Sanshiro Read online

  Not being able to buy books, though: that was hard. Far from buying them, we often found ourselves having to sell some of the books we owned just to make ends meet. In those days (not so much anymore), I absolutely devoured books. I would hurry from one book to the next as if in a race with time. I felt it was the only way I could go on living, which is why not being able to buy new books was as painful and constricting to me as not being able to breathe fresh air.

  Soon I found myself having to reread my books. And when I had no more books left to read a second time, I started reading the books that remained in my wife’s bookcase. She had majored in Japanese literature, so she owned quite a number of books I had never read. Among them were two sets of “Complete Works” that piqued my curiosity: one belonging to the poet Miyazawa Kenji (1896–1933) and the other the Complete Works of Natsume Sōseki. My wife had originally planned to write her graduation thesis on Miyazawa Kenji. She saved her money and bought the complete works, but somewhere along the way she gave up on writing about Miyazawa (I’m not sure why) and switched to Sōseki. A friend of hers had used the Sōseki set to write a graduation thesis and no longer needed the books, so my wife was able to buy them cheaply. It was the height of practicality. She also owned a number of books by the novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), the eleventh-century classic The Tale of Genji, and the publisher Iwanami’s World Literature for Boys and Girls. These were all very different from my own literary tastes, but at least there was no overlap—none at all.

  Since I had nothing else to read, I turned to these books in my spare time, though without much enthusiasm. Miyazawa Kenji, I have to say in all honesty, did not do much for me, nor could I see—in those days, at least—anything to like about The Tale of Genji. Sōseki and Tanizaki, though, were not so bad. And so it came about that the novels of Sōseki and Tanizaki always bring back to me scenes from my life as a poverty-stricken newly-wed at the age of twenty-two. Our place was cold indoors, and the water in the kitchen sink was usually frozen on winter mornings. The alarm clock was broken, so if I wanted to know the time I had to go peek at the clock out in front of the tobacco shop at the bottom of the hill (I still smoked back then). We had a large window facing south, so at least there was plenty of sunshine coming in, but the National Railways’ Chūō Line ran by just below the window, which made it horribly noisy (on a par with Dan Aykroyd’s apartment next to the elevated railway in the movie Blues Brothers). When there was a strike and the National Railways stopped running for twenty-four hours, most people were greatly inconvenienced, but it gave us pure relief. We used to have long freight trains running by until the sun came up.

  This, then, was the setting in which I read Sōseki’s works, which is why, for me, they are permeated with memories of reading while stretched out in the sunshine and hearing the roar of passing express trains. Of course the sun wasn’t always pouring in, but that is the impression that remains the strongest. The cats would lie next to me, sleeping. I didn’t read all of Sōseki’s works at the time but chose the most important ones, some of which I liked better than others. My favorite novels were the three that compose his so-called “first trilogy,” Sanshirō, Sore kara (And Then), and Mon (“The Gate”). I especially remember the strong sense of identification I felt with Mon, the story of a young married couple living in far-from-ideal circumstances.

  For me, Sōseki’s apparently most popular novel, Kokoro, left something to be desired, and while I did enjoy the late works so widely praised for their psychological insight, I could never fully identify with the deep anguish of the modern intellectual depicted in them. “What’s the point of going on and on about this?” I would often feel. In that sense, I’m probably a bit removed from the “mainstream” Sōseki reader. There is no doubt, however, that the “Sōseki experience” I had at that time, belated though it was, remains firmly rooted within me to this day, and that, whenever I have a chance to reread Sōseki’s novels, I am always struck by how fine they are. Sōseki is always the name that first comes to mind when someone asks me who my favorite Japanese author is.

  By the time I had my “Sōseki experience,” the student movement was already past its most ferocious peak, and the mood was heading swiftly toward something more tranquil. The university campuses were still full of huge signboards scrawled with political slogans, but the possibility of revolution had simply evaporated (not that it was there to begin with, of course), and hopes for reform were swiftly fading. The banners of idealism had mostly been furled. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison were dead. In this somewhat listless, dead-end atmosphere, the worlds of writers like Sōseki and Tanizaki may have been taking on a new meaning once again. We could almost feel it in the skin. Or at least, that is how it seems to me looking back from my current vantage point. In any case, this was my first genuine encounter with Sōseki.

