Jay Rubin, a former Harvard academic and Japanese translator, said of Sōseki:
“Natsume Sōseki is two writers: the popular comedian […] and the intellectual’s tragedian of […] Kokoro.” (Rubin 335)
Howard Hibbett, another Harvard academic and Japanese translator, added:
“If [Soseki’s] early novels reflect more clearly the surface changes of his society, it is in the later novels, in which he probes his own darkest psychological problems, that he symbolizes the widespread anxiety beneath those exciting changes.” (Rubin 336)
The duality of Sōseki’s writing reflects that of the Japan he lived in. He was born a year before the 1868 Meiji Restoration, which transformed Japan from a feudal agrarian society to a modern industrial and imperial power. The effects of this seismic change would guide the course of Sōseki’s intellectual career. He wrote about Western influence and modernization, isolation, and individualism in the context of the modern Japan that was emerging around him, and alluded to his complex feelings regarding allegiance to the state. These themes will be explored in depth in the following series of blog posts primarily through the lens of Kokoro, a novel serialized two years before Sōseki passed away in 1916.
Kokoro is split into three acts. The first act opens from the perspective of a nameless narrator, a male university student in late Meiji who meets a mysterious older man he calls Sensei and with whom he slowly forms a mentor-mentee bond. The second act continues from the narrator’s perspective after his graduation and as his father is ailing, forcing the narrator to return to the countryside to tend to him. The third act is a letter written from Sensei to the narrator explaining his tumultuous background and beliefs as well as confessing his sins. Through these three acts, Sōseki grapples with the problem of reconciling tradition with modern Japan and reveals his tormented response.