were rapidly overtaking much of the rest of the world. Pressure from Western nations eager to expand their sphere of trade finally proved irresistible in 1853, when the commander of a U.S. squadron, Matthew Perry, anchored his “black ships” threateningly offshore and sent an ultimatum to Japan’s ruling powers. The subsequent internal upheaval resulted in a new government that opened Japan’s doors to the West and embraced the introduction of Western culture and technology. In the next four decades Japan was utterly transformed. The Meiji period is synonymous with the fundamental transformation that set Japan on the road to becoming all that it is today.

Such rapid change inevitably comes at a psychological cost, and this is what Sōseki acutely documented in his finest novels. The dilemmas that he portrayed were deeply felt. Natsume Kinnosuke (Sōseki was his nom de plume) was born in 1867, the year before the Meiji era began, in what was still known as Edo (now Tokyo). The old Japan was his inheritance in more than birth. He was educated in the Chinese and Japanese classics and in the Confucian moral code, which Western concepts of individualism and individual rights were only just beginning to undermine. Kokoro’s central character, the man referred to as Sensei, is of an age with Sōseki, and his references to the importance of his old-fashioned moral education clearly reflect Sōseki’s own experience. For both, the Meiji period’s embrace of Western individualism provoked irreconcilable inner conflicts that haunted them through life.

Kokoro’s Sensei shares other characteristics with Sōseki as well. Family difficulties and alienation, a recurrent theme in many of Sōseki’s novels, played their part in his own early life. A late child of a large family, Sōseki as an infant was formally adopted by a childless couple; his real family took him back only grudgingly when the couple divorced nine years later. Adoption, which plays an important part in the story of Sensei’s friend K in Kokoro, was common at the time—continuing the family name was more important than maintaining blood ties. Sōseki’s own adoption was a sorry failure on every level, leaving him feeling unloved, isolated, and bitter.

Like Kokoro’s Sensei, Sōseki, a bright student, attended the new university in Tokyo, where he specialized in English literature. Meiji-era Japan believed that foreign literature held the key to understanding the Western culture that it was then avidly embracing, and Sōseki was part of the earliest generation to be trained in this important field. His education gave him elite status, and in 1900 the Japanese government selected him to spend two years studying in London; the intention was that he would increase the nation’s cultural capital by bringing back a deeper understanding of the West. But Sōseki was miserable in England, isolated and alienated from everything around him, which seems to have brought him close to nervous collapse. After his return to Japan, he took up prestigious teaching posts at the First National College and in the English literature department at Tokyo’s Imperial University. To all appearances, he was set to rise to the top of his elite profession.

But Sōseki could revel in neither his status nor his success. Like Kokoro’s Sensei, he was an essentially introverted and retiring person; his nervous sensibility shrank from exposure to the everyday world, and the strain of teaching told badly on his nerves. Partly to soothe and entertain himself, he decided to try his hand at a light, humorous novel (I Am a Cat, 1905). To his surprise, upon publication it achieved instant fame. A year later came two more novels: the immensely popular Botchan (1906) as well as the beautiful haiku-style Kusamakura. At the age of forty, encouraged by the Asahi newspaper’s guarantee to serialize any future work, Sōseki took the audacious step of resigning from his teaching posts and devoting himself to his writing.

His novels had moved from gently humorous anecdotes and observations of life to the more philosophical and experimental approach of Kusamakura, which maintains a delightful lightness of touch even as it engages thoughtfully and critically with Meiji Japan’s transformations and its fraught relationship to Japan’s past. But the mature works that now began to flow from his pen struck a new, more inward note. Sōseki became increasingly focused on his contemporaries’ quintessential experience, one that he himself felt acutely: the necessity to evolve a modern, individual sense of self and to cope with the new Meiji self’s resultant problems: isolation, alienation, egotism, and profound dislocation from its cultural and moral inheritance. Sōseki increasingly sought to portray for his readers not only the upheavals of their rapidly changing world but the dilemmas and suffering of the contemporary psyche.

These themes achieved their ultimate statement in the late novel Kokoro. It was both written and set in the first days of the new Taishō period, which began in 1912 with Meiji’s death and the accession of the new emperor. The moment of transition registered profoundly throughout Japan. The unnamed protagonist in the novel’s long first section, “Sensei and I,” is a naive and earnest young man on the point of graduating from the Imperial University; he is one of the new generation’s elite who will inherit the coming era. The focus of this section is his difficult and intense relationship with the older man he calls Sensei, whom we see through his puzzled and intrigued young eyes.

