Natsume Soseki — The Man with Such a Straight Face

In the Basket

"I was put in a small basket together with the junk of a secondhand dealer, and every night I was left out on display at the night stalls on the main street of Yotsuya."

This happened when he was a baby. He could not possibly remember it. He learned it from other people after he grew up, and when he was nearing fifty, he wrote it in a newspaper serial.

Soon after he was born, he was sent to live with another family. They were apparently a poor couple who made their living buying and selling old goods. The baby was put in the same basket as the things for sale, and every night he was set out at the night stalls.

One evening his older sister, passing by on an errand, found the baby. She must have felt sorry for him, he wrote. She tucked the baby inside her kimono and carried him home.

That night the baby would not go to sleep. He kept crying all night long, they say.

Because of that, the sister was scolded harshly by their father.

He was the youngest child, born when his parents were already old. It was shameful to be expecting a child at her age. His mother had supposedly said something like that, and the story was repeated now and then even after he grew up, they say.

He was born on a Koshin day, a day in an old calendar cycle. A child born on that day, people said, would grow up to be a great thief. To avoid that, the child's name should include the character for "gold." That old saying is why he was named Kinnosuke, according to a biography by his disciple Komiya Toyotaka.

Natsume Kinnosuke. The boy who would later take the pen name Soseki was born in 1867 in Ushigome, in Edo (the old name of Tokyo).

He did not know when he was taken back from the foster family. But he did not stay long in the house where he was born. Soon he was sent out again, this time adopted by another family. By his own memory, he was four years old.

When he was eight or nine, trouble broke out in the adoptive family, and he was sent back from Asakusa to his birth home in Ushigome.

But he did not know it was the house where he was born. He believed that his real father and mother were, as before, his grandfather and grandmother.

The two people he called by those names kept a straight face about it, he wrote. Perhaps they thought it would seem odd to suddenly change what he called them.

Still, when he moved to Ushigome, he was somehow very happy. His joy showed so clearly on the outside that anyone could see it, they say.

It happened one night.

He was sleeping alone in a big room when someone at his pillow began calling his name again and again in a small voice. The room was pitch black, and he could not tell who was bending over him. As he kept listening, he realized it was the voice of a maid who worked in the house.

The maid whispered in his ear.

"The people you think of as your grandfather and grandmother are really your father and mother, you know."

She had heard the two of them talking just now, she went on. That is probably why he was so fond of this house, how strange. So she was telling him, quietly. He must not tell anyone. That is what the maid said, he wrote.

The boy answered only, "I won't tell anyone."

Inside, he was very happy. But it was not because he had been told the truth. The maid had been kind to him. That was all, and that was what made him happy, he wrote.

He forgot her name and her face completely. All he remembered was her kindness.

Even after he went back to the house where he was born, he was not loved the way the youngest child of another family would be. Part of it was that he was not an easy child. Part of it was that he had been away from his parents for so long. With his father especially, he remembered being treated rather harshly, he wrote.

He was a mischievous, stubborn child. His mother did not spoil him either. Even so, the person in the whole house who loved him most was his mother. That feeling, he wrote, always stayed in his memory.

One day he took a nap alone upstairs and was troubled by a strange dream.

He did not know when or where he had done it. But he had spent a great deal of other people's money. As a child, there was no way he could pay it back.

In distress, he called out loudly to his mother downstairs.

His mother came up right away. She heard him out, and, so he wrote, she said with a smile:

"Don't worry. Mother will give you as much money as you need."

He was very happy. Relieved, he fell fast asleep again.

Was it all a dream? Was half of it true? Even when he wrote this down, he had not decided. All he could say was that he could only think he really had called loudly for his mother, and that she really had come up.

His mother's name was Chie.

When he was thirteen or fourteen, she died.

Failing on Purpose

He hated English.

As a boy, what he loved was the study of old Chinese books. He read a great many of them. English he hated even to pick up.

He had learned a little from his older brother. But the teacher was short-tempered, and the student hated it. It ended with the second reader, he said later.

