PENGUIN CLASSICS
SANSHIRŌ
NATSUME SŌSEKI (in the Japanese order, surname first) is universally recognized to be Japan’s greatest modern novelist. Born Natsume Kinnosuke in Edo in 1867, the year before the city was renamed Tokyo, he survived a lonely childhood, being traded between foster and biological parents, was deeply schooled in both the Chinese classics and English, and at the age of twenty-two chose from a Chinese source the defiantly playful pen name Sōseki (“Garglestone”) to signify his sense of his own eccentricity. In 1893, Sōseki became the second graduate of (Tokyo) Imperial University’s English Department and entered the graduate program, but in 1895 he abruptly took a position teaching English in a rural middle school. Though hoping to become a writer as early as the age of fourteen, Sōseki chose the more respectable path of English literature scholar, was sent to London by the Ministry of Education in 1900 for two years, and taught in his alma mater until 1907, when his early success as a part-time writer of stories and novels led him to accept a position as staff novelist for the Asahi Shinbun newspaper, in which he serialized the rest of his fourteen novels. Sōseki also published substantial works of literary theory and history (and contemplative essays, memoirs, lectures on the individual and society, etc.) and continued to think of himself as a scholar after his controversial resignation from the University. His works quickly lost any hint of academic artifice, however, relying initially on a freewheeling sense of humor, and then darkening as Sōseki wrestled with increasingly debilitating bouts of depression and illness. Sanshirō, his seventh novel, written in 1908, was the last in which the humor predominated. Sōseki wrote many Chinese poems and haiku as a form of escape from the stresses of the world he had created. He died in 1916 with his last—and longest—novel still unfinished. Each new generation of Japanese readers rediscovers Sōseki, and Western readers find in him a modern intellect doing battle in familiar territory, a truly original voice among those artists of the world who have most fully grasped the modern experience.
HARUKI MURAKAMI (in Western order) has written twelve novels, eight volumes of short stories, and over thirty books of nonfiction, while also translating well over thirty volumes of American fiction, poetry and nonfiction since his prizewinning debut in 1979 at the age of thirty. Known in the English-speaking world primarily for his novels A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Norwegian Wood, Dance Dance Dance, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, and Kafka on the Shore, Murakami has also published commentary on the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin gas attack in Underground, written a book of essays on the relationship of long-distance running to his fiction, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and edited a book of American, British and Irish fiction, Birthday Stories. His works have been translated into more than forty languages.
JAY RUBIN has translated Natsume Sōseki’s novel The Miner, Akutagawa Ryūnosoke’s Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories (Penguin, 2006), and Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, after the quake, and After Dark. He is the author of Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State and Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, and the editor of Modern Japanese Writers. He began his study of Japanese at the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in 1970, and taught Japanese literature at the University of Washington and at Harvard University, where he is now an emeritus professor.
NATSUME SŌSEKI
Sanshirō: a Novel
With an Introduction by HARUKI MURAKAMI
Translated with Notes JAY RUBIN
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN CLASSICS
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First published 1908–9
This translation first published in Penguin Classics 2009
Translation, Chronology, Further Reading and Notes copyright © Jay Rubin, 2009
Introduction copyright © Haruki Murakami, 2009
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The moral right of the translator and introducer has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
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ISBN: 9781101488225
Contents
Note on Japanese Name Order and Pronunciation
Chronology
Introduction
Further Reading
Translator’s Note
SANSHIRŌ
Notes
Note on Japanese Name Order and Pronunciation
All Japanese names that appear after this page in the book are written in the Japanese order, surname first. The author is known in Japan as Natsume Sōseki, and the writer of the Introduction as Murakami Haruki. “Sōseki,” however, is a traditional pen name (much like that of the seventeenth-century haiku poet, Matsuo Bashō), and it is by this, rather than the family name, that most Japanese and Western readers refer to the author. Sōseki’s name has been given in the Japanese order but Murakami’s in the Western order on the cover and title page because of their greater familiarity in the West and for convenience in cataloging.
Some guidelines to pronouncing Japanese names and terms:
All a’s are long, as in “father,” e is pronounced as in “bed,” i sounds like “ee,” and three-syllable names tend to have a stress on the first syllable. Thus, “Natsume” is pronounced “NAH-tsoo-meh” (three syllables) and “Sanshirō” is pronounced “SAHN-she-row.” “Yojirō” sounds like “YO-jee-row.” “Mineko” is “MEE-neh-ko.” “Hirota” has a very slight stress in the middle: “Hee-ROW-tah.”
Macrons have been included to indicate long syllables but have been eliminated from the place names Tōkyō, Kyōto, Ōsaka, Kōbe, Honshū, and Kyūshū, and from familiar words such as “shōji” and “Shintō.”
Chronology
1854 February: Commodore Matthew Perry returns to Japan with gunboats to enforce previous year’s demand from U.S. President Fillmore that Japan open its doors to trade. Tokugawa regime of warrior-bureaucrats, headquartered in city of Edo, agrees in writing to open the country, political unrest increases.