  In terms of my own feeling, Sanshirō was the right novel to be reading on a sunny veranda. Confused though he may be, the protagonist generally has his eyes trained on the future. His face is tilted slightly upward, and broad skies open up before him. This is the kind of impression the book gives. And in fact, the novel’s characters are constantly looking at the sky, descriptions of which figure prominently in the narrative.

  Novels like this are rare among Sōseki’s works—or perhaps I should say they are virtually non-existent. Most of his protagonists face real-life contradictions. They experience anguish over how they ought to live, and are confronted with real-life decisions that are being forced upon them. They struggle earnestly to find where they stand amid the competing demands of the pre-modern and the modern, between love and morality, between the West and Japan. They don’t seem to have the freedom to spend time gazing up at the sky. Instead, the characters who appear in Sōseki’s other novels all seem to be looking at the ground as they walk. The protagonists of the late novels, especially, appear to the reader to be suffering with severe stomach pains just as the author himself actually did (though, strangely enough, Sōseki’s pen never lost its natural quality of humor).

  The protagonist of Sanshirō, however, is different. He, too, is unable to find his proper place amid dislocated circumstances, but he never fully confronts those circumstances as a problem within himself. Instead, he accepts them in a relatively natural way, with a young man’s particular kind of nonchalant resignation, as something entirely external to himself. “Oh, well, that’s how it goes,” he seems to say. Stomach pain has not yet entered his world. I think that Sanshirō is a personal favorite of mine because it depicts this natural functioning of the young protagonist’s psyche in an utterly mellifluous style. Sanshirō watches life sweeping him along the same way he looks at clouds sailing through the sky. The free movement of his gaze draws us in almost before we know it, and we forget to view him critically.

  Of course, such a carefree, detached style of life cannot go on forever. The person may stand back and declare “I have decided nothing,” but this only remains possible during one short—and possibly happy—stage of life. Eventually, like it or not, one must bear the burdens of responsibility, and once that happens, the cloud-gazing must come to an end. This is what happens to Daisuke, the protagonist of Sōseki’s next novel, And Then, and with even greater severity to Sōsuke, the protagonist of the following work, “The Gate”. Together, the books comprise a trilogy, which Sōseki completed as serialized newspaper novels in the short space of three years, depicting with absolute mastery the youth—and the end of youth—of young intellectuals living in the Meiji era. We could probably call the three novels “The Growing Up Trilogy.” Sōseki’s own growth as a writer during those three years was almost shockingly swift, like a movie on fast-forward.

  But let me get back to Sanshirō. The protagonist of this novel is still in the pre-dawn of life. He is unaware of the burdens he will eventually have to bear, and this lack of awareness is precisely what makes him Sanshirō: a young man who still has the time to look up at the sky and gaze at the clouds in al
l innocence. We see here not anguish but omens of anguish to come, of suffering that still has no concrete form. Sōseki is in no hurry in this novel. He is not pushing Sanshirō from behind, urging him to move ahead, forcing him toward anguish or defeat before his time. He neither criticizes him nor praises him. Sōseki merely allows Sanshirō to be Sanshirō, and he paints him as he is, with free and leisurely strokes, and here is where we see the author Sōseki in all his greatness.

  When I first read Sanshirō at the age of twenty-two, I, too, had little sense of the burdens to come. I was newly married, still a student. However poor my daily existence might be, however noisy the trains rushing by, I was still sprawling in the sunshine with two soft, warm cats sleeping nearby.

  I grew up in a quiet suburb near the city of Kobe and went to Tokyo at the age of eighteen when I entered Waseda University. Originally I had no strong desire to go to Tokyo and was planning to take the relaxed route by attending a local college, but at the very last moment I started to feel I would like to leave home and test myself—to live alone for the first time in my life. I packed my stuff and said goodbye to my girlfriend. Having sent the larger packages on ahead to my dormitory, I was carrying one bag with me when I boarded the recently-built Shinkansen “bullet” train from Osaka station. In my pocket was a paperback copy of John Updike’s The Music School. The cover of that book remains seared in my brain as part of that special time. (Updike died a matter of days before I wrote this Introduction, I am sorry to say.)

