The Anti-Novel

Natsume Sōseki, author of Kokoro (1914) and I Am a Cat (1905), is often considered the most renowned modern novelist within Japan, so respected in his home country that his face has appeared on the 1,000-yen note. If it’s true that he’s less known in the United States, there has nevertheless been a resurgence of interest in his work during the past ten years, motivated, in large part, by novelist Haruki Murakami’s professed adoration.

The Miner, originally published in 1908, is perhaps his least well-known novel. It’s a strange, nearly plotless story told by a narrator quick to assert his distrust of standard novelistic tropes and expectations. If it had been published forty or fifty years later, it would be natural to call it a postmodernist work. Aardvark Bureau has recently reissued Jay Rubin’s English translation of The Miner, along with a new afterword by the translator and an introduction by Murakami, both of which serve to contextualize the novel among Sōseki’s work.

Such context is rewarding, if not strictly necessary, for those of us discovering the novel in 2016. For The Miner is perhaps more intelligible, in some ways, to the present-day reader than it was to Sōseki’s contemporaries—who, as both Rubin and Murakami note, nearly universally rejected it as a failed work.

As the book begins, we are presented with an unnamed narrator walking through an unnamed wood who has left his home for reasons we are not given and plans to do something that he can’t quite tell us about. If it’s true that later we learn a little more of the narrator’s circumstances—he’s a young man who left Tokyo following a shameful love affair—what we do learn is hardly more than the lightest sketch of his past. In any case it seems to have little bearing on anything that happens in the rest of the novel. And why should it? As the narrator himself says, looking back on these events from his old age:

I don’t believe any more in the existence of “character.” Novelists congratulate themselves on their creation of this kind or that kind of character, and readers pretend to talk knowingly about character, but all it amounts to is that the writers are enjoying themselves writing lies and the readers are enjoying themselves reading lies. In fact, there is no such thing as character, something fixed and final. The real thing is something that novelists don’t know how to write about. Or, if they tried, the end result would never be a novel.

We learn that he is planning to kill himself, or thinks he’s planning to kill himself, or possibly just to die somehow, but he soon meets a man who asks if he wants to become a miner, so he decides to do that instead. “Decides” might be too strong a word, actually. At first he was going to kill himself, then he was going to be a miner. His circumstances changed—he met a labor recruiter—and so he changed, as well.

The remainder of the novel follows the narrator on his path to becoming a miner. Much of it involves the young man himself following the crude and yet oddly compelling labor recruiter through small towns, mountains and roadside hovels. At times during the first half of the novel, I wondered whether the narrator would ever get to the mine itself, or whether part of the joke, as in Tristram Shandy (1759), was that the story would end without ever quite getting to the beginning. Like Tristram Shandy, much of the joy of this novel is in following the narrator’s occasionally interminable digressions. One of the critics noted by Rubin in his afterword, apparently less appreciative of this aspect of the book, complained, “You’d think Sōseki was some kind of antique dealer, the way he attaches a certificate of...