Sōseki: Modern Japan's Greatest Novelist by John Nathan (review)

On 29 November 1911, Natsume Sōseki's (1867–1916) fifteen-month-old daughter, Hinako, experienced a seizure while a maid was feeding her dinner. According to his wife, Kyōko, at the time Sōseki was in another room talking to an editor from the newspaper Asahi shinbun and initially ignored cries for help from his three older children. Hinako was prone to seizures, and he assumed that she would recover. But this time, the usual treatment of splashing water in her face did not work, and she died.

In Sōseki: Modern Japan's Greatest Novelist, John Nathan tells the story of this tragedy by drawing on Soseki's diary, Kyōko's memoir, and Soseki's recasting of the event as fiction in the novel he was serializing at the time. The chapter is Nathan's most moving, and it exemplifies his biographical method. He has sifted through the mountains of information we have on Sōseki, chosen the most significant events, and brought them to life by a few powerful details. One example from this chapter: after describing the cremation of Hinako's body, Nathan informs us that the fee was normally ten yen "but because Hinako was a child, it was reduced to six" (p. 207).

By selecting only those biographical facts that provide meaningful emotional insight into Sōseki's life and works, Nathan keeps his main text to within three hundred pages while still covering the main events of the novelist's life and his relationships with his wife and children; his close friend, the haiku poet Masaoka Shiki; and the group of admiring male disciples on whom he showered affection and mentorship. Interwoven throughout are elegant capsule readings of ten of his major novels, several of his shorter works of fiction, his massive Bungakuron (Theory of Literature), his memoir Omoidasu koto nado (Recollecting and Other Matters), and his work as a haiku poet.

On the whole, the picture Nathan paints of Sōseki is a dark one: a writer preoccupied above all else with the tragic realization that "communication between two people, not to mention love, is impossible" (p. 237). Nathan sketches the events that shaped this worldview, beginning with the deep wounds that Sōseki suffered as a child from his parents, who put him up for adoption twice before he was four years old. Then came a series of losses: two older brothers died of tuberculosis in 1887, when Sōseki was twenty-one, and Shiki would die of the same disease in 1902. Two years spent in London from 1900 to 1902, while productive intellectually, were miserable on a personal level, and Sōseki began to suffer from paranoid delusions, a sickness that would follow him home to Tokyo in 1903.

Sōseki began to emerge from this difficult period with the serialization of his first novel, Wagahai wa neko de aru (I Am a Cat), in January 1905. The short stories Rondon-tō (The Tower of London) and Kairo kō (A Dirge) came in the same year, and by December, Nathan writes, his "creative energy geysered" (p. 90). Even as he continued with I Am a Cat in 1906, Sōseki brought out novel after novel at an extraordinary pace, finishing Botchan in eleven days in March and dashing off Kusamakura (which Nathan translates as Grass for a Pillow) in a single week in August. The same year, he also published the short novels Nihyaku tōka (The 210th Day) and Shumi no iden (The Heredity of Taste), all while teaching full time as a professor of British literature at Tokyo Imperial University. Writing in the preface to Bungakuron (1907) in what Nathan calls a "quirky manner that was one of his standard modes," Sōseki declared himself grateful for his "nervous condition and insanity" because they had enabled him to produce so much (p. 115). On the basis of his record, he secured a contract with the Asahi...