But to get into the preparatory school for the university, he needed English.

He sold every one of his beloved Chinese books and threw himself into English. In the summer of 1884, at seventeen, he entered the preparatory school.

Once he was in, he hardly studied at all.

He loved being lazy, and thought playing around was somehow impressive, he said when he looked back on it. In class, he and his friends piled firewood onto the stove next to the teacher. When the stove glowed red, even the serious face of the Chinese-studies teacher turned red from the heat. They giggled and enjoyed the sight, it is said.

One year he caught peritonitis, an infection of the belly, and could not take the end-of-year exams. He asked to take a makeup exam, but the person in charge would not listen.

So he thought.

The reason they would not let him take a makeup exam was, first of all, that people did not trust him. Without trust, he could do nothing once he was out in the world.

"To earn trust, I absolutely must study."

His friends urged him again and again to take the makeup exam. He did not listen. He chose to fail the year himself and repeat the same grade.

That failure, he said later, turned out to be a very effective medicine for him.

As the years went on, the time came to choose a subject to specialize in. He chose architecture.

His reason was this:

"I am an oddball by nature."

If he stayed as he was, the world would not accept him. But if he did work that people truly needed, then even an oddball would have customers coming to him. He would never go hungry. That was his thinking, he said in a published talk.

But then a classmate, Yoneyama Yasaburo, told him: even if you do architecture in Japan now, you cannot make something big enough to last for generations. Do literature instead.

He thought, I see, and changed his mind. He settled on English literature.

The literature of the language he had hated so much.

Around then, he made a friend who pushed him around. Masaoka Shiki.

Shiki treated people like his henchmen. He ordered him to write haiku, short poems, flat out, and even picked the topics himself. Still, grumbling, he wrote them.

"I suppose it just means I was the better-natured one."

That is what he said in a later talk.

Of himself when he graduated from university, he said he was "the sort of fool you would look at and wonder, is this really a university graduate?" His grades were good, so people trusted him quite a bit. But when he looked at himself, he felt very sorry for what he saw.

And yet, he also said, he was extremely proud toward the world.

An offer came to become a teacher. Kano Jigoro (the founder of judo), to whom he was introduced, spoke of high ideals. I could never do that, he said, and turned it down.

Then Kano said something clever.

"Seeing you refuse, I want to ask you all the more."

That was what Kano said, as he remembered it.

Unable to refuse, by nature, he accepted. That was the start of my life, he said, looking back.

In 1895 he became a teacher at a middle school in Matsuyama.

Shiki came tumbling into his lodgings.

Saying that he would stay there, Shiki decided it all by himself before he had even agreed. Some people warned him that Shiki had a lung disease, tuberculosis, and it might spread. He was a little afraid, too. But he did not refuse, and let him stay.

Almost every day, haiku friends from Matsuyama gathered, and he lost all time of his own. At noon Shiki ordered grilled eel without asking anyone, and ate it, slurping noisily.

When Shiki went back to Tokyo, he said this, so the story goes:

"Say, pay for it, will you."

And he went off with a straight face. On top of that, he borrowed about ten yen.

Even I was surprised by that. That is how he complained, in a talk years later.

In 1896 he moved to a school in Kumamoto, in southern Japan, and married Kyoko.

In 1900, at thirty-three, he was to go to study in England.

At the port of Yokohama, Terada Torahiko, his student from Kumamoto, had come to see him off. Terada wrote down how it looked.

The two companions who were going on the same ship waved their hats and cheerfully greeted the people seeing them off. Only the teacher stood a little apart, leaning on the ship's rail, not moving, staring down at the pier.

As the ship began to move, Terada saw his wife press a handkerchief to her face.

"The autumn wind blows on one lone man, out over the sea."

That poem has survived.

A little over two years later, when he came back, his wife would think he had become a different person.

In a Sack

"I feel as if I had been stuffed into a sack and could not get out."

That was how he later described, in a lecture, the feeling he had carried since leaving university. Even after he crossed to London, the feeling did not change.