1854 or 1855: Widower with two daughters, Natsume Kohē Naokatsu (1817–97), an Edo nanushi (landowning merchant-class “headman” with local administrative and police powers), marries Fukuda Chie (1826–81), divorced daughter of a pawnbroker. Chie will give Naokatsu six more children between 1856 and 1867.
1867 9 February: Chie gives birth to he
r sixth child on day designated by astrological charts as “Elder Brother of Metal,” which dooms the child to a life of thievery unless he is given a name with the character for “metal/gold/money” (kin) in it. Adding the male suffix “-nosuke” to “Kin,” the Natsumes name the boy “Kinnosuke”. Parents are embarrassed to have had a child at their advanced ages of forty-nine and forty (fifty and forty-two by Japanese count). Shortly after birth, Kinnosuke is sent to the relative of a Natsume family maid to nurse but is soon brought home by sixteen-year-old half-sister, who is scolded by father. A neighbor nurses the child.
1868 (1 year old) Tokugawa rule ends with the “restoration” of the emperor to a position of theoretical sovereignty. 3 September: Edo is renamed Tokyo (Eastern Capital). 23 October: the modernizing Meiji Period1 (1868–1912) begins. Naokatsu retains some authority under Meiji government and later holds various police positions, but family’s fortunes decline.
November: Kinnosuke adopted by Naokatsu’s former ward, Shiohara Masanosuke and wife Yasu. He remains “Shiohara Kinnosuke” until 1888. Shioharas shower him with love, nurture a fondness for traditional plebeian entertainments, storytelling and comedy, by taking him to the variety theater (see Chapter 3 of Sanshirō).
1874 (7) Shiohara marital turmoil. Kinnosuke changes hands, homes, schools several times over next two years. Growing consciousness of being traded like a piece of property will emerge in novel Michikusa (Grass on the Wayside, 1915).
1876 (9) April: Shioharas divorce. May: Kinnosuke is returned to the Natsume household, though still legally a Shiohara. Learns from a maid that his “grandparents” are actually his parents. Father stern, mother more loving.
1878 (11) Kinnosuke enters middle school, chooses course that emphasizes Chinese studies instead of English, though this invalidates him for entry into University Preparatory School.
1881 (14) Mother dies. Around this time, Kinnosuke leaves middle school for a private academy of Chinese studies. Enjoys Chinese literature, Japanese novels, thinks of becoming a writer, but elder brother scolds him for considering such an unworthy profession. Beginning to think of pursuing a university education.
1883 (16) Enters English academy, sells beloved Chinese books, begins serious study for University Preparatory School entrance exams.
1884 (17) Begins rooming-house life, returning to Natsume home occasionally when ill.
September: Enters University Preparatory School Preparatory Course.
1885 (18) English schoolwork consistently signed “K. Shiohara” until 4 January 1888.
1886 (19) April: Preparatory School renamed First Higher Middle School. Pleurisy causes him to fail exam for advancement to higher class. Shock of failure inspires him to go to the head of his class and remain there until graduation. Teaching to support himself. Tokyo University renamed Imperial University; will remain the only Imperial University until 1897 when it is renamed Tokyo Imperial University after the founding of Kyoto Imperial University. Others added in 1907 (Tōhoku), 1910 (Kyushu), etc.
1887 (20) Two of three elder brothers die of tuberculosis. Suffers first of many eye diseases, acute trachoma. Considers studying architecture, but friend persuades him to change his mind.
September: University English Literature Department founded.
1888 (21) 28 January: Name transferred from Shiohara to Natsume family registry upon large payment (¥170 down, ¥3 monthly, ¥240 total) by Naokatsu to Shiohara: legal name once again “Natsume.”
September: Advances to regular course of First Higher Middle School, Faculty of Letters, more or less certain he will major in English literature. (“Middle” dropped from school name in 1894. This is the prestigious First Higher School or First National College where Sanshirō’s Professor Hirota teaches.)
1889 (22) January: Becomes friends with tubercular classmate and budding haiku poet Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902). Begins writing haiku, which remains a lifelong practice.
11 February: Minister of Education, Mori Arinori (1847– 89), leaving home for ceremonial promulgation of new Meiji constitution, assassinated for supposed offenses against the national gods. 16 February: Like Sanshirō’s Professor Hirota, Kinnosuke and classmates may have stood in formation at Mori Arinori’s funeral. May: Speaks against mindless nationalism at student patriotic society. Writes a critique and nine poems—all in Chinese—for Shiki’s hand-circulated literary anthology, using playful pen name “Sōseki” (Garglestone) for the first time. Identifies himself with the eccentric protagonist of a Chinese story who stubbornly insisted on the correctness of his all-too-obviously mistaken declaration, “I shall pillow my head on the stream and rinse my mouth out with stones.”
1890 (23) July: Graduates from First Higher Middle School, but feeling depressed. September: Enters Imperial University English Literature Department with annual tuition advance of ¥85.
