Light and Darkness

by Sōseki Natsume

  Notes

  1. His family name was Natsume; his given name, Kinnosuke. At twenty-two, he chose “Sōseki” (漱石) for a pen name from an ancient Chinese story. The phrase means “to gargle with stones.” In the anecdote, collected in a popular Chinese language primer, a civil servant intending to become a recluse declares, mistakenly inverting a Chinese expression, that he will “pillow his head on the river and gargle with stones.” Corrected, he argues intractably that his mistake was intentional. In taking the name, Sōseki is representing himself as a contrarian. His choice suggests a self-conscious identification with China’s literati.

  2. Natsume Sōseki, “The Civilization of Modern-Day Japan,” in Kokoro: A N ovel and S elected E ssays, trans. Edwin McClellan, essays trans. Jay Rubin (Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1992), 278

  3. Even in his day, Sōseki was hardly light reading. It was the Asahi’s policy to appeal to less ambitious readers by serializing a second, less demanding novel in parallel with Sōseki’s. Light and Dark shared the pages of the paper with two works by Nakarai Tōsui, a “newspaper novelist” less famous for his writing than as the writing teacher who broke Higuchi Ichiyo’s heart.

  4. Sōseki defended his decision to resign his lectureship at the most prestigious university in the country to become a “newspaper man” in a somewhat facetious article, “Statement on Joining the Asahi.” See Natsume Sōseki, Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, ed. Michael K. Bourdaghs, Atsuko Ueda, and Joseph A. Murphy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 155–58.

  5. Yamamoto Shōgetsu was editor of the literary arts section. See Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū (SZ), 28 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2004), 24:532.

  6. The tyranny of the daily installment is perceptible in the text. Sōseki went out of his way to end many of the installments with contrived cliff hangers, and others begin with recapitulation. A few strokes in red pencil by an editor may easily have effaced these minor blemishes, but editing a master’s manuscript is considered disrespectful in Japan, and emendation of this kind is outside the translator’s jurisdiction.

  7. On February 19, 1916, Sōseki had written the young writer a letter of fulsome praise for his short story “The Nose”: “Create another 20–30 stories of this quality and see what happens—you will find yourself a member of our literary brotherhood without equal” (SZ 24:510–11). Archived in the Museum of Modern Japanese Literature together with the letter it contained, Sōseki’s envelope has been torn open, as if Akutagawa had been unable to control his impatience to see what the master had written.

  8. SZ 24:554–56.

  9. SZ 24:558–62.

  10. The original manuscript of Light and Dark is in the archives of the Museum of Modern Japanese Literature in Tokyo and may be examined on request in advance.

  11. SZ 24:589–90.

  12. O-Hide is pronounced O-HE-day.

  13. Yoshimoto Takaaki characterized Sōseki’s style in later years as “consciously motivated by his wish to experiment with narrowing the gap between an English prose style and that of Japanese” (quoted in Reikō Abe Auestad, Rereading Sōseki : Three Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Novels [Wiesbaden: Herassowitz, 1998], 149).

  14. Sōseki, “Interrelations Between Literary Substances,” in Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, 107–11.

  15. Henry James, The Art of Criticism, ed. William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 288.

  16. Ibid.

  17. In the margin of page 103 he notes: “This writer’s prose style aims to express things easily understood in language that is hard to understand” (SZ 27:159).

  18. SZ 19:359.

  19. SZ 14:239.

  20. Madam Yoshikawa suggests that a trip to visit Kiyoko will be “the best possible treatment for O-Nobu” and explains ambiguously, “Just watch, I’ll teach O-Nobu-san how to be a better wife to you, a more wifely wife” (142:311). Some Japanese critics have interpreted this to mean that O-Nobu must be taught, however painfully for her, that her emphasis on the nature of the love she receives from Tsuda is an unseemly attitude for a wife, who should be focused on helping her husband maintain favor with his relatives. See Ōe Kenzaburō, Saigo no shōsetsu (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1988), 161. Perhaps. Or perhaps she is simply jealous. Or possibly this is just characteristic perversity: “With no limits on her time, [Madam] needed no invitation, given the opportunity, to meddle in the private affairs of others, and she enjoyed looking after people beneath her, particularly those she was fond of, all the while making clear unabashedly that she was acting principally in the interests of her own amusement” (132:289).

  21. In his preface to the Iwanami paperback edition of the novel, Ōe Kenzaburō reminded “contemporary and particularly young readers” that the influence exerted by relatives in Japanese social life and personal relationships was “decisively more powerful in the Meiji and Taisho periods than it is today” (Natsume Sōseki, Meian [Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2010], 599).