If there were one awl, a sharp tool for poking holes, that could break through the sack, he would make a hole somewhere. So he thought, and searched for it, restless. But he said he could not find an awl like that, even if he walked all over London.

He had come to study English literature, but when he read Western poetry, he felt nothing. To pretend to enjoy it, he said, was like flying with wings that did not exist, or walking around as if he were rich when he had no money. He also said he could not help feeling that way.

He was short of money, too. In a letter to Shiki, he wrote:

"If the money from home does not come, I cannot even buy books. I am a little stuck. It will probably arrive soon, so there is no need to worry."

He stayed in touch with his family in Japan by letter.

Once, a photograph arrived of his wife and their eldest daughter, Fudeko. In his reply he wrote: it was the first time in a long while he had seen their faces, and he admired that the two of them were as comical-looking as ever. It made him feel a little embarrassed, but he put it on display on top of the stove.

The old woman who ran his boarding house came to clean, and she and her sister praised the photo again and again, saying what a sweet young girl and a lovely wife. So he told them that in Japan, women like that all get put in the Otafuku group, and there are many far prettier ones. Otafuku is a word for teasing a woman who is not good-looking.

"Fude's face, now, is really quite a funny one."

The letter goes on like that. He was a man who could not say he loved the people he loved without making fun of them. His disciple Morita Sohei wrote this about the letter.

Early September 1902. The poet Doi Bansui visited his boarding house in London.

Bansui was shocked by what he saw. He was in a terrible nervous breakdown, Bansui wrote. That was the name people used then for a state in which the mind is so worn out that ordinary life becomes hard.

The old woman at the boarding house had asked Bansui to stay by his side, because she was worried. Bansui says he was also told this by the man himself:

"I'm glad when you are here."

Bansui moved into the same boarding house on September 9.

That same year, 1902, back in Japan, Masaoka Shiki died.

In December he left London. In January of 1903 he arrived in Tokyo.

At Shimbashi station, Terada Torahiko had come to meet him. The student who had seen his ship off at Yokohama.

Stepping down from the train, the teacher put his hand under his small daughter's chin, lifted her face, and stared at her. Then he let go and wore a strange smile, Terada wrote.

His wife Kyoko later told what happened three or four days afterward.

He and his eldest daughter were sitting across a hibachi, a charcoal heater. On the edge of the hibachi lay a single copper coin worth five rin, a tiny amount of money. The moment he saw it, he suddenly grew angry and hit his daughter.

The daughter began to cry.

When Kyoko asked why, she learned the reason. In London, he had once given a copper coin to a beggar. Back at his boarding house, a similar coin was lying on the toilet window. He had become convinced that the old woman at the boarding house was following him and spying on him. The coin on the hibachi was the same kind of dig at him, he thought.

That summer his temper got even worse. He raged like a completely different man from the one who had left to study abroad. Kyoko later looked back on it that way. He began telling his wife to go back to her parents' home.

In July, Kyoko took the children and went back to her family's house.

When she had a doctor look at him, she was told, it is said, that this illness may calm down, but will come back sooner or later.

Kyoko, they say, decided to accept it as her husband's illness.

In September, an older brother of the Natsume family stepped in as go-between, and Kyoko came back home. In reply to his brother, he said something to the effect that both husband and wife had frayed nerves, it is said.

Right after she returned, he wrote about his wife to a friend in a letter. She had come back again, but with her big belly she could hardly move around. No matter how beautiful a woman is, a pregnant figure is not very beautiful. Much less so in the case of my wife, he wrote.

But that did not settle things. When their third daughter was born at the end of October, the mood in the house turned harsh again, and it lasted until about the next spring. He was greatly bothered by the crying of his three-year-old second daughter, and he was hard on her even in the middle of the night, according to Kyoko.

Before long, his haiku friend Takahama Kyoshi asked him to write something.

What he wrote was a story about a cat who watches human beings and talks about them.

This Won't Do

"This won't do."

Takahama Kyoshi read the manuscript and, apparently, said exactly that.

