Reading Those Classics #15

Modernist Classic set in Japan. The writer was so revered in Japan that his portrait appeared on the ¥1000 bill from 1984 to 2007. He is best known for his serio-comic novels Botchan and I am a Cat, both observations of early 20^th century intellectuals, neurotic, aimless, and stuck from not adjusting to modernization during the Meiji era. Besides, fall is coming. In Japan, everybody from esoteric philosophers to pop culture mavens values 読書の秋 Dokusho no Aki. This expression means that autumn is the season for reading books. Come fall, people ought to read, think and reflect on the transience of life in order to savor daily life. Like Aurelius said, “In a little while you will have forgotten everything; in a little while everything will have forgotten you.”

The Three-Cornered World - Natsume Soseki

This novel, which is also known in English as The Grass Pillow (草枕 Kusamakura), has comic relief in which the narrator is being roughly shaved by a Tokyo barber who ended up in a country barbershop. But mainly the tone is quiet, somber, and a little stoned and dreamy. More a travel diary, the book takes the reader along the itinerary of the narrator, on a journey in search of himself. A young artist is a painter which inevitably means a poet as well. On turning thirty, he ventures down a narrow road into a small Japanese village. He feels the need to leave behind the impurity of desire and aversions, and to become an artist in the fullest sense.

You may feel the human realm is a difficult place, but there is surely no better world to live in. You will find another only by going to the nonhuman; and the nonhuman realm would surely be a far more difficult place to inhabit than the human.

So if this best of worlds proves a hard one for you, you must simply do your best to settle in and relax as you can, and make this short life of ours, if only briefly, an easier place in which to make your home. Herein lies the poet's true calling, the artist's vocation. We owe our humble gratitude to all practitioners of the arts, for they mellow the harshness of our human world and enrich the human heart.

Yes, a poem, a painting, can draw the sting of troubles from a troubled world and lay in its place a blessed realm before our grateful eyes.

Disguised as the story of an artist who travels to a mountain resort to look for subjects and meditate, it's an extended essay about mono no aware, the empathy and sensitivity to the ephemeral nature of life, the wistful sadness of its rapid passing, and the wisdom of savoring every single day. So, it is the perfect book for autumn as the leaves fall and plants, animals and people in a Northern place brace for another winter.

Soseki grants that Japanese artists do not have a monopoly on 'melancholy of things' as R.H. Blythe showed in Zen and English Literature and Oriental Classics. A reader may have reservations about detachment in art or the tendency of the artist to handle other people as mere source material for art or as the servants of artists who need to be fed and whose dishes have to be done by somebody. See The Children's Book and The Moon and Sixpence.

Delicate, magical, evocative, a little slow, this is a must-read for readers who feel ready for a short dip in the cement pond of Japanese aesthetics as typified by modern novels that are somehow not novels.