“Under the sun the couple presented smiles to the world,” Sōseki writes, in one of his most beautiful sentences here; “under the moon, they were lost in thought: And so they had quietly passed the years.” At one point Oyone asks her husband, “How are things going for Koroku?”
“Not well at all,” he answers, and with that they both go to sleep.
How to adjust to a world in which the climax of a scene—and sometimes the central event—is going to sleep? We’re going to have to adapt, maybe even invert our sense of priority and our assumptions about what constitutes drama, as most of us foreigners have to do when traveling to Japan. Sōseki is an unusually intimate writer—the public world is only his concern by implication—and in Japan (again as in the England that I know) intimacy is shown not by all that you can say to someone else, but by all that you don’t need to say.
Thus the very fact that Sōsuke and Oyone express so little to each other in the novel seems almost to intensify the depth of their shared past; their silences say plenty. While never showing the couple touching or quite baring their hearts, Sōseki evinces a sense of closeness—you could call it love—so intense that when one of them falls ill, it becomes hard to read of the other one’s fears. It’s everything that doesn’t get externalized that knits them together in a community of two: One central scene finds Sōsuke returning to his home to discover everyone, unsettlingly, asleep; and in perhaps the novel’s most magical moment, Oyone simply walks around their house, watching her husband, then her maid in sleep. Much of the novel suggests the silent, only half-shared agitation of a couple, one of whose partners falls instantly asleep, while the other tosses and turns, wide awake.
Indeed, it’s typical of the predicament—and the devotion—around which the novel turns that one partner realizes that to wake up the other might be to cause suffering; yet not to do so may be to allow a worse suffering to develop. And the arrival of any outsider, whether Sōsuke’s aunt or his brother, only deepens our sense of the bond between Oyone and her husband. Sōseki was suffering from acute stomach pains while he wrote The Gate—they would lead to his death six years later—so perhaps it’s no surprise that even a wind in the novel is so strong it can “send people into depression.”
The fact of nothing happening becomes a source of almost unbearable tension in nearly all of Sōseki’s novels. His protagonists keep waiting to be exposed, or for something to explode (again you can see how Ishiguro might have learned to create suspense from Sōseki, just by having a character try to outrun a past that’s always gaining on him). Since Sōseki’s people are nearly always hard up, and bound by many conflicting obligations, they’re already paralyzed in a practical sense. And since they seem terrified of dependence on others—Sōseki himself was raised by a family not his own and appears never to have outgrown the unsettledness that brought him—their only way of claiming independence is by sitting in a prison they’ve made themselves.
The challenge of a novel like The Gate is to find a way to turn inaction into a kind of higher detachment, suggestive of the sage’s refusal to be swayed by the vicissitudes of the world. One of the first things that may hit a Western reader on entering the world of a Japanese novel—though of course you can find this in Edith Wharton, too—is how every character is effectively a tiny figure in a suffocating world of associations and obligations; where many an American novel might send its protagonist out into the world to make his own destiny, in Sōsuke’s Japan he cannot move for all his competing (and unmeetable) responsibilities to his aunt, his younger brother, his wife, and society itself.
Free will is not an option; for Sōsuke it would be all but heresy even to reflect on his individual longings. “For some reason I have become terribly serious since arriving here,” Sōseki wrote, in his “Letter from London,” a year after his arrival in England. “Looking and listening to everything around me, I think incessantly of the problem of ‘Japan’s future.’” Its future, then as now, involves trying to make a peace, or form a synthesis, between the ancient Chinese ideal of sitting still and watching the seasons pass, tending to social harmonies, and the new American way of pushing forward individually, convinced that tomorrow will be better than today.
It’s no wonder that so many of Sōseki’s characters are prematurely old; this is an old man’s—an old culture’s—vision, in which the past has much greater vividness than the future. Yet his people don’t feel nostalgia toward what’s passed so much as skepticism toward the prospect of getting a new life. New Year’s Day, the central festival of the Japanese calendar, features in many of Sōseki’s books, as here, and it has resonance mostly because, for figures such as Sōsuke and Oyone, there seems scant possibility of starting anew or turning a fresh page.