Sōseki himself would have known well the disconcerting role of sensei to the worshipful young. Usually translated as “teacher,” sensei is essentially a term of deep respect for one who knows; it implies a position of authority in relation to oneself that comes close to that of master and disciple. In strongly hierarchical Meiji society, Sōseki, with his established position as a leading writer, naturally attracted a flock of eager young followers (many of whom would go on to become key literary figures of the Taishō period and beyond). We may all too easily imagine Sōseki, holding court in his role as sensei, registering private misgivings at the intensity of some of his disciples’ devotion to him, and doubts about his suitability as role model for them. However, where Sōseki was a successful man, at least in public terms, Kokoro’s Sensei is essentially a failure, both in his own eyes and in those of the world. The puzzle that the first section presents is: What are the causes of this failure?

The novel’s short middle section balances the unnamed young man’s yearning and unfulfilled relationship with the evasive Sensei against that with his own dying father. Like Sensei, the father in some ways embodies the Meiji era, which at that moment is in its own death throes. Themes of betrayal and a failure of moral nerve, which sound through much of Sōseki’s work and are fundamental to Kokoro, are also set to haunt the young man’s own future at the end of this section as he opens the long letter he has received from Sensei and begins to read.

That letter constitutes the final section of the novel and is in many ways its real tour de force. In fact, Sōseki conceived it first and originally intended it to stand alone as a complete work. It takes us back to the world of Sensei’s youth, to his own student days. The letter’s painfully honest confession will finally reveal to the young man what he has longed to know—the mysterious secret that cast its long shadow over Sensei’s life. But it is more than a simple confession. Writing this letter as he faces his own despairing death, Sensei attempts to redeem himself, if nothing else than in the role of Sensei that he unwillingly accepted late in life, by passing on his story for the edification of his young follower and friend. Ironically, his letter becomes the unwitting cause of the young man’s own crucial act of moral failure.

The man called K, the young Sensei’s friend, who precipitates the crisis with which the novel culminates, in many ways embodies the old world’s strict code of values and ethics, which was coming into such painful conflict with the new Western concepts of individual rights and the primacy of the ego. K’s self-elected death foreshadows the ultimate death of that old world, a world Sōseki himself had inherited and whose unattainable and rapidly vanishing certainties preoccupied him. K’s death by his own hand, shocking and pointless from the perspective of the new values, is nevertheless a crucial moral victory that haunts Sensei’s life. Another, later death also reverberates, both for the dying father and, crucially, for Sensei himself—the ritual suicide of General Nogi. This anachronistic gesture of ethical atonement and expression of desire to follow one’s master (here the Meiji emperor) to the grave stunned Japan. The news impels Sensei, the morally paralyzed inheritor of Meiji Japan’s dual worlds, finally to act. His suicide is not only an act of personal despair but is expressed half-seriously as “following to the grave . . . the spirit of the Meiji era itself,” a final gesture of loyalty to that era’s difficult dualities that, he guesses, his young friend will find incomprehensible.

Kokoro is beautifully constructed to express Meiji Japan’s spiritual dilemmas. But it does much more: Sōseki is a masterful portrayer of human relations, and in fact the novel’s wider historical dimensions are usually little more than flickers at the edge of the reader’s consciousness. As well as being a compelling portrait of Sensei in maturity and youth, Kokoro tells the story of three young men whose hearts are “restless with love” and of their emotional entanglements not only with the opposite sex but variously with one another. Homosexuality is not, needless to say, at issue, although a young man’s intellectually erotic attraction to an older man is beautifully evoked. The novel’s women, particularly Sensei’s wife, are portrayed sympathetically, but it is the men who take center stage—another, although no doubt unwitting, expression of the Meiji ethos. Their very different relationships with and reactions to one another form the core of the story and weave its suspenseful and carefully constructed plot.

In their dilemmas and responses, the characters of Kokoro, although in many ways specific to their time, are fundamentally immensely human. It is the human condition itself that is Sōseki’s primary interest, here and elsewhere in his work. In Kokoro he achieved his finest expression of this great theme.

Kokoro, the novel’s title, is a complex and important word that can perhaps best be explained as “the thinking and feeling heart,” as distinguished from the workings of the pure intellect, devoid of human feeling. Because one’s kokoro thinks as well as feels, “heart” is at times an inadequate translation. Nevertheless, as the concept of kokoro is a pervasive motif throughout the novel, I have chosen to express it with the single word “heart” and to preserve its presence in the translation wherever possible. For the title, it seemed best to retain the original word.

MEREDITH McKINNEY