When he asked what was wrong, there were many things. He had completely forgotten what he was told. Anyway, it made sense to him, and he rewrote it. That is what he said later.

He and Kyoshi had a connection from before. When he wrote from his London boarding house about how badly off he was, Masaoka Shiki published the letter in Hototogisu, the haiku magazine of his circle. By the time he came home to Japan, Shiki was gone. The man editing Hototogisu was Kyoshi.

Kyoshi praised the rewritten manuscript heartily and put it at the head of the January 1905 issue of Hototogisu. A story about a cat who watches human beings and talks about them. I Am a Cat.

He had meant it to be a one-time piece. But Kyoshi said it was fun and told him to write more. As he wrote, it grew longer and longer.

Thirty-seven years old. For a man teaching English literature at a university, it was a late start as a writer.

The cat story took whatever happened around him as material, one thing after another.

On New Year's Eve that year, he sent a letter to his disciple Suzuki Miekichi. Today is New Year's Eve, but it is perfectly peaceful. No debt collectors came. I am reading a novel at the kotatsu, a heated table with a quilt.

The students in the dormitory of the school behind his house get so loud at night that it bothers the whole neighborhood. If a complaint came, he thought, it would give him more material, and be fun.

"Without some kind of quarrel, I am running out of material for the cat, and that will not do."

Futtei means running out of stock. Without a quarrel he would have nothing to write about the cat, and that would be a problem, he meant.

A letter of the following February says: a newspaper wrote that since he had written the cat, he and his saikun had not been getting along. Saikun is an old word for a wife.

"In the past, such things bothered me, and I felt uneasy unless I corrected every one. Now it just feels funny."

Before long, he guessed, they would write that Soseki had died yesterday.

In October 1906, he set a day for visitors. Thursday afternoons from three o'clock. Too many guests had come, and he was sick of it.

Yet about those Thursday gatherings, he wrote this to Kyoshi:

"I am by nature a carefree fellow, and I love listening to a crowd of people getting together and talking big as they please."

A man tired of meeting people says he loves a crowd. This gathering came to be called the Thursday Gathering.

That same month, Miekichi's letter apparently said something about taking him as a model. His reply was this:

"My moral lessons are out of the question. I have not behaved in any way that could serve as a lesson for others."

He went on: two-thirds of what he did was a kind of trick to get by, and to others it must look like he was out of his mind.

In 1907 he quit the university and joined the Asahi Shimbun, a newspaper. Writing novels for the newspaper became his job.

The world was shocked that a university teacher would become a newspaperman. In his statement on joining the paper, he wrote:

"Just as a newspaper is a business, a university is a business."

He also wrote that his lectures at the university had been poor because a dog was always barking and making noise, and that half of it was the dog's fault.

That same year, 1907, his scholarly book, Theory of Literature, came out. But it was full of wrong characters and misprints. He wrote to a friend:

"If I could, I would pile all thousand printed copies in the garden and set fire to them."

Then Terada Torahiko came. The student who had seen his ship off at Yokohama. A scientific paper is worth more when it comes with a careful list of corrections, Terada said. That calmed his temper a little, the story goes.

Three years later, he would be dead for thirty minutes.

I Do Not Wish to See My Children

August 1910. Forty-three years old, he lay in an inn at Shuzenji, a hot-spring town in Izu, with a bad stomach.

He hated being seen by the other hot-spring guests passing along the veranda. So he kept the paper sliding doors shut even on muggy days. When he looked at the dishes lined up on his tray, he felt a dislike rising from nowhere, and could not bring himself to pick up his chopsticks, he wrote.

Before long he began to vomit. What he brought up changed color little by little. In the end he vomited a dark, thick liquid, a whole metal basin brimming with it.

He asked the doctor what it was. The doctor, looking bored, answered: it is blood.

But to his eyes, the black stuff did not look like blood.

He vomited again. This time it had a little red in it, and a raw smell hit his nose. Pressing his chest, he said it himself: blood, it is blood.

August 24.

That day a doctor named Sugimoto was due to come from Tokyo to examine him. The result was: not so bad. The people attending him were glad and at once sent a telegram to Tokyo saying all was well.

