though I was only meeting Mr Kanō for the first time, I tried to be evasive, saying:
“According to your own account you are looking for teachers to serve as instructors, to be a model to the students. I am completely unqualified for such a position.”
Mr Kanō responded:
“You are a competent person. When I hear you reject my suggestion with such honesty, I want you to come and work with us even more.”
He would not let me refuse the job, and, although I was not by nature an acquisitive type who would want to teach in two schools at the same time, I had caused trouble for several people through my lack of maturity. So in the end I decided to go and teach at the Teacher Training College.
However, it was clear at the outset that I did not have the qualifications to be a good teacher, and I am sorry to say that I was very ill at ease. Mr Kanō said it was a pity that I was so honest, and perhaps it would have been better if I had been more devious. However, I could not help thinking that the post did not suit me; to speak plainly, I felt like a fish out of water.
Finally, one year later, I was appointed to a college in the country. It was a college at Matsuyama,1 in Iyo province. I see that you laugh at my mention of Matsuyama College. You have no doubt read my work Botchan. In that novel there is a character whose nickname is “Red Shirt,” and at the time I was asked who this person might be. At that period, I was the only teacher who had a degree, so if we want to find real people behind every character in Botchan, well, it must have been me hiding behind “Red Shirt.” I want to tell you that this is very lucky for me.
I lived in Matsuyama only for a year. The prefect asked me to stay there, but since I had already given my word to another establishment I could not accede to his request and I moved on to somewhere else. This time I went to Kumamoto2 high school. Looking at it chronologically, I acquired my teaching experience at the college, the high school, and then at the university. I have yet to try a primary school or a girls’ school.
I lived in Kumamoto for a long time. Then, I unexpectedly received a confidential note from the Ministry of Education. They were offering to send me to London for studies. I had spent quite a few years in Kumamoto, had I not? At the time I was thinking of refusing the offer: after all, I told myself, what use to the nation would it be for me to go abroad with no particular objective? However, the principal professor, who was the intermediary who informed me of the secret plans of the Ministry, said, “It is they who make the assessment. It isn’t up to you to assess yourself. In any case it’s best for you to go.” So, as I had no reason to refuse, I obeyed the Minister’s order and went to England. But as I had expected, I had nothing to do there.
To explain this to you, I must tell you what I did before I went abroad. The story I am going to tell you is part of the lecture I am giving today and I ask you to listen carefully.
At university I specialized in English literature. Perhaps you are going to ask me exactly what I mean by “English literature.” For me, after three years of study, it was as hazy as a dream. Dixon3 was my professor: he made us read poems and prose extracts aloud in class; he made us write essays; he snarled at us when we forgot articles, and got himself into a temper when we made mistakes in pronunciation. In the examination he asked us for the dates of the birth and death of Wordsworth, the number of pages in Shakespeare’s manuscripts, and even a chronological list of the works of Walter Scott. That is the only type of question he set for us.
However young you may be, you can doubtless understand what I am saying. When I wondered what English literature was, and when I wondered first what literature itself was, temporarily leaving aside English literature, I of course had no answer to the question. If I had been told “You only have to read it yourself to understand!,” I would have retorted that that would be like a blind man looking through a fence. I could not find anything in the library that caught my eye, however long I browsed over the shelves. This was not simply because of a lack of willingness on my part, but also because the available resources were poor in the field of English literature. In any case, I studied for three years, and at the end of it I had understood nothing about literature. And I am forced to admit to you that this was the source of the torments I was to suffer.
I set out on my working life with this ambivalent attitude. Rather than say that I became a teacher, it would be better to say that circumstances led me into that profession. By good luck, as my linguistic skills were not strong, the different subterfuges I used every day managed to keep me out of trouble. However, in my heart I had a profound sense of emptiness. In fact, if it had been genuine emptiness, I would have been able to deal with it, but the deep dissatisfaction I felt, tainted with irresolution and ambiguity, was unbearable; to crown it all, I was not in the least interested in my adopted profession of teacher. From the outset I knew that I did not have the right temperament to be a teacher. Teaching in class already bored me. How could I help it? I felt turned in on myself, as if I were getting ready to disappear into my own world. But did that world exist, yes or no? No matter in which direction I looked, I didn’t dare disappear anywhere.
“Since I was born into this world, I must do something in it,” I told myself, but I had not the faintest idea of what was good for me. I remained paralyzed, like an isolated being surrounded by mist. I expected at least one ray of sunshine to penetrate the darkness, or, even better, I would have liked to have a searchlight so that I could see clearly before me. But a single ray would have been enough. Unfortunately, no matter where I looked, everything was indistinct, confused. I had the impression of being trapped in a bag which I could not get out of. “If I had a gimlet I could make a hole in this bag and escape from it,” I thought, impatient in the extreme to get out of it. But, alas, no one gave me a gimlet and I was incapable of finding one myself. I spent dark days within myself speculating on what was to become of me.
In the grip of this anguish, I graduated from the university. Spurred on by it, I moved from Matsuyama to Kumamoto and then I left Japan with the same anxiety. As soon as you begin to study outside your own country you become aware of new responsibilities. I worked as hard as I could and did my utmost to achieve something. But, whatever book I read, I never managed to come out of the bag. However much I paced the city of London in search of a gimlet to rip the bag, I would never have discovered one, I believe. In my room in the boarding house, I began to reflect. The situation was absurd. “There is no point in reading all these books,” I told myself, and then I gave up. I no longer saw any reason to read the books.
At that moment, I understood for the first time that I had no hope of finding salvation if I did not formulate my own basic concept of what literature was. Until then I had floated at random, like a rootless aquatic plant, relying entirely on the opinions of others. At last I became aware that I had reached an impasse. When I say that I based myself on the opinions of others, I mean that I was an imitator, like someone who makes others drink his liquor, then asks them their opinion on it and makes it his own, even if it is wrong. It must seem odd to you when I put it like this, and you may doubt that there are such imitators in reality. In fact, there really are.
Recently, Westerners have been talking a great deal about Bergson4 and Eucken.5The Japanese also, behaving like Panurge’s sheep,6 are making a good deal of fuss about them. In my time, it was even worse. If you came across any suggestion from a Westerner, whatever it might be, you adopted the point of view blindly and with great affectation. Whatever the occasion, people littered their speech with foreign words, recommended them to their neighbors, and considered themselves very intelligent in so doing. Everyone, or almost everyone, wanted to do the same thing. I am not maligning other people: in fact, I have behaved like this myself. For example, if I read a critique by a Westerner of a book written by a Westerner, I would spread the ideas all over the place, whether or not I understood them, not thinking at all about the proper merits of the judgement. I would stroll around arrogantly talking about some subject which was foreign to me, which was not in any sense my own, deriving from my own being. It did
