Kokoro

by Sōseki Natsume

  Ojōsan simply laughed. I disliked women who laugh in response that way. All young ladies do it, of course, but Ojōsan had a tendency to laugh at silly things. When she saw my face, however, her usual expression quickly returned. There had been nothing urgent, she replied. Okusan had just gone out on a small errand.

  As a lodger, I had no right to press the matter further. I held my tongue.

  No sooner had I changed my clothes and settled down than Okusan and the maid returned. At length, the time came for us all to face one another over the evening meal. When I had first moved in as a lodger, they had treated me much like a guest, the maid serving dinner in my room, but this formality had broken down, and these days I was invited in to eat with the family. When K arrived, I insisted that he too be brought in for meals. In return I donated to the household a light and elegant dining table of thin wood, with foldable legs. These days one can find tables like this in any household, but back then there were almost no homes where everyone sat around such a thing to eat. I had gone especially to a furniture shop in Ochanomizu and ordered it made to my specifications.

  As we sat at the table that day, Okusan explained that the fish seller had failed to call at the usual hour, so she had had to go into town to buy our evening’s food. Yes, I thought, that seems quite reasonable, given that she has guests to feed. Seeing my expression, Ojōsan burst out laughing, but her mother’s scolding quickly put an end to it.

  CHAPTER 81

  A week later I again passed through the room when Ojōsan and K were talking there together. This time she laughed as soon as she caught sight of me. I should have asked then and there what she found so humorous. But I simply went past them to my own room without speaking. K thus missed his chance to come out with his usual greeting. Soon I heard Ojōsan open the sliding doors and go back to the sitting room.

  That evening at dinner she remarked that I was an odd person. Once again I failed to ask the reason. I did notice, however, that Okusan sent a hard stare in Ojōsan’s direction.

  After dinner K and I went for a walk. We went behind Denzūin Temple and around the botanical gardens, emerging below Tomizaka. It was a long walk, but we spoke very little. K was temperamentally a man of even fewer words than I. I was not a great talker, but as we walked, I did my best to engage him in conversation. My main focus of concern was the family in whose house we were lodging. I asked him what he thought of Okusan and Ojōsan. He was quite impossible to pin down on the subject, however. He not only avoided the point, but his responses were extremely brief. He seemed far more interested in the topic of his studies than in the two ladies. Our second-year exams were almost upon us, I admit, so from any normal point of view he was behaving much more typically than I. He launched into a disquisition on Swedenborg1 that made my uneducated mind reel.

  We both passed our exams successfully, and Okusan congratulated us on entering our final year. Her own daughter, her sole pride and joy, was soon to graduate as well. K remarked to me that girls emerged from their schooling knowing nothing. Clearly he chose to completely overlook Ojōsan’s extracurricular study of sewing, koto playing, and flower arranging. Laughing, I countered with my old argument that a woman’s value did not lie in scholarly accomplishment. While he did not refute this statement outright, he did not seem willing to accept it either. That pleased me—I interpreted this casual dismissal of my ideas as an indication that his former scorn of women had not changed. Ojōsan, whom I thought the embodiment of womanly excellence, was evidently still beneath his notice. In retrospect, I see that my jealousy of K was already showing its horns.

  I suggested that the two of us go away together somewhere during the summer vacation. He responded with apparent reluctance. It’s true that he could not afford to go wherever he wanted, but on the other hand nothing prevented him from accepting an invitation to travel with me. I asked why he didn’t want to come. He replied that there was no real reason; he simply preferred to stay at home and read. When I contended that it would be healthier to spend the summer studying in some cooler place out of the city, he suggested I go on my own.

  I wasn’t inclined to leave K there in the house alone, however—his growing intimacy with the two ladies was disturbing enough already. Needless to say, it was ridiculous for me to be so upset over a situation that I had gone out of my way to engineer in the first place. I was clearly being foolish.

