Sensei describes himself as initially having a “generous nature”, but with a streak of suspicion that led him “not only to suspect the motives of individual persons but to doubt even the integrity of all mankind.” (Sōseki 130) Like with K, each isolating event that Sensei undergoes is inextricably linked to Japan’s modernization, and a vehicle for Sōseki’s criticism of modern Japan.
Sensei suffers the loss of both of his parents at once due to typhoid fever. Although his family was quite well-off in the countryside, he is sent to Tokyo according to his mother’s alleged last wishes. His uncle assumes control of his parents’ estate; but, as Sensei discovers later, used his position to steal the majority of Sensei’s rightful assets. In this first tragedy that Sensei encounters, Sōseki deliberately associates Sensei’s move to the city and receiving an education with the motifs of isolation and betrayal to convey what how he saw loneliness as “the price for being born in an age of individualism.” (Hibbett 339) The weakening of collective units like family in modern Japan is thus a theme that echoes throughout Kokoro. Sensei’s betrayal of K for his own self-interest mirrors his uncle’s betrayal of him, and causes him to lose faith in humanity altogether. Finally, he betrays his wife by committing suicide, knowing how his absence in death would affect her. Even with her, Sensei could not bear his heart: “Often, I was on the verge of telling her everything […] I simply did not wish to taint her whole life with the memory of something that was ugly.” (Sōseki 237)
Kokoro’s most prominent English language translator, Edwin McClellan, offers an interesting perspective on Sensei and K’s suicides in Kokoro:
“Simply because we understand death to be the cessation of life, many of us have come to regard life and death as opposite conditions, negating each other. But to the author of Kokoro, death is not merely the only escape from loneliness in life, as in the case of Sensei and K, but the clearest confirmation of the truth about every man’s life; namely, that the profoundest experiences which each of us undergoes are not communicable to others. There will always be an insurmountable wall between two people, no matter how much they may love each other.” (McClellan 367)
Sōseki thus portrays isolation as an ultimately universal human condition, but one that was badly exacerbated by Japan’s modernization. University of Rochester academic David Pollock sums up Sōseki’s intentions with the contention that “Sōseki apparently saw this breakdown in human relations in large part as the inevitable result of a society whose values had come to be based exclusively on the possession of money.” (Pollack 419)
The narrator, meanwhile, is in many ways a younger version of Sensei that holds views and commits acts that Sōseki is careful to depict as mistakes, and specific to modern Japan. When the narrator visits his home in the countryside where his parents live, he makes several comments on the provinciality of the countryside and longs to return to Tokyo. Furthermore, in a betrayal of the Confucian value of filial piety, the narrator leaves his father on his deathbed to seek out Sensei in Tokyo after receiving his suicide letter - via a train, no less. In Sōseki’s Kokoro, modernity facilitates betrayal.
The triggers for Sensei and the narrator's father's deaths will be discussed in a pair of later blog posts: Allegiance to the State in Modern Japan and Individualism in Modern Japan.