Natsume Soseki: Father of Modern Japanese Fiction

For most of the 20th century, Natsume Soseki's face was on the Japanese 1,000-yen note. Few writers in any country are quite that canonical, and even fewer deserve it. He is the founding figure of the modern Japanese novel and the most quietly devastating chronicler of late Meiji middle-class life. His students at Tokyo Imperial University included Akutagawa Ryunosuke. He died at 49.

He is also the writer most likely to confuse a new reader. His best novel is unfinished. His most famous one is a meandering satire told from the point of view of a cat. There is no obvious place to begin.

This is the place.

Who Soseki was

Born Natsume Kinnosuke in 1867, the year before the Meiji Restoration that ended the samurai class. He was the youngest of eight children in a Tokyo family that had passed its prime. He was sent to a foster family at birth and shuttled between households for years, an experience he returned to in his fiction.

He studied English literature at the new Tokyo Imperial University, taught at provincial high schools, and was sent by the Japanese government to London in 1900 to study English. The two years there nearly broke him. He wrote later that they were the most unhappy of his life. He came back, taught at Tokyo Imperial, and at 38 began to write fiction.

In the next eleven years he wrote roughly fifteen novels, most of them now considered classics. He died in 1916 of stomach hemorrhage, in the middle of writing what most Japanese critics consider his greatest work, Light and Darkness.

What Soseki's fiction does

He was the first Japanese writer to fully naturalise the European psychological novel into Japanese, and he did it without imitating anyone. His characters are middle-class intellectuals trying to manage the contradiction of being modern Japanese: westernised by training, alienated from their tradition, and not at home in the imported one either. The plots are often quiet on the surface and devastating underneath.

His best novels do something rare: they make you finish the book and then keep thinking about a single conversation in chapter eight for years afterward. Read closely, he is a much better writer than his easy readability suggests.

Where to start

Four novels, in this order.

1. Botchan (1906)

A young Tokyoite, hot-headed and incapable of dishonesty, takes a teaching job at a provincial high school in Shikoku and is immediately surrounded by petty intrigue. He fails to play the political game and goes home. About 200 pages, fast, funny, the most-read novel in Japan after the war. The narrator's voice is one of the great first-person voices in Japanese.

Good entry because it is short, comic, and gives you Soseki's prose without yet asking for emotional commitment.

2. Kokoro (1914)

The novel most often taught in Japanese high schools. A university student in Tokyo befriends an older man he calls Sensei. The first two thirds are the friendship and the student's puzzlement at Sensei's withdrawal from the world. The final third is a long letter from Sensei explaining what happened in his student years that left him unable to live among other people.

Kokoro is the test case for whether you will love Soseki. The first two parts are deliberately slow. The letter at the end pays for everything. Read it without skipping.

3. Sanshiro (1908)

A country boy from Kumamoto comes to Tokyo for university. He meets the city, the women in it, the new science, the old politics. The first part of an unofficial trilogy with And Then (1909) and The Gate (1910). Sanshiro is the loosest and most charming of the three, a portrait of late-Meiji Tokyo as it must have felt to a 22-year-old.

4. Light and Darkness (1916)

Unfinished. Soseki was writing it serially in the Asahi Shimbun when he died. About 600 pages of what would have been Japan's first fully psychological novel of marriage, in the manner of Henry James but more concentrated. The plot follows a recently married couple navigating his ex-fiancee's reappearance.

The novel breaks off mid-sentence. Critics still argue about how it would have ended. Several writers including Mizumura Minae have written sequels. The unfinished version is the version everyone reads.

What to skip at first

Do not start with I Am a Cat. It is brilliant but very long (around 500 pages) and depends on a specific cultural context: the new Meiji middle class, the English-teacher subculture, the satire of imported European philosophy. Read it after Botchan and Kokoro have given you the period.

Do not start with Kusamakura (Grass Pillow). It is a beautiful book but structurally a meditation, almost plotless. Lovely as a third or fourth Soseki, frustrating as a first.

English translations

Most of Soseki is in English. Edwin McClellan's 1957 Kokoro is still in print. J. Cohn's 2006 Botchan is the standard. V. H. Viglielmo translated Light and Darkness in 1971; Mizumura Minae's continuation appeared in 2013, then in English as A True Novel. The translations are generally good. Soseki's prose is plain enough that most translators have not had to fight it.

What you get from him

The most underrated quality in Soseki is his ear for the half-spoken. His characters mean things they do not say, and the gap between what is said and what is meant is always doing the work. After enough Soseki you start to read modern Japanese novels differently and ordinary fiction looks talkier.

He is also, almost in passing, the writer who teaches you what late-Meiji Japan was actually like. The cabs, the boarding houses, the salaries, the obligations to extended family, the tension between western suits and the rest of the wardrobe. No history book gives you the texture this exactly.

Start with Botchan

Botchan is around 200 pages, written for general readers, and you can finish it in a weekend. After that Kokoro is the natural next step. Both are in the public domain in Japan and several English translations are in the public domain in the US. Browse Soseki and other Japanese classics on Pagera.