Born: Natsume Kinnosuke in Tokyo, Japan, 9 February 1867. Education: Educated at schools in Tokyo; Tokyo Imperial University, 1890-93. Family: Married Nakane Kvoko in 1896; five daughters. Career: Taught at Tokyo Normal College, 1894-95; Middle School, Matsuyama, 1895-1900; lived in England, 1900-02; Professor of English, Tokyo Imperial University, 1903-07. Member of the staff, Tetsugaku Zasshi, 1892; associated with Asahi from 1907: in charge of literary columns from 1909. Awards: Honorary doctorate: Ministry of Education (refused). Died: 9 December 1916.
Publications
Collections
Zenshu [Complete Works], edited by Komiya Toyataka. 34 vols., 1956-59.
Zenshu. 16 vols., 1965-67.
Fiction
Rondon-To (story). 1905; as The Tower of London, translated by Peter Milward and Kii Nakano, 1992.
Wagahai wa neko de aru. 2 vols., 1905-07; as I Am a Cat, translated by K. Ando, 1906, revised by K. Natsume, 2 vols., 1906-09; also translated by Katsue Shibata and Motonari Kai, 1971 (vol. 1), and A. Ito and G. Wilson, 1980 (vol. 2).
Yokyoshu [Drifting in Space] (stories). 1906.
Botchan. 1906; as Botchan (Master Darling), translated by Yasotaro Morri, 1918; as Botchan, translated by Umeji Sasaki, 1968; also translated by Alan Turney, 1972.
Kusamakura. 1906; as Kusamakura, translated by Umeji Sasaki, 1927; as Unhuman Tour, translated by Kazutomo Takahashi, 1927; as The Three-Cornered World, translated by Alan Turney, 1965.
Ni hyaku toka [The Two Hundred and Tenth Day]. 1906.
Nowaki [Autumn Wind]. 1907.
Uzurakago [Basket of Quails] (includes Botchan; Kusamakura; Ni hyaku toka). 1907.
Gubijinso [The Poppy]. 1908.
Kofu [Miner]. 1908,
Yume juya. 1908; as Ten Nights’ Dream, translated by Sankichi Hata and Dofu Shirai, with Our Cat’s Grave, 1934.
Sanshiro. 1908; as Sanshiro, translated by Jay Rubin, 1977.
Sorekara. 1910; as And Then, translated by Norma Moore Field, 1978.
Mon. 1911; as Mon, translated by Francis Mathy, 1972.
Higan Sugi made [Until after the Equinox]. 1912.
Kojin. 1914; as The Wayfarer, translated by Beongcheon Yu, 1967; as The Wanderer, translated by Yu, 1967.
Kokoro. 1914; as Kokoro, translated by Ineko Sato, 1941; also translated by Ineko Kondon, 1956; Edwin McClellan, 1957.
Garasudo no naka. 1915; as Within My Glass Doors, translated by Iwao Matsuhara and E.T. Iglehart, 1928.
Michikusa. 1915; as Grass on the Wayside, translated by Edwin McClellan, 1969.
Meian (incomplete). 1917; as Light and Darkness, translated by V.H. Viglielmo, 1971.
Ten Nights’ Dream, and Our Cat’s Grave, translated by Sankichi Hata and Dofu Shirai. 1934.
Ten Nights of Dream, Hearing Things, The Heredity of Taste, translated by Aiko It5 and Graeme Wilson. 1974.
Other
Eibungaku keishiki ron [Theory of Form in English Literature]. 1903.
Bungakuron [Theory of Literature]. 1907.
Bungaku hyoron [Literary Criticism]. 1909.
Kirinukicho yori [Random Recollections]. 1911.
Shakai to jibun [Society and I]. 1913.
Zen Haiku: Poems and Letters of Natsume Soseki , translated and edited by Soiku Shigematsu. 1994.
Critical Studies:
Natsume Soseki by Beongcheon Yu (in English), 1969; Two Japanese Novelists: Soseki and Toson by Edwin McClellan, 1969; Essays on Natsume’s Works, 1970; Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel by Masao Miyoshi, 1974; Natsume Soseki as a Critic of English Literature by Matsui Sakuko, 1975; The Psychological World of Natsume Soseki by Takeo Doi, 1976; Soseki’s Development as a Novelist until 1907: With Special Reference to the Genesis, Nature and Position in His Work of Kusa Makura by Alan Turney, 1985; Three Modern Novelists: Soseki, Tanizaki, Kawabata by Van C. Gessel, 1993; Rereading Soseki: Three Early Twentieth-century Japanese Novels by Reiko Abe Auestad, 1998; Chaos and Order in the Works of Natsume Soseki by Angela Yiu, 1998.
One of the leading figures at the formative stage of Japan’s ”modern” prose fiction, Natsume S5seki is still widely read and highly revered. Acutely aware of the nation’s cultural and historical fissure that resulted from the exposure to Western hegemony, he saw the problems of a rapid change everywhere. The inherited values and customs had to be reexamined in the light of new and ”rational” knowledge, but this freshly acquired modern insight, too, required authentication both for its legitimacy and adaptability. His earlier studies of English literature may have led him to believe that historical discontinuity was universal, as it was in some sense. The notion of universalism and centrality of the West was, however, not unmixed with a conviction about Japan’s distinctness and orientalness. As has been the case with most serious Japanese writers since, the major motif of his work from beginning to end was a struggle to make the competing claims somehow compatible and to contain the incongruous and contradictory within the narrative form he had to forge.
Reflecting the deep cultural fracture, Natsume’s form and style are both traditional and experimental. His attachment to ”pre-modern” Edo culture is evident throughout his work: in the colloquialism of the dialogue, the narrator’s reference to the commonplace in arts, and the choice of familiar and vulgar characters in the older quarters of Tokyo, which together serve to deflate the pompous pretentions of the newly emerging bureaucracy. Also unmistakable is his fascination with a dense verbal texture—puns, parodies, and periphrases—which he discovered in 18th-century gesaku (playful writing) books and their entertainment-hall descendants. This, together with his intimate knowledge of Chinese classics, foregrounds Natsume’s writing in the art of eloquence. Especially in his earliest works such as Wagahai wa Neko de aru ( I Am a Cat), Botchan, and Kusamakura (The Three-Cornered World), Natsume’s still youthful buoyancy and energy are at times defined in the imagery and rhetoric of Edo fiction. Natsume, however, was also a ”modern” intellectual obsessed with the crisis of alienation. Hero after hero in his works broods darkly and endlessly over his personal isolation and cultural insularity. Mr. Hirota (”Great Darkness”) in Sanshiro, Daisuke in Sorekara (And Then), and the Sensei in Kokoro are such characters confronting the blind alley of bourgeois life. And in such writing, Natsume’s grammar, too, takes on the vocabulary and syntax of an unidiomatic ”translation style.”
The sentence in Kokoro (meaning Heart) is dominated by the first-person pronoun. As in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (which Natsume is most likely to have read), the multiple narrators of the work are guides for the reader on a journey inward to glimpse the darkest core of the interior. Deaths abound, and the disrupted narrative sequence finally leads to the starting point that was already a dead end. The central character’s suicide silences the story at the end.
By the time of Natsume’s death Japan had been embarking on its own program of expansionism into the Asian continent. His last work, Meian (Light and Darkness), intimates a firmer will to face the national and social issues with clarity and irony. A bourgeois critic of Imperial Japan, Natsume still remains perhaps the most thoughtful of writers produced by 20th-century Japan.
