Mount TBR #32

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

Kokoro – Natsume Sōseki

The first two parts of this modernist novel in three parts are narrated by a young Japanese student, circa 1914. The collegian meets a man in early middle age by chance at a seaside resort at Kamakura. As young people sometimes do with strangers, he feels an affinity for the elder, feeling admiration and curiosity.  He rather forces his company on this private and enigmatic man, calling him Sensei (teacher). The young student, from the country, has been influenced by city life and feels estranged from the customs and ways of thinking of his rustic parents. So seeking connection and wisdom to navigate a rapidly changing urban world, the student sends hints in Sensei’s direction that he wants deep insights into life from the teacher.

Sensei seems hesitant to do this at first. But eventually he writes a long letter to the student, explaining what conclusions he has drawn from life.

And we readers feel a similar pity for Sensei that we felt for the narrator John Dowell in The Good Soldier and Marlow in Heart of Darkness, who both learned life lessons that they would just as soon have gone without. Sensei tells a story on himself that reveals him to be prejudiced, malicious, rude, insincere, dishonorable, and disloyal, all of which stem from his inability to control his own emotions and tongue and his own cowardice to take what he wants, what other people would think is reasonable and fit to take. Truly a modernist novel that brings to mind Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford – deeply sad and wise.

So, it’s a great novel for fall.

Natsume Sōseki 夏目漱石 became popular with his novel Botchan, which the Japanese still love today. Also, funny were the three I am a Cat books, which satirized human foibles in general and Japanese intellectuals dealing with modernization in particular. But like a lot of funny guys, Sōseki (“gargling with stones” as the Japanese call him) was beautifully melancholy and in Japan this novel and The Gate are still read today and enjoyed, if that is the right word.

He was sad and shy and peevish because that was his temperament but also because smallpox scarred him at age six and he had problems with peptic ulcers in adulthood. He died, probably of GI bleeding, on  December 9, 1916 at the age of 49. Forty-nine – just a kid!