  Okusan, tired of seeing us endlessly at cross-purposes, stepped in to mediate. The result was that we decided the two of us would go off to the Bōshū Peninsula2 together.

  CHAPTER 82

  K seldom took trips, and I had never been to Bōshū, so we both disembarked at the boat’s first port of call in complete ignorance of the place. Its name was Hota, I remember. I don’t know what it might be like today, but in those days it was a dreadful little fishing village. For one thing, the whole place stank of fish. For another, when we tried sea bathing the waves knocked us off our feet, and our arms and legs were soon covered in scratches and grazes from the fist-size rocks that were forever tumbling around in the water with us.

  I soon had enough of the place. K, however, said not a word either for or against it. Judging from his expression at least, he seemed quite unperturbed, although he never emerged from a swim without a bruise or a cut.

  I finally persuaded him to leave Hota and move on to Tomiura. From there we went to Nako. All that part of the coast was a popular vacation place for students in those days, and we found beaches to our liking wherever we went. K and I often sat on a rock gazing out at the sea’s colors, or at the underwater world at our feet. The water below us was beautifully crystal clear. In the transparent waves we could point out to each other the brilliant flashes of little fish, whose vivid reds and blues were more spectacular than anything to be seen in the fish markets.

  I frequently read while sitting on the rocks, while K spent most of his time sitting silently. Was he lost in thought, or gazing at the scene before him, or intent on some happy fantasy? I had no idea. Occasionally I glanced up and asked what he was doing. Nothing, he replied simply. I often thought how pleasant it would be if Ojōsan, rather than K, were sitting there beside me. This was all very well, but I sometimes felt a stab of suspicion that K might be thinking the same thing. Whenever this occurred to me, I found I could no longer sit calmly reading. I rose abruptly to my feet and let out a great unrestrained yell. I couldn’t dispel my pent-up feelings in a civilized manner, such as blandly declaiming some poem or song. All I could do was howl like a savage. Once, I grabbed K by the scruff of the neck and demanded to know what he would do if I tossed him into the sea. K remained motionless. “Good idea. Go right ahead,” he replied without turning. I quickly let go.

  The state of his nerves by now seemed to have considerably improved, while my own peace of mind had disintegrated. I observed his calm demeanor with envy, and with loathing, interpreting it as indifference to me. His serenity smacked of self-confidence, and not of a kind that it pleased me to see in him. My growing suspicions now demanded clarification of just what lay behind his self-assurance. Had his optimism about his chosen goals in life suddenly revived? If so, then we had no collision of interests—indeed, it would have pleased me to think I had helped him on his way. But if his calm originated in his feelings for Ojōsan, this I could not countenance. Strangely, he seemed oblivious to the signs that I myself loved her—though needless to say, I was anything but eager to alert him to my feelings. Quite simply, he was constitutionally insensitive to such things; indeed, it had been in the faith that no such problems would arise that I had brought him into the house in the first place.

  CHAPTER 83

  Summoning up my courage, I decided to confess to K what was in my heart. It was not the first time I had reached this decision. It had been my plan since before our trip together, in fact, but so far I had had the skill neither to seize an appropriate moment nor to create one. It strikes me now that the people I knew back then were all a bit peculiar—no one ar
ound me ever spoke about private matters of the heart. No doubt quite a few had nothing to confide, but even those who did kept silent. This must seem most peculiar to you, in the relative freedom of your present age. I will leave it to you to judge whether it was a lingering effect from the Confucianism of an earlier time or simply a form of shyness.

  On the face of it, K and I could say anything to each other. Questions of love and romance did occasionally come up, but our discussions around them always descended into abstract theory, and were in any case rare. For the most part, our conversations were confined to the subject of books and study, our future work, our aspirations, and self-improvement. As close as we were, it was difficult to break into these rigid, impersonal discussions with a personal confession. High-minded gravity was integral to our intimacy. I do not know how often I squirmed with impotent frustration at my inability to speak my heart as I had resolved to do. I longed to crack open some part of K’s mind and soften him with a breath of gentler air.