When Sōseki traveled to England, he complained that he couldn’t even “trust myself to a train or cab . . . their cobweb system was so complicated.” He felt patronized by the cleaning women and landladies who tried to explain their culture to him (already a teacher of English literature), and both pride and insecurity arose as he felt himself superior to people who (physically) were always looking down on him. But if you read the novels, you begin to suspect that this sense of imprisonment was simply something he took with him on the boat to England. Not only is his take on standoffish and ghostly England startlingly similar to a foreigner’s response—even today—to Japan; the England he evokes, of class distinctions and wraiths and people falling on hard times, is almost identical to the Japan he describes in book after book.
In his dismissals of the “lower class” barbarians he meets and the way his bleak London boardinghouses are so far from what English literature led him to expect, he sounds in fact very much like V. S. Naipaul half a century later; yet, much like Naipaul, Sōseki, for all his unease in Britain, could seem a strikingly European figure when he went back to Tokyo, affecting a frock coat, a mustache, and a love of beef and toast. It is one of the curiosities of Japan, ever since the Meiji Restoration, that its identity has been defined largely by an identity crisis; to this day, both Japanese and those foreigners who contemplate the country keep wondering if it’s leaning too much toward an outdated Confucian past or toward an unsteady Californian future. Whether progress is cyclical or linear—should people honor their ancestors or their ambitions?—sometimes seems the central question in Japan. Sōseki is one of the first writers to make it the heart of his concerns, telling individual stories that seem to speak allegorically for something much larger.
Yet what a novel like The Gate only slowly discloses is that all the talk of no thing happening and all the meticulous avoidance of conflict and feeling speaks only for too much feeling in the past. Sōseki had an uncommonly acute sense of the power of passion—“It is the force of blood that drives the body,” he writes in his late novel, Kokoro—even if he chooses to concentrate on those moments when people live with the embers of what was once a devouring blaze. The problem is not that a character like Sōsuke “hated socializing”; it is that, once upon a time, he was “exquisitely socialized,” a flamboyant “bright young man of the modern age,” whose prospects seemed “boundless.” It’s only his acting too strongly that has condemned him to a life of inaction.
It takes awhile for a Western reader, perhaps, to realize that in Sōseki’s novels, as in Japan, external details are not just decoration; they’re the main event. It’s as if foreground and background are reversed, so that it’s the ads in the streetcars, the sound of laughter from a neighbor’s house, the talk about the price of fish that are in fact the emotional heart of the story. A man is robbed in The Gate and we read on excitedly to see what has happened. But when the victim is revealed, he “did not appear in the least ruffled” and sits at home with a palpable sense of well-being, talking about his dog who’s off at the vet’s.
It’s easy to suspect that this is the character who’s found the peace that all Sōseki’s characters long for, just by sitting apart from events and not letting them affect his joie de vivre. In
deed, his confidence is rewarded by his receiving back the item that was stolen from him. By the end of the novel, though unmoved by Confucius and all talk of Buddhism, Sōseki’s protagonist suddenly takes off on a ten-day retreat to a Zen temple in the mountains, and there discovers a world in which the fact of nothing happening can be a kind of blessing.
Nothing can be known or controlled, Zen training teaches; the only thing you can do is scrub floors and do your rounds and perhaps clear your head in the process. Enlightenment comes nowhere but in the everyday; self-realization arrives only when you throw self—and any idea of realization—out the window. Accept life and what it gives you and then you become a part of it.