  I was doing the same thing we see Sanshirō doing at the opening of the novel, going to Tokyo from the provinces to enter a university, though of course the details were very different. Sanshirō was written in 1908, and I went to Tokyo in 1968, exactly sixty years later. Travelling from Kobe to Tokyo at that time took fifteen or twenty hours on a steam train. For me, on the electrically powered Shinkansen, it took only four. Traveling from distant Kyushu to Tokyo, Sanshirō spent two nights on the road. In other words, we grew up in very different environments. The social standing of university students was different as well. Anyone entering a university in Sanshirō’s day was treated with respect, but it was nothing special in my day. The educational systems were also different. Sanshirō has just graduated from a “higher school” (kōtōgakkō), which was more like a modern-day liberal arts college, and he is already twenty-two (in Western terms) when he enters the university for more focused study, whereas I was only eighteen. Perhaps there was not so great a difference between us, however, in our excitement at going to a strange big city and beginning a new life.

  Needless to say, the kind of erotic encounter that Sanshirō experienced on his trip to Tokyo did not happen to me on the Shinkansen. He stayed overnight in an inn, after all, while I spent only four hours on the bullet train. To tell the truth, however, something a little bit like Sanshirō’s experience did happen to me. To save money on the fare, I took the slower bullet train, the Kodama, which made more stops along the way than the usual Hikari, and at one of those stops—Shizuoka, I think—a young woman got on and sat down next to me. The car was practically empty, and it would have been easy for her to occupy a two-person seat all to herself, but she nevertheless decided to sit by me. She was a nice-looking woman in her early twenties—no more than twenty-five, I’d say—not exactly a beauty, but attractive enough. Not surprisingly, having her sit next to me like that made me rather tense.

  Once she had settled in, she started talking to me with friendly smiles. Where did I come from? Where was I going? She spoke in a very open, straightforward way, and I answered her questions as honestly as I could. I told her I was from Kobe and going to enter a university in Tokyo, that I would take a major in literature, that I liked to read books, that I would be living in a dormitory in the Mejiro neighborhood, that I was an only child, and so on and so forth. I don’t really remember the details. Even at the time my head was not that clear, and my answers just seemed to spill out.

  In any case, this young older woman remained seated next to me all the way to Tokyo. We talked the whole time, and I recall that she bought me some kind of drink. We stepped down to the platform when the train reached Tokyo. “Good luck in school, work hard,” she said to me, and with a wave of the hand, she was gone. That was the end of that. I have no idea why she chose to sit next to me on that nearly empty train. Maybe she just wanted someone to talk to and figured a kid like me would pose no threat (I’m pretty sure that was it). Or maybe she had a younger brother close to my age. Whatever her reason, she left me standing on the platform at Tokyo Station with a strange, almost buoyant sort of feeling. So this was the start of my new life in Tokyo, tinged from the outset with the faint scent of something female, a young woman’s wonderful fragrance, like a sign of things to come. Unquestionably, such smells would help determine the course of my life from that point forward.

  I have read Sanshirō several times now, and each time I am reminded of that period in my life. Always the book revives in me that strange sensation I felt upon going to Tokyo and sensing that I was slowly but surely separating from the streets of my home town, from my life as a typical suburban teenage boy, from the security my parents had given me, from the girlfriend I had left behind, and from the values I had known until then. But what had I gained—and what would I gain—to take their place? Of that I could not be sure. Indeed, I had no certainty that there even existed real things that could take their place. I felt both an exhilarating sense of freedom and a terrifying sense of loneliness, like a trapeze artist who has let go of one trapeze before he is sure that the next one is there for him to grab.