  To your generation, this will seem quite absurd, but for me at the time it constituted a huge difficulty. I was the same coward on vacation as I had been back home. Though constantly alert for a chance to make my confession, I could find no way to break through K’s determined aloofness. His heart might as well have been sealed off with a thick coating of hard black lacquer, it seemed to me, repelling every drop of the warm-blooded feeling that I was intent on pouring upon it.

  Sometimes, though, I found K’s fiercely principled stance toward the world reassuring. Then I would regret ever doubting him and silently apologize for my suspicions. In this state of mind, I seemed a deeply inferior person and suddenly despised myself. But then the same old doubts would sweep back in and reassert themselves with renewed force. Since I deduced everything on the basis of suspicion, all my conclusions cast me in a disadvantageous light. It seemed to me that K was handsomer and more attractive to women than I, and that my fussiness made my personality less appealing to the opposite sex. His combination of firm manliness with something a little absurd, also struck me as superior. Nor did I feel myself a match for him in scholarly ability, although of course our fields differed. With all his advantages so constantly before my eyes, any momentary relief from my fears soon reverted to the old anxieties.

  Observing my restlessness, K suggested that if I didn’t like it here, we might as well go back to Tokyo, but as soon as he said this, I wanted to stay after all. What I actually wanted was to prevent him from going back himself, I think. We plodded on around the tip of the peninsula, miserably roasting in the painful rays of the hot sun and plagued by the notorious local habit of understating distances when we asked our way. I could no longer see any point in going on walking like this and said as much half-jokingly to K. “We’re walking because we have legs,” he replied. Whenever the heat grew too much for us, we took a dip in the sea wherever we happened to be. But when we set off again, the sun was just as fierce, and we grew limp with fatigue.

  CHAPTER 84

  With all this walking, the heat and weariness inevitably took their toll on us. It’s not that we were actually ill; rather it was the disturbing feeling that one’s soul had suddenly moved on to inhabit someone else. Though I continued to talk to K as normal, I felt anything but normal. Both our intimacy and the antagonism I felt toward him took on a special quality that was peculiar to this journey. I suppose what I am saying is that, what with the heat, the sea, and the walking, we entered a different kind of relationship. We became for the moment like nothing so much as a couple of wandering peddlers who had fallen in with each other on the road. For all our talk, we never once broached the complex intellectual topics that we usually discussed.

  Eventually we arrived at Chōshi.1 One extraordinary event on our journey I will never forget. Before leaving the peninsula, we paused at Kominato to take a look at the famous Sea Bream Inlet. It was many years ago, and besides, I was not particularly interested, so the memory is vague, but I seem to remember that this village was supposed to be the place where the famous Buddhist priest Nichiren2 was born. On the day of his birth, two sea bream were said to have been washed up on the beach there, and the local fishermen have avoided catching bream ever since, so the sea there is thronged with them. We hired a boat and went out to see.

  I was intent on the water, gazing entranced at the remarkable sight of all the purple-tinted sea bream milling below the surface. K, however, did not appear as interested. He seemed preoccupied with thoughts of Nichiren rather than fish. There was an impressive temple in the area called Tanjōji, or “Birth Temple,” no doubt referring to the saint’s birth, and K suddenly announced that he was going to go to this temple and talk to its head priest.

  We were, I may say, very oddly dressed. K’s appearance was particularly strange, since his hat had blown into the sea, and he was instead wearing a peasant’s sedge hat that he had bought along the way. Both of us wore filthy robes that reeked of sweat. I urged K to give up the idea of meeting the priest, but he stubbornly persisted, declaring that if I didn’t like it, I could wait outside. Since there was no arguing with him, I reluctantly went along as far as the temple’s entrance hall. I was privately convinced we would be turned away, but priests are surprisingly civil people, and we were immediately shown into a fine large room to meet him.