It may seem strange that Japan’s favorite novelist was an anxious, passive, haunted character writing about nervous disorders and falling asleep and paralysis (even the dog at the vet’s is suffering from a “nervous ailment”). But it speaks for an inner world—and again this is evident in Murakami—that sits in a different dimension from the smooth-running, flawlessly attentive, and all but anonymous machine that keeps public order moving forward so efficiently in Japan. Perhaps the novel has always been one way in which the individual can get his own back at the world; perhaps this is even one of the more useful souvenirs Sōseki brought back from his life-changing stay in England. One of his most celebrated essays, the text of a lecture delivered two years before his death, was called “My Individualism,” and in it he spoke out about a “nationalism” that, only a generation later, would indeed become poisonous.
Nothing is happening on the surface of his characters’ lives even as so much around them seems a whirlwind of movement and perpetual self-reinvention. But each of these may be as deceiving as the other, as evidenced by the fact that, after a century of turmoil and convulsive change, Japan seems not so different, in its questions, from where it was in Sōseki’s time. In Sōseki, as in Japan, it’s the fact of nothing happening that makes for a tingle of expectation, a sense of imminent passion, and, in the end, the kind of privacy that stings.
—PICO IYER
THE GATE
1
SŌSUKE had been relaxing for some time on the veranda, legs comfortably crossed on a cushion he had set down in a warm, sunny spot. After a while, however, he let drop the magazine he had been holding and lay down on his side. It was a truly fine autumn day, the sun bright, the air crisp, and the clatter of wooden clogs passing through the quiet neighborhood echoed in his ears with a heightened clarity. Tucking one arm under his head, he cast his gaze past the eaves at the expanse of clear blue sky above. Compared to the tiny space he occupied here on the veranda, this patch of sky appeared extremely vast. Thinking what a difference it made, simply to take in the sky in the rare, leisurely fashion afforded by a Sunday, he squinted directly at the blazing sun for a few moments, then, averting his eyes, rolled over to his other side and faced the shoji. Beyond its panels his wife was seated, busy with her needlework.
“Beautiful day, isn’t it,” he called out to her.
She murmured in acknowledgment. Sōsuke, apparently not eager to strike up a conversation himself, lapsed back into silence. Presently his wife spoke up.
“Why don’t you take a stroll?”
This time it was Sōsuke who answered noncommittally.
Two, three minutes later, she brought her face up close to the glass panels in the shoji and peered out at her husband lying on the veranda. She saw that at some inner prompting he had brought his knees up to his chest, prawn-like, as if he were occupying a cramped space. His head of black hair was cradled between his arms, and his face was totally obscured by his elbows and clasped hands.
“Sleeping in such a place—why, you’ll catch cold,” she cautioned. She spoke in a manner characteristic of contemporary schoolgirls, in which overtones of Tokyo speech mingled with undertones from somewhere else. Peering up from between his elbows and blinking exaggeratedly, Sōsuke mumbled, “Don’t worry, I’m not asleep.”
Once again they fell silent. Sōsuke heard two or three rings of a bell announcing the passage of a rickshaw gliding along on rubber wheels, followed by the distant crowing of a rooster. Basking in the warm sun’s rays that readily penetrated to the shirt beneath his newly tailored kimono, made from machine-spun cloth, Sōsuke passively registered the sounds. Then, as if suddenly reminded of something, he called out to his wife through the shoji.
“Oyone,” he asked, “what’s the character for ‘kin’ in ‘kinrai’?”
“It’s the same as the one for ‘Ō’ in ‘Ōmi,’ isn’t it?”[1] His wife’s reply contained no hint of condescension, nor was it accompanied by the sort of shrill laughter peculiar to young women.
“But that’s the character I can’t remember—the one for ‘Ō.’”
Sliding the shoji open halfway, his wife thrust her ruler out beyond the track and with its edge traced for him the character on the veranda. “Like this, you see.” She said no more. The tip of the ruler rested where she had ended her tracing, and for a moment her gaze lingered intently on the pellucid sky.
“Oh, so that’s it,” said Sōsuke, not looking at his wife and without the faintest smile that might indicate this had all been a little joke.
Oyone, for her part, appeared to make nothing of their exchange. “Oh yes, a really fine day,” she remarked, more or less to herself, and resumed her needlework, leaving the shoji half open behind her.
