LITMIR.BIZ

      Introduction

      A Crisis of Belonging

      From his earliest years, Sōseki Natsume (or Natsume Kinnosuke, as he was born), experienced a series of crises concerning his sense of belonging and identity. The sad events of the first years of his life led to a powerful sense of dislocation that permeates his oeuvre. As we shall see in the important essays now available in English for the first time in this volume, his personal experiences led him to consider the philosophical and cultural significance of human isolation from a variety of perspectives. It is impossible to say whether Sōseki would have been as preoccupied with issues of isolation and belonging if he had not also lived in Meiji Japan—a culture obsessed with the issues regarding belonging and identity that arise from rapid change and dissociation from one’s past. In any case, although a genius in his own right, the similarity between his individual concerns and the broader cultural concerns of the Meiji period enhanced the reception of his work and led him to become one of Japan’s most important modern authors. His popularity is witnessed in contemporary material culture by the fact that Sōseki’s face still circulates in Japan on the ¥1000 note—an honor that Sōseki might have declined, had he had the opportunity to do so, just as he declined many other public honors.

      Sōseki’s parents were upper-class administrators who found their social standing suddenly undercut with the fall of the feudal system, as the Tokugawa Shogunate collapsed. Partially because of their financial embarrassments, they gave their youngest son Kinnosuke to a local greengrocer. The green-grocers, busy with their daily work, neglected Kinnosuke, leaving him outside their shop in a basket. Finally, taking pity upon her young brother lying outside in the cold, one of Kinnosuke’s sisters brought him home to his original parents. His parents gave him away again after a year, this time to a childless former servant named Shiobara and his wife. Domestic troubles eventually led the couple to divorce, and Kinnosuke returned to his original family. Kinnosuke, however, was 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

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