unaware of his relation to his new guardians, thinking that his parents were more distant relatives. At age 21, he finally regained the family name Natsume, and a year later, adopted the pen name Sōseki, by which name he is commonly known today. His three successive families, the two aborted attempts to give him away, and his four name changes all lent considerable chaos to Sōseki’s first two decades of life.
Sōseki’s own life span (1867–1916) coincided almost exactly with the long reign of Emperor Meiji (1868–1912), and thus with the Meiji Era that witnessed unprecedented change in Japan. Sōseki’s birth succeeded the arrival of Admiral Perry’s “black ships” by only fourteen years. In 1868, when Sōseki was one year old, Emperor Meiji proclaimed his “Five Articles” that ousted the samurai from their seats of power, promoted Western-style education, and opened the door for a wide range of institutional and social reforms. The following decades witnessed a fascination with things Western, leading to sights that would have been unimaginable only a decade earlier. Alongside these cultural changes occurred the tremendous technological and industrial advances that transformed the Japanese economy and urban landscape. Sōseki lived to see the death of Emperor Meiji in 1912, and died four years later, in 1916. The events of Meiji left an indelible mark on him and others of his generation; all of his literary works reflect his preoccupation with the cultural and spiritual dangers associated with such rapid change.
Just as Sōseki moved from house to house as a young child and grew to be a stranger in his own home, not even recognizing his own parents, Sōseki describes the modern Meiji man as straddling cultures, dislocated both from Japan’s past as well as from its future. This modern man, as Sōseki depicts him, has irreparably lost the innocence and moral integrity connected with Japan’s neo-Confucian past, and is at the same time inexorably attracted to modernity, the West, and material success (c.f. Brodey and Tsunematsu, pp. 1–15). As a character says in his novel Kokoro, published in the same year as “My Individualism”: “You see, loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern age, so full of freedom, independence, and our own egotistical selves!” In the two essays reproduced in this volume, Sōseki self-consciously defines the role of art and the artist in light of the loneliness and individualism of the modern world.
Redefining Japanese Literature for a Modern Age
Meiji literary discourse was not immune from the alternating waves of xenophilia and xenophobia that altered the terrains of other areas of Meiji cultural discourse. Bummeikaika (or “civilization and enlightenment”), a cultural movement encouraging rapid modernization and Westernization, made its presence felt
as Meiji authors tried to redefine Japanese literature, particularly Japanese narrative fiction, according to what were perceived as more modern (and Western) standards. The writings of one of the most influential revolutionary Meiji literary critics, Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935), for example, forcefully promoted a shift toward tightly constructed plots with “logical development.” In addition, specific Western authors and movements were chosen as particularly suitable for the new Japan.
Just as Meiji reform leaders attempted to inculcate European scientific method and rationalism through education reform, authors such as Shimazaki Tōson adopted Naturalism and the “scientific novel” from France as a mode suitable to the new level of scientific development in Japan. As a result, Naturalism dominated Japanese literary culture for the first decade of the twentieth century; in fact, it still has a strong presence today, just as it does in American fiction. Few Japanese authors, most notably Mori Ōgai and Sōseki, resisted this movement. In fact, Sōseki’s dislike of Naturalism is one of the motivating forces behind both of the essays in this volume. In “Individualism,” he examines the underlying Japanese “anxiety” behind the need to imitate the West that indirectly led to the excessive admiration for Naturalism. In “The Philosophical Foundations of Literture,” he invokes examples from Zola and Maupassant, as well as Ibsen, to suggest the aesthetic poverty of a realistic depiction of sordid human conditions without the transforming power of beauty, virtue, heroic determination, or even attention to “technique.”
Debates over literature in this same Meiji culture were thinly veiled discussions of national identity, particularly Japan’s place in relation to its expanding world and the “West.” As Etō Jun writes, “No matter how radically they differed from one another in their literary or political opinions, Meiji writers shared in the dominant national mission of their time: the creation of a new civilization that would bring together the best features of East and West, while remaining Japanese at its core” (Etō, p. 603).
Sōseki makes no secret of these two levels of discourse in the essays in this volume: each essay includes individual biographical anecdotes and also invites their allegorical reading as stories about the fate of Japan. Part of this tendency to allegorize his personal experience may stem from his painful awareness of his position as a representative of Japan during his two-year stay in England. It was one year after the influential publication of Ukigumo, Japan’s first “Western” novel, that Sōseki became the first official student sponsored by the Japanese emperor Meiji to study English literature abroad. In “My Individualism,” he mentions the burdensome responsibility he felt on this “unbearable” trip. In Tower of London (London Tō, 1907), he reports that “The two years I spent in London were the most unpleasant two years of my life. Among English gentlemen, I lived like a shaggy dog in a pack of wolves” (Sōseki Zenshū, XI, p. 10, IX, p. 14). After his return, Sōseki received his university position and became a prominent literary figure of the Meiji period, enabling him to help define the new direction of Japanese literature.
“My Individualism” gives us a rare account of his stay in London from the perspective of twelve years after his return, allowing us to see how Sōseki came to understand the profound shift in his thinking about literature that occurred during his stay there. In this essay, he recounts his irritation and sense of helplessness when Englishmen gave their opinions on literature, with which he disagreed. He suffered at not having his own sense of Japanese literature to lend support to his perceptions: “I had no hope of finding salvation if I did not formulate my own basic concept of what literature was.” It is within the pages of the other essay in this volume, “Philosophical Foundations,” that we find one of Sōseki’s principal attempts to provide a cross-cultural framework for the interpretation of literature.
In the pages of both of these essays, we witness Sōseki’s reflections upon the pressures for modernization and Westernization in literature. The helpful combination of the two essays in this volume also allows us better to understand Sōseki’s overall purpose. In creating a theory of literature that is characteristically Japanese, Sōseki wishes to provide Japan with its own literary discourse about the role of literature, satisfying its longing for Western-style philosophy or theory, its need to find a self-conscious approach to literature, and its anxious concern over national identity.
Literary Detours: Prefaces, Apologies, and “Ditches”
The first-time reader of “Foundations” might find the first part of the essay extremely abstruse. If one is not familiar with Sōseki’s writing style, one can find oneself wandering in a desert of abstractions, longing for specific literary examples, and wondering whether one has made any progress toward understanding his central argument. It might help the first-time reader to understand that Sōseki’s serpentine path of argumentation, his apologies, numerous prefaces, self-referential digressions, and even self-professed narratorial “ditches” are part of his self-conscious style and an attempt to combine elements of East and West. In fact, both his Japanese and British literary studies led him to prefer authors who focused on digressive, or “sequential,”