Sōsuke raised his head slightly from between his elbows and now looked directly at his wife for the first time. “You know, there’s something amazing about Chinese characters.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, no matter how simple the character, once you get to thinking about it, it starts looking a bit odd, and suddenly you can’t be sure anymore. The other day I got all mixed up over the ‘kon’ in ‘konnichi.’[2] I’d put it down correctly on paper, but when I scrutinized it I got the feeling it was wrong somehow. After that, the closer I looked at what I’d written the less it looked like kon . . . Hasn’t that ever happened to you, Oyone?”
“Certainly not.”
“It’s just me, then?” Sōsuke asked, bringing a hand to his head.
“Just you. There’s obviously something wrong.”
“I wonder if it’s my nerves again.”
“Yes, that must be it!” Oyone said, eyeing her husband.
At this Sōsuke got to his feet. He traversed the sitting room, stepping gingerly over Oyone’s sewing basket and scattered threads, and opened the sliding panels to the parlor. Its southern exposure was blocked by the vestibule, with the result that the shoji at the other end of the room presented a distinctly chilly appearance to the gaze of someone just coming in out of the sunlight. He opened these as well. Yet even here on the eastern veranda, where one might expect the sun’s rays to strike in the morning, at least, they scarcely penetrated at all because of a cliff-like embankment that loomed over this side of the house, sloping down so steeply that it all but brushed the eaves. The embankment was covered with vegetation. Lacking so much as a single row of stone revetment, it looked precariously close to crumbling down. Astonishingly, however, it seemed as though nothing of the sort had ever happened, and the landlord went along year after year simply leaving things as they had always been. An elderly produce dealer, a resident of the quarter for two decades, had offered a ready explanation for this phenomenon as he stood with his vegetables outside the kitchen door one day. According to him, this plot of land had originally been covered by a sprawling thicket of bamboo; when it was cleared, the roots had not been dug up but left buried. The earth here, the peddler had said, was in fact more stable than one might think. Sōsuke had raised some doubts: If the roots were just left there, wouldn’t the bamboo grow back into a new thicket? Well, the old man had said, it seems that once it had been cut down to the ground like that it couldn’t easily grow back, but there was no need to worry about the cliff; no matter what, it would not crumble down. After this spirited defense, delivere
d as if he had a personal stake in the matter, the old man had departed.
The face of the embankment was largely colorless. Even in autumn the green vegetation merely faded into a pale, patchy tangle. There was no touch of the elegant such as would have been provided by plumes of susuki grass or ivy vines. In a kind of compensation several tall, slender mōsō bamboo trees,[3] a vestige of the former grove, rose cleanly out of the soil, two of them halfway up the steep slope, three more near the top. The bamboo had recently taken on a yellowish hue, and whenever Sōsuke stuck his head out beyond the eaves and saw the sun’s rays strike their trunks, he felt as though he were observing the warmth of autumn there atop the embankment. Sōsuke was one of those men who left home for work every morning and returned after four o’clock; normally he was far too pressed for time to take in the scenery towering above him. After exiting the unlit toilet and washing his hands in the basin, however, he happened to glance up beyond the eaves and noticed the bamboo. Leaves gathered densely atop the bamboo stalks, like the stubble on a monk’s close-cropped head. As the leaves luxuriated in the autumn sunlight they drooped down heavily in silent clusters, not a single one stirring.
Sōsuke returned to the parlor, closing the shoji behind him, and kneeled down at his desk. Although the couple had designated this room the parlor, as it was the one to which guests were conducted, it might more aptly have been called a study or a living room. In the alcove in the north wall hung a token scroll, a rather peculiar one, and in front of it was displayed a misshapen, murky crimson flower vase. In the space between the alcove’s lintel and the ceiling glinted two shiny brass S-hooks. No plaques hung from them. The only other item on the wall was a cabinet of shelves with glass doors that contained, however, nothing worthy of note.