From that evening into the night, his chest suddenly tightened with pain.

His wife Kyoko was sitting next to him. She was kindly staying at his bedside. He ordered her to move over a bit, because it was stifling.

He himself noted that he gave the order coldly, with no thought for her.

When he next opened his eyes, he was facing right, and had thrown up a huge amount of blood into the metal basin, thick and wet.

Strangely, the pain from a moment before was gone. Before anything else, he thought, well, good. That was his first thought, he said.

A big needle was pushed into his chest, and salt water was injected. The people around his pillow were moving about in a hush.

Then two doctors started talking in German, on either side of him as he lay with his eyes closed. They were sure he was unconscious.

"Weak."

"Yes."

"Probably hopeless."

"Yes."

"What if we let him see his children?"

"I suppose so."

He suddenly felt helpless. However he thought about it, he did not want to die. And the pain was gone completely, so he felt at ease.

Two people were talking calmly right next to him about whether he would live or die. Having to lie there and listen became more and more painful. In the end he got a little angry, he wrote.

If they were going to act like that, he had ideas of his own.

He suddenly opened his closed eyes. And as loudly and clearly as he could, he said:

"I do not wish to see my children."

Sugimoto seemed not to mind at all. He only answered lightly that he saw. Then he said he would go finish his half-eaten meal, and left the room.

Dr. Morinari and an attendant, Setcho, were left behind, and each held one of his hands, one on the left and one on the right. All three said nothing as the night turned to dawn.

Even at the very edge of death, can a person still play such games? When his body was recovering, he would remember his defiance that night and smile, they say.

But the truth, he still did not know.

He learned it much later. He was reading his wife's diary from that time and noticed that it said he had lost consciousness. When he asked his wife, she said:

"No, that's not right. For about thirty minutes back then, you were dead."

As far as he knew, he had only seen blood in the basin the instant after he tried to turn over. Those thirty minutes in between were nowhere in his memory.

On October 11, he was allowed to return to Tokyo.

It was raining at Shuzenji, and raining in Tokyo. Stepping off the train, he was laid at once on a tsurudai, a platform for carrying a sick person, covered with oiled paper against the rain, and carried to the hospital. On the train, Dr. Morinari had put a big branch of wild chrysanthemum into the mouth of a bag by his pillow. It probably broke in the crowd as he got off, he thought, looking back.

As he rested at the hospital, a nurse brought two telegrams.

One was from an old friend in Manchuria, Nakamura Zeko. "I congratulate you on your safe return to Tokyo."

The other had exactly the same words, not one character different. The sender's name was "Suteto."

Who could it be? When he found that it had been sent from Nagoya, he finally realized. It was his wife's younger sister Tokiko and her husband Suzuki Teiji. It was a name put together from the first letters of their two names.

He laid the two telegrams one on top of the other and decided. Tomorrow morning, when my wife comes, I will tell her this story first.

Such a Straight Face

Even after Shuzenji, his body never fully recovered.

When people asked whether he had completely recovered, he would say, yes, more or less, I am managing to stay alive. One day an acquaintance, Mr. T, told him that this could not be called recovered, it was surely just the old illness going on.

After that, he decided to answer this way:

"My illness is still going on."

His short temper went on, too.

October 1914. There was a funeral for the father of Suzuki Teiji, the husband of his wife's younger sister. It was the house of the couple who had sent the "Suteto" telegram on the night he came back from Shuzenji. His disciple Morita Sohei wrote down what happened that day, as Kyoko told it.

People thought Soseki surely would not come. But he came. A seat in the carriage had not been prepared, so he went with the funeral procession by rickshaw, and his wife Kyoko by horse carriage.

He got angry. He did not appear at the ceremony, and when the funeral was over and Kyoko had gone back to the Suzuki house, he called her back by telephone and raged at her at length, it is said.

His disciple Komiya Toyotaka thought it was no wonder he was angry. Morita doubted this. The teacher did not usually care about seats in a carriage, so Morita suspected it might have been something like a fit of his illness.

