LITMIR.BIZ

      In the spring of 2000, to recognize the millennium, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper conducted a nation-wide survey asking the Japanese people who they considered was the best Japanese writer of the past one thousand years. Sōseki Natsume was the first choice among readers. Murasaki Shikibu, author of The Tale of Genji, was ranked second. Matsuo Bashō, the great haiku poet, ranked sixth. Similarly, there was a great outcry in the fall of 2002 when proposed high school textbooks submitted for approval by the Ministry of Education did not include selections from the oeuvre of Sōseki Natsume. Clearly Sōseki is a literary institution in Japan, an author whose work has spoken to generations of Japanese readers, an author who, eighty years after his death, still dominates Japan's literary scene.

      More perhaps than any other Japanese writer, the bulk of Sōseki's works have been translated into English, and yet there still remain a host of letters, diaries, poems, and short early works which are unknown outside Japan. These early works are of particular interest because they reveal the extent to which Sōseki was a protean, ever experimental writer, seeking a medium, themes, and methodology that would allow him to express his ideas clearly.

      Nearly four decades ago, Professor Edwin McClellan performed a great service when he outlined for English readers the progression of themes in Sōseki's major novels. In this progression, McClellan shows a particular line of philosophical development in Sōseki's work. Today, we have a chance to look at Sōseki's shorter work and see the rich creativity and diversity he brought to his writing.

      Shumi no iden, translated here as The Heredity of Taste, was written in December 1905 just following the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War the previous September, and it stands as Sōseki's response to this great and tragic war. This is Sōseki's only work of anti-war literature, and in some ways it marks him as a renegade in Meiji society. The response of the Japanese public to this war was highly ambivalent. On the one hand, the war confirmed Japan's maturity as a modern nation. The proof of this was that she had engaged a major European power in war and had come away the victor. In an age which firmly believed that no non Euro-American people could defeat Europeans in war, Japan had done just that. Admiral Togo had destroyed the Russian naval fleet at Tsushima, and General Nogi had broken General Stoessel's defense of Port Arthur. This victory established Japan's position as the strongest military power in East Asia and guaranteed her a seat as one of the five major victorious nations at the Treaty of Versailles following World War I. In other words, Japan had arrived as a modern world power.

      This success, however, had cost Japan dearly both in economic terms and, more significantly, in terms of blood shed by its youth. While patriotism and nationalism were at a fever pitch throughout the nation, there were some who began to question the price Japan had paid for this victory. And when the Treaty of Portsmouth, brokered by President Teddy Roosevelt, left Japan without $600,000,000 in reparations to recoup the cost of the war, there was a huge outcry in Japan against

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