  What makes Sanshirō such an outstanding work of fiction, it seems to me, may well be the way its protagonist, Sanshirō, never openly displays this clash between his excitement and his terror. It certainly isn’t there on the surface—in the form of modern novelistic “psychological complications.” In his story, Sanshirō is always an observer. He accepts everything and lets it all pass through him. He does at times make judgments about good and bad, about his likes and dislikes, and he sometimes even offers his impressions with a degree of eloquence, but always in the form of “tentative rulings.” He uses far more psychic energy in seeing than in thinking. He is not so much deciding things as gathering materials for decisions to be made later. His footwork is hardly the lightest; indeed, he can be clumsy, but at the same time he is not hobbled. Sōseki succeeds beautifully in investing this innocent—but still fundamentally intellectual and, in his own way, richly endowed—provincial with a free and open point of view.

  This freedom and openness, coupled with a kind of danger lurking in the background, are simultaneously characteristic of the adolescence of Sanshirō the individual and, perhaps, of the adolescence of Japan itself, that turn-of-the-century period known as “mid-to-late Meiji.” In the youthful Sanshirō’s foot-work and gaze we may be able to see elements in common with a young nation undergoing a growth spurt, its pulse heightened after having cast off the old feudal system, breathing deeply of the newly introduced air of Western culture, and questioning its future direction and goals. But neither in the footwork nor in the gaze do we find a strong consistency. Things happen to be in balance for the moment, but no one can predict how events might cause them to falter.

  One character, however, does seem to sense the danger to come. Professor Hirota, the odd fellow whom Sanshirō chances to meet on the Tokyo-bound train and who will become a mentor to him, offers a harsh assessment of Japan’s fate. Japan might swagger like a first-class power following its victory in the Russo-Japanese War (in 1905, just three years before the novel was written), but as a country, he says, it still has shallow roots. What do the Japanese have to boast of abroad? Mount Fuji? It’s nothing but a natural object that has been there for all time. The Japanese didn’t make it. Japan may give the impression of having modernized, the Professor points out, but it’s all on the surface. Psychologically, the country still has one foot deeply thrust into the pre-modern world.

  Sanshir
ō is not especially patriotic, but the strange man’s words offend him, and he tries his best to defend the country: “But still,” he protests, “Japan will start developing from now on at least.” To which the man replies curtly, “Japan is going to perish.” Sanshirō is shocked, but at the same time he has to admire the man. Yes, he thinks, Tokyo people are different. No one in his home island of Kyushu (an especially conservative region) would dare to say anything so outrageous. “Japan is going to perish.” But Sanshirō never thinks to ask, “Why?”

  You have to look at the world from a broader perspective, the Professor admonishes Sanshirō, and, even more importantly, you have to look hard at yourself. Perhaps he is being deliberately provocative, but his words become a kind of prophesy that hangs over the story—a warning—with regard to both Japan’s latent fragility and, simultaneously, the limits of the psyche of one young Meiji intellectual named Sanshirō.

  Sanshirō is treated to another, more direct, prophesy with regard to the erotic side of things. It is delivered by the woman he meets on the train and with whom, on their stopover in Nagoya, he happens to share a room. As they part the next morning, she gives him a knowing look and says, “You’re quite a coward, aren’t you?”, both mocking and reproaching him for having failed to take any initiative with her during their night together. Sanshirō feels “as if he were being flung onto the platform” when he hears this. He flushes red to the tips of his ears and stays that way for a very long time; he knows that what stopped him from touching her in the night was not morality but a sheer lack of courage. Her feminine intuition enables the woman to jab at his greatest weakness.

  As strongly as he is capable of doing, Sanshirō takes the two shocking prophesies or warnings to heart as he plunges into his new life in Tokyo. In this sense, his train trip from Kyushu to Tokyo is the first in a series of rites of passage for Sanshirō. In terms of myth, the prophesies comprise the first two important motifs for the innocent prince who enters the forest. Will Sanshirō successfully overcome the prophesies or warnings on his journey to maturity? Will the young hero of this coming-of-age myth forge his way into the deep, unknown forest, do battle with his shadow, and take for himself at least part of the treasure of wisdom that awaits him there?