  22. Japanese readers tend to object heatedly to this interpretation. As evidence that Sōseki did not intend any particle of doubt about Tsuda’s condition, they cite two lines of text (emphasis mine in both): “About to explain that his doctor’s specialty was in an area somewhat tangential to his particular illness and that as such his offices were not the sort of place that ladies would find inviting” (12:46); and “Supposing that Tsuda was afflicted with the same sort of illness as his own, [his friend] had spoken up without any hesitation or reserve, as if to do so were perfectly natural” (17:54). In fact, the second sentence contains its own ambiguity. The verb I have translated as “supposing” (omoikomu) means “to assume something, sometimes—but not always—mistakenly.” To be sure, both lines may be read as negating the possibility that Tsuda suffers from a venereal disease. At the same time, it seems obvious that at the very least Sōseki is playing them contrapuntally against seeds of doubt that he has intentionally planted.

  23. Ōe, Saigo no shōsetsu, 170–71.

  24. Ōoka Shōhei, Shōsetsuka Natsume Sōseki (Tokyo: Chikuma Shōbō, 1988), 425–29.

  25. Kumegawa Mitsuki, Meian Aru Shūshō (Tokyo: Ronsōsha, 2009); Tanaka Fumiko, Natsume Sōseki Meian no Dabi (Tokyo: Tōhōshuppan, 1991); Mizumura Minae, Zoku Meian (Tokyo: Chikuma Shōbō, 1990); Nagai Ai, Shin Meian (Tokyo: Jiritsu Shobō, 2002).

  26. Mizumura, Zoku Meian, 260, 261.

  A Note on the Translation

  IN HIS first response to a list of questions that I had sent him, a Sōseki scholar in Tokyo wrote: “Rereading the passages you have marked, I find they contain difficult problems that cannot be answered simply. Your questions have led me to the realization that the text of Light and Dark, read closely, is even for me a universe of complex language not easily fathomed.” I was surprised by this but also reassured to think that the difficulty I was having as a reader was not altogether due to inadequate command. Over time I consulted others, observed them shaking their heads, and began to feel comfortable with the conclusion that Sōseki’s language in Light and Dark is after all a challenge to understand even for literate native readers. To be sure, there are moments when the interior landscape emerges in lucid focus as though bathed in early morning light; at other times, the reader must hold on for dear life as Sōseki descends through the murkiness toward the depths he is seeking.

  This is particularly the case in the narrative passages that the Japanese call “psychological description.” Sōseki assigns to words idiosyncratic, deeply personal connotations, and his syntax can be not so much tortuous as indeterminate: sentences aggregate into passages that point toward meaning without ever quite arriving. In this final novel, Sōseki appears to be experimenting, taxing his language with a mode of description unfamiliar to him, intentionally deranging his masterly prose, and the result must be deemed uneven, now brilliantly exact and now opaque.

  I should interject that the dialogue, so copious that this novel sometimes reads like a play, is even more compellin
g than his usual: ironically witty, pitch-perfect, richly revealing character. The superlative aliveness of the book’s conversations—an aliveness that throbs beneath the surface of a maddening placidity—is in itself enough to make them difficult to translate acceptably. There is, moreover, the challenge of creating the patina of age that a novel written 100 years ago will have acquired for the native reader, a coloration that rarely survives in a translation. The extended family in Light and Dark, lambasting one another and revealing themselves in the process, converses in the language of the haute bourgeoisie of 1916. Formulating a notion, however vague, of how this sounded to Japanese readers at the time and how it strikes the ear of the native reader today was critical, and that left me with the struggle to create this subtle verdigris in my English dialogue. I should mention that I had recourse to Henry James in my attempt to “cure” the translation, harvesting from his pages words and turns of phrase that struck me as redolent of the period in which Light and Dark occurs.

  To return to the narrative that prefaces and reflects on the dialogue, Light and Dark confronts the translator with a twofold challenge. I have suggested the difficulty I experienced comprehending passages in the text. But arriving with some certainty at what Sōseki intended to say was only the beginning. Should I translate the language I had managed to decipher paraphrastically, taming it for the benefit of the English reader? Or must I labor to render it in English as resistant to easy comprehension as the Japanese original? The latter course was dictated by my fundamental view of the translator’s task: to provide the reader in English with an experience equivalent to what the native reader experiences in Japanese. But that far more difficult approach, even assuming I possessed the craft to achieve it, would require the courage to fly in the face of the reader’s expectation that translations should proceed “smoothly.”

