The 210th Day
Sōseki Natsume (1867-1916) is widely considered the foremost novelist of the Meiji period (1868-1914). After graduating from Tokyo Imperial University in 1893, Sōseki taught high school before spending two years in England on a Japanese government scholarship. He returned to lecture in English literature at the university. Numerous nervous disorders forced him to give up teaching in 1908 and he became a full-time writer for the Asahi newspaper. In addition to fourteen novels, Sōseki wrote haiku, poems in the Chinese style, academic papers on literary theory, essays, autobiographical sketches and fairy tales.
Sammy I. Tsunematsu is founder and curator of the Sōseki Museum in London, and the translator of several of Sōseki's works. He has also researched and published widely on the Japanese artist Yoshio Markino, who was a contemporary of Sōseki's living in London at the beginning of the twentieth century. Tsunematsu has lived in Surrey, England, for nearly thirty years.
Sōseki Natsume
The 210th Day
Translated by Sammy I. Tsunematsu
With an introduction by Marvin Marcus
TUTTLE PUBLISHING
Boston • Rutland, Vermont • Tokyo
Published by Tuttle Publishing
an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd,
with editorial offices at 364 Innovation Drive, North Clarendon, VT 05759 U.S.A. and 61 Tai Seng Avenue, #02-12 Singapore 534167.
Originally published in Japanese as Nihyaku Toka, 1915
English translation © Sammy I. Tsunematsu, 2002
First Tuttle edition, 2002
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information
storage and retrieval system, without prior permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging Card No. 2002102259
ISBN 978-1-4629-0209-5
The Translator would like to acknowledge the assistance of
John Edmondson who kindly read through the English version
and made many helpful changes.
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Contents
Plates between pp 48 & 49
Introduction
Sōseki Natsume (1867-1916) is a Japanese icon. A native of the great shogunal capital of Edo, Sōseki was one year old when the Meiji Restoration established Japan as a modern nation and the city of his birth was renamed Tokyo. His lifetime almost perfectly overlaps the course of Japan's extraordinary modernization in the Meiji era (1868-1912). By the time of Sōseki's death in 1916, Japan had become an Asian empire. Not quite seventy years later, Sōseki's face would adorn the national currency, in the form of the 1000-yen banknote.
Sōseki Natsume was one of a handful of writer-intellectuals whose lives and work came to epitomize the age in which they lived—an age that resonates powerfully among Japanese and those with an interest in Japan. Like many of his contemporaries, Sōseki lived at a crossroads where his East Asian cultural heritage and taste for "traditional" arts and styles intersected with a passion for modern intellectual inquiry and knowledge of the West. Initially schooled in the Chinese classics, Sōseki was among the first students at the Imperial University to major in English. He went on to specialize in English literature and spent two years in England at the turn of the century, immersed in literary study
Sōseki Natsume's mastery of English literature and modern literary theory was unsurpassed when he returned to Japan and assumed a prestigious academic position at the Imperial University There was every reason to believe that the young scholar would find a comfortable niche at the university However, the stultifying academic routine proved irksome, and his own literary creations were beginning to earn him a widespread reputation.
The budding author, who had experienced serious melancholia and depression during his stay overseas, was a man of peevish, dyspeptic temperament—a quality reflected both in his fiction and his assorted personal writings. Indeed, Sōseki's assorted neuroses have long been a fixture of modern Japanese literary lore and the subject of endless biographical study and speculation over the years.
Gradually souring on academic life, Sōseki took the unprecedented step of accepting a position with the Asahi shinbun, a leading newspaper, as staff writer. By this time, he had already published two remarkable novels—Wagahai wa Neko de aru (I am a Cat, 1905), a brilliantly sardonic portrayal of human pecadilloes, as narrated by the family cat; and Botchan (1906), a loosely autobiographical account of the youthful experiences of its memorable protagonist.
The Asahi position, which Sōseki assumed in 1907, called for the writing of shinbun shôsetsu— so-called "newspaper fiction"—which entailed daily serialization of ones work. For a decade, this work would be part of the regular reading diet of the nation's readers, and in due course he emerged as Japan's "novelist-laureate". His mature works— most notably Kokoro (1914) and Michikusa (Grass on the Wayside, 1915)—are undisputed masterpieces of modern Japanese fiction.
Sōseki