1891 (24) Outstanding record wins him a full scholarship, but Scottish instructor’s insistence on rote-learning dulls his enthusiasm for English literature, which he will never love like Chinese. July: Deeply saddened by death of sister-in-law Tose (a secret love?) from complications of pregnancy. Boarding-house friend Tachibana Masaki becomes first graduate of English Literature Department (and later becomes customs official in Shanghai and Da-lien).
1892 (25) April: Changes official domicile to Hokkaidō, perhaps to avoid draft. May: Begins part-time teaching at private college (until 1895). Publishes several literary essays.
1893 (26) July: Becomes second graduate of Imperial University English Department, the only graduate that year. Enters graduate program, but has doubts about devoting himself to literary research, feeling he has been “deceived by English literature.” October: Takes second part-time lectureship, in English, at Higher Normal School (annual salary ¥450), helping to support his father and half-sister Fusa.
1894 (27) Diagnosed with possible early stages of tuberculosis, afraid of meeting two brothers’ fate, works to improve health, but plagued by depression.
1 August: Sino-Japanese War begins.
December–January: Seeks Zen enlightenment in Kamakura temple, befriends monks but leaves feeling he has failed.
1895 (28) April: Abruptly takes teaching position at middle school in Shiki’s rural home town, Matsuyama. Hoping to save up for a trip to the West, but ¥80 monthly salary lasts only two weeks. 23–27 April: Sino-Japanese War ends with demeaning treaty that will be avenged with the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05. Long-distance negotiations for arranged marriage begin. Writing haiku, especially after Shiki comes to live with him in August. October: Feeling lonely after Shiki leaves for Tokyo. December: Visits Tokyo to meet Nakane Kyōko (1877–1963), daughter of Chief Secretary of the House of Peers, at formal “interview” (miai). Decides to marry.
1896 (29) Increasingly depressed by life in Matsuyama. April: Resigns teaching post in Matsuyama, takes instructorship (¥100/month) at Fifth National College in Kumamoto (Sanshirō’s alma mater). June: Kyōko and father come to Kumamoto, wedding performed in Sōseki’s rented house. July: Promoted to professor.
September: Terada Torahiko (1878–1935), the model for Sanshirō’s scientist, Nonomiya, enters the College. Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) appointed lecturer in English literature at Imperial University in Tokyo. Meanwhile, in Kumamoto, Sōseki actively involved with student journal, class outings, peaceful home life, writing haiku, Chinese verse, occasional scholarly papers.
1897 (30) Father-in-law urges him to take a teaching post in Tokyo, but he declines. April: Writes to Shiki that he wants to quit teaching, spend all his time reading and writing literature. 29 June: Naokatsu dies, but Kinnosuke continues supporting half-sister Fusa until 1915. July: Travels to Tokyo with Kyōko, who experiences a miscarriage. September: Returns to Kumamoto, Kyōko follows in October. Peaceful life resumes, but letter from adoptive mother Yasu threatens complications.
1898 (31) Writing Chinese verse, literary essays, guiding students in haiku composition. Kyōko suffers from attacks of hysteria, attem
pts suicide in June or July, especially bad with bouts of extreme morning sickness in autumn. November/December: Publishes playful literary essay in Shiki and friends’ haiku magazine Hototogisu under the pen name “Hechima Sensei” (Professor Loofah).
1899 (32) 31 May: Daughter Fudeko born.
August: Terada Torahiko leaves to study science at Tokyo Imperial University. Good friends leaving Kumamoto for Tokyo.
1900 (33) April: Appointed acting assistant principal. Kyōko becomes pregnant with second child. 12 May: Ordered by Ministry of Education to spend two full years in England studying the language at government expense (annual stipend of ¥1,800 plus meager family support in his absence of ¥300 per year). Initially declines (neither the Ministry nor he had any idea what he should do in England), but eventually accepts. July: Sells or gives away all household goods, leaves Kumamoto, depositing Kyōko and Fudeko with Tokyo in-laws. 8 September: Boards German ship for Genoa, arriving 19 October. 21 October: Arrives in Paris by train. Visits Louvre, World’s Fair (Exposition Universelle). 28 October: Arrives in London without a clear purpose. Sees the sights. November: Visits Cambridge, but concludes that government stipend too low for study there. November/December: Attends a class at University College, London. Lives in a series of shabby rooming houses, mostly reading in his room, but contracts with Shakespeare scholar William James Craig (1843–1906) for weekly individual tutoring at 5 shillings per hour (an arrangement that would continue until October 1901). No more formal study than this.
1901 (34) 27 January: Second daughter, Tsuneko, born. 2 February: Views Queen Victoria’s funeral cortège in Hyde Park. Letters from this time express anger at Kyōko for writing infrequently, and desire to teach at the First National College in Tokyo upon his return to Japan instead of continuing to teach in Kumamoto. May/June: His informative letters to Shiki are published in Hototogisu as “Letters from London” and signed, haiku-style, “Sōseki.”