Back to the Classics #18

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge

Classic from a Place You’ve Lived. When I lived in Japan (1986 – 1992), Natsume Sōseki 夏目漱石 was pictured on the often-used 1000-yen bill. His picture has since been replaced by not one but two bacteriologists. Still, Sōseki is revered in Japan to this day, with notables such as Haruki Murakami saying Sōseki is his favorite writer.

I am a Cat II – Natsume Sōseki, translated by Aiko Itō & Graeme Wilson

At the expense of the Meiji government, Sōseki studied abroad in the UK from 1901 to 1903 in order to obtain the graduate education that would enable him to teach at the university-level back in Japan and prepare students to contribute to the modernization of Japan. Though Sōseki was such a neurasthenic agoraphobe in the UK that his Japanese friends feared for his sanity, by reading constantly and voluminously he managed to get a good grounding in English literature. He returned and replaced Lafcadio Hearn as an English lit prof at the First National College, now Tokyo University, the most prestigious university in Japan. To augment his paltry civil servant salary, he wrote fiction and contributed to literary magazines. In 1905, he published the first section of I am a Cat, to critical acclaim and popular success.

The satire is narrated by a sardonic feline. He observes the family of a Japanese English professor. Very close, indeed, is the observation; modernists like Conrad and Sōseki want to make the reader really see:

Mrs. Sneaze is sitting so that her bottom presents itself before her husband’s face. You think that impolite? Speaking for myself I would not call it so. Both courtesy and discourtesy depend on one’s point of view.

My master is lying perfectly at ease with his cupped face in close proximity to his wife’s bottom: he is neither disturbed by its proximity nor concerned at his own conduct. His wife is equally composed to position her majestic bum bang in her husband’s face. There is neither the slightest hint nor intention of discourtesy. They are simply a much-married couple who, in less than a year of wedlock, sensibly disengaged themselves from the cramps of etiquette. Mrs. Sneaze seems to have taken advantage of the exceptionally fine weather to give her pitch-black hair a really thorough wash with a concoction made from raw eggs and some special kind of seaweed. Somewhat ostentatiously, she has let her long straight hair hang loose around her shoulders and all the way down her back, and sits, busy and silent, sewing a child’s sleeveless jacket. In point of fact, I believe it is purely because she wants to dry her hair that she’s brought both her sewing-box and a flattish cushion made from some all-woolen muslin out here. It is similarly to present her hair at the best angle to the sun that, deferentially, she presents her bottom to her spouse. That’s my belief, but it may, of course, be that my master moved to intrude his face where her bum already was

Professor Sneaze’s set of friends are posing, indecisive, lost, un-shut-upable intellectuals who are made amused, derisive, and desperate about Japanese changing their customs and ways in the face of Westernization. The cat takes aim at mindless aping of Western mores and attitudes, but he is not above delivering thrusts and jabs at traditions such as Japanese Zen, which has exasperated some Japanese intellectuals since the 15^th century.

Philistines such as he, creatures responsive only to the crudest material phenomena, cannot appreciate anything deeper than the surface appearances recorded by their five coarse senses. Unless one is rigged out in a navvy’s clobber and the sweat can be seen and smelt as it pours from one’s brow and armpits, such persons can’t conceive that one is working. I have heard there was a Zen priest called, I fancy, Bodhidharma, who remained so long immobilized in spiritual meditation that his legs just rotted away. That he made no move, even when ivies crept through the wall and their spreading suckers sealed his eyes and mouth, did not mean that the priest was sleeping or dead. On the contrary, his mind was very much alive. Legless in the bonds of dusty vegetation, Bodhidharma came to grasp such brilliantly stylish truths as the notion that, since Zen is of itself so vast and so illumining, there can be no appreciable distinction between saints and mediocrities. What’s more, I understand that the followers of Confucius also practice forms of meditation though not perhaps to the extent of self-immurement and of training their flesh to crippledom by idleness.

As this passage illustrates, the word-play is exuberant, learned, quaint, snippy, anecdotal, and appealing to bookish people who pat themselves on the back for getting some allusions and don’t beat themselves up for not getting them all.

As supercilious as he is, though, he is a Zen cat, accepting the here and now as it is, without letting preferences or aversions cloud his take on reality.

It’s a waste of effort to try and force those incapable of seeing more than outer forms to understand the inner brilliance of their own souls. It is like pressing a shaven priest to do his hair in a bun, like asking a tunny-fish to deliver a lecture, like urging a tram to abandon its rails, like advising my master to change his job, like telling Tatara to think no more about money. In short, it is exorbitant to expect men to be other than they are. Now the cat is a social animal and, as such, however highly he may rate his own true worth, he must contrive to remain, at least to some extent, in harmony with society as a whole. It is indeed a matter for regret that my master and his wife, even such creatures as O-san and Tatara, do not treat me with that degree of respect which I properly deserve, but nothing can be done about it. That’s the way things are, and it would be very much worse, indeed fatal, if in their ignorance they went so far as to kill me, flay me, serve up my butchered flesh at Tatara’s dinner table, and sell my emptied skin to a maker of cat banjos.

For those wondering what "cat banjos" might be, think of the three-stringed samisen that  traditionally used cat, dog, or snake skin to cover the body of the instrument.

I am sure readers who are into people and things Japanese would like this chatty story, especially those who liked Sōseki’s hit novel Botchan or his later sad novels such as The Gate.