  I was far from sharing K’s religious interests back then, so I didn’t pay much attention to what they said to each other, but I gathered that K was asking a great deal about Nichiren. I do remember the dismissive look on his face when the priest remarked that Nichiren was renowned for his excellent cursive writing style—K’s own writing was far from good. He was after more profound information. I don’t know that the priest was able to satisfy him, but once we left the temple grounds, K began to talk fervently to me about Nichiren. I was hot and exhausted and in no mood to listen to all this, so my responses were minimal. After a while even this became too much of an effort, so I simply remained silent and let him talk.

  It must have been the following evening, when we had arrived at our night’s lodging, eaten, and were on the point of turning in, that things suddenly grew difficult between us. K was unhappy with the fact that I had not really listened to what he’d said to me about Nichiren the previous day. Anyone without spiritual aspirations is a fool, he declared, and he attacked me for what he obviously saw as my frivolity. For my part, the question of Ojōsan of course complicated my feelings, and I couldn’t simply laugh off his contemptuous accusations. I set about defending myself.

  CHAPTER 85

  In those days I was in the habit of using the adjective human. K maintained that this favorite expression of mine was actually a cover for all my personal weaknesses. Thinking back on it now, I can see his point. But I had originally begun to use the word out of resistance to K, in order to convince him of his lack of human feelings, so I was not in a position to consider the question objectively. I stuck to my guns and reiterated my argument.

  K then demanded to know just what it was in him that I believed lacked this quality. “You’re perfectly human, indeed you’re even too human” was my response. “It’s just that when you talk, the things you say lack humanity. And the same goes for your behavior.” K offered no refutation, except to say that if he appeared that way, it was because he had not yet attained a sufficient level of spiritual discipline.

  This did not so much take the wind out of my sails as arouse my pity. I immediately stopped arguing, and he too soon grew calmer.

  If only I shared his knowledge of the lives of the ancients, he remarked mournfully, I wouldn’t be attacking him in this way. When K spoke of “the ancients,” of course, he was not referring to men of legendary daring and courage. His heroes were the fierce ascetics of old, those mortifiers of the flesh who lashed themselves for the sake of spiritual attainment. He was sorry, K declared, that I had no understanding of what anguish he suffered from his own shortcomings.

  With this, we both went to sleep. The following morning we
returned to business as usual and set off again to plod on our sweaty way. But my mind kept going back over the previous night’s events. I burned with regret—why had I passed up the perfect opportunity to say at last what was on my mind? Rather than employ an abstraction such as human, I should have made a clean and direct confession to K.

  And truly it was my feelings for Ojōsan that had prompted me to start using this word in the first place, so it would have been more to the point to reveal to K the facts that lay behind my argument rather than belabor him with its theoretical distillation. Our relationship was so firmly defined by lofty scholarly exchange, I must admit, that I lacked the courage to break through it. I could explain this failing as that of affectation, or as the result of vanity, although what I mean by these words is not quite their normal interpretation. I only hope you will understand what I am saying here.

  We arrived back in Tokyo burned black by the sun. By this time I was in yet another frame of mind. Concepts such as “human” and other futile abstractions had all but vanished from my head. K, for his part, showed no more traces of the religious ascetic; he too, I am sure, was no longer troubling himself with the question of the spirit and the flesh.

  We gaped about us at the swirling life of Tokyo, like two visitors from another world. Then we set off for the Ryōkoku district,1 where we had a chicken dinner. So fortified, K suggested we walk back home to Koishikawa. I was physically the stronger, so I readily agreed.

  Okusan was taken aback at our appearance when we arrived. Not only were we black from the sun, we were gaunt from the long, exhausting walk. She nevertheless congratulated us on looking so much stronger, and Ojōsan laughed at her inconsistency. No doubt it was the combination of the circumstance and the pleasure of hearing her laughter again, but in that moment I was happy, freed of the anger that had plagued me before the trip.