What it meant for the family. His eldest daughter, Fudeko, told Morita as an adult that she had no memory of her father being kind to her. What she remembered was being treated harshly. She gave several examples from those days, it is said.

From January to February 1915, he wrote a serial in the Asahi Shimbun called Inside My Glass Doors. It is about small things happening around him, seen from inside the glass doors of his study.

There is a story about a photograph in it.

A man from a magazine asked to take his picture. He asked if he had to smile. No, said the man, there was no need. Then a normal face, he said firmly, and they made a promise.

But right before the shot, the man said politely:

"I know we had an agreement, but could you please smile, just a little?"

He ignored it. When they took pictures in the garden, the man said the same words again. He felt less and less like smiling.

About four days later, the photograph arrived.

In the photograph, he was smiling, just as ordered.

It could only be that someone had retouched it afterward to make him smile. He showed it to four or five people who came to the house. They all had the same opinion.

Many times since he was born, he had smiled in front of people when he did not feel like smiling. Perhaps that falseness was now being paid back by this photographer, he wrote.

In the same serial there is also a story about an old friend, O, coming to visit.

O was a friend from high school days, now the principal of a middle school in Karafuto (the southern part of Sakhalin, then ruled by Japan). Taking the calling card from the person at the door, he went ahead of the guest into the sitting room, as usual, and took his seat.

Coming along the corridor to the entrance of the room, O saw him sitting properly on his cushion and said at once:

"You have got an awfully straight face on."

Before O had hardly finished speaking, a "Yeah" had slipped out of his mouth.

How had a reply that admitted his own faults come so naturally, sliding down his throat? At that moment he felt a clear, good feeling, as if something had become transparent, he wrote.

The parents who were called grandfather and grandmother had kept a straight face. The youngest son of that house was now well past the middle of his forties.

That day, on the streetcar they took out together, O pulled a handkerchief bundle out of his pocket and showed it to him. Inside were the chestnut buns served at his house earlier. When had he wrapped them? He asked O, you took those buns? O answered, maybe so.

The baby in the basket, the maid whose name and face he had forgotten, the dream of calling his mother upstairs: all of them are written in this same serial.

On November 22, 1916, his stomach went bad again and he took to his bed.

That day, bearing the pain, he had been lying face down on the carpet in his study. Kyoko came and urged him to go to bed, and the story goes that he answered:

"I was just thinking about my death poem."

A death poem is a poem a person leaves before dying. After that he went to bed and, they say, never spoke to anyone about it.

December 9 was a Saturday.

The night before, the doctor had told them there was no hope, according to Komiya's biography. The children had been sent to school, but as his condition worsened, they were each sent for.

Aiko, his fourth daughter, who went to a nearby primary school, came home, walked into the sickroom, and burst into tears. When Kyoko scolded her for it, he said, eyes still closed, it is said:

"It's all right, it's all right. You may cry."

When his eldest son Junichi, in school uniform, sat down at his pillow with a thump, he suddenly opened his eyes and grinned, they say.

Terada Torahiko, though he was in bed himself with the same stomach illness, came to see him when he heard. But he could not push his way into the sickroom. He leaned dejectedly against the wall of the children's room, but his stomach began to hurt, and in the end he went home around four o'clock without seeing his face, it is said.

Kyoko, they say, suggested taking a photograph. There were people who believed that when a dying patient had his picture taken, he sometimes recovered. A photographer was called, and the photograph was taken.

At 6:45 p.m., the doctor announced the end. He was forty-nine.

Someone was always beside him in that life.

The older sister who took a baby from a night-stall basket and carried him home inside her kimono. The maid who whispered to him in a dark room. Bansui, who moved into the boarding house in London. His wife, who wrote in her diary about her husband losing consciousness, and on his last day had a photograph taken so that he might recover. Terada, who leaned against the wall of the children's room without seeing his face.

That night, when he was carried home inside his sister's kimono, the baby cried all through the night, it is said.

His sister was scolded by their father for it.