  The centripetal power of this expectation should not be underestimated—it is at least partly responsible for the blandness of many literary translations—and I will not pretend that I never succumbed. Perhaps a single example will suffice. In the following lines, Tsuda reflects on a violent altercation with Kobayashi that he has imagined. The passage had baffled me, and when I showed it to an ardent Sōseki reader who is a novelist in her own right, she exclaimed, “This is horrendous! Shame on him!” First a literal rendering in English:

  But his critique could not proceed beyond that point. Dishonoring himself vis-à-vis another person, if ever he should perpetrate such a thing how terrible that would be! This alone lay at the base of his ethical view. On closer inspection one had no choice but to reduce this to scandal. Accordingly, the bad guy was Kobayashi alone.

  The following somewhat overarticulated version is from V. H. Viglielmo’s 1971 translation:

  And yet his assessment of such a hypothetical scene could not go beyond that point. If ever he should lose face in front of others, it would be dreadful. This was all there was at the root of all his ethical views. If one tried to express this more simply, one could reduce it to the simple fact that he feared scandal. Therefore the only person in the wrong would be Kobayashi.

  As for me, in the light of conjecture offered by the native readers I consulted, I settled on the following:

  But he was unable to develop his critique beyond this. To disgrace himself in the eyes of others was more than he could contemplate. Saving face was the fundament of his ethics. His only thought was that appearances must be preserved, scandal above all avoided. By that token, the villain of the piece was Kobayashi.

  I am confident that this is what Sōseki intended, but inasmuch as it offers no resistance to interpretation it represents a compromise. Not that I always acquiesced to the pressure to domesticate the translation. On the contrary, I labored to preserve in my English the varieties of difficulty I perceived in Sōseki’s Japanese.

  Perhaps the last sentence in the novel will serve as an illustration of what I was at pains to achieve throughout. The final installment concludes: “On the way back to his room, Tsuda attempted to explain the meaning of [Kiyoko’s] smile.” Straightforward enough, but for an adverbial phrase that I omitted here, hitori de, which normally connotes “by himself/myself,” as in “I went to the movies by myself,” or sometimes potentiality, “I can do it by myself.” From the first time I read the sentence, I had an uncomfortable feeling about the phrase, as if it were somehow out of place, and considered eliminating it from my final draft. Then I had the opportunity to examine Sōseki’s original manuscript in Tokyo and saw, turning to the last page, that he had inserted hitori de as an afterthought with a circle around it and an arrow—had gone out of his way, I should say, of adding it. The emendation was inked in his own hand as though emphatically, making me feel that ignoring it was not an option, and I modified my English sentence: “On the way back to his room, Tsuda attempted alone with himself to explain the meaning of [Kiyoko’s] smile.” I don’t deny that there is something awry about the revision, a grain of sand beneath the eyelid. But if it now conveys the sense that Tsuda has only himself to rely on in his effort to solve the mystery, it will come closer to the effect of the original sentence on the Japanese reader, and I will have achieved, momentarily at least, my own version of fidelity.

  J. N.

  [ 1 ]

  FINISHED WITH his probe, the doctor helped Tsuda down from the examination table.

  “It appears the lesion extends all the way to the intestine. Last time I felt the ridge of a scar and assumed it stopped there, but when I scraped away just now to help it drain, I see it’s deeper.”

  “To the intestine?”

  “Yes. What I thought was less than two centimeters appears to be more than three.”

  A flush of disappointment rose faintly to Tsuda’s face beneath his strained smile. The doctor shook his head, his hands clasped in front of him against his baggy white smock. “It’s too bad but it’s the reality we have to face,” he might have been saying. “A doctor can’t compromise professional standards with a lie.”

  Tsuda retied his obi in silence and turned again to face the doctor, lifting his hakama* from the back of a chair where he had dropped it.

  “If it’s all the way to the intestine there’s no way it’ll heal?”

  “There’s no reason to think that.”

  The doctor’s denial was emphatic and unhesitating, as if to invalidate Tsuda’s mood at the same time.

  “It does suggest we’ll have to do more than just clean the canal as we’ve been doing. Since that won’t get us any new tissue our only option is a more fundamental approach.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Surgery. We’ll resect a portion of the canal and connect it to the intestine. That will allow the resected ends to knit naturally and you’ll be, well, almost as good as new.”

  Tsuda nodded without speaking. Next to where he stood, a microscope sat on a table that had been installed beneath a window facing south. Entering the examination room earlier, his curiosity had prompted him to ask the doctor, with whom he was on familiar terms, if he could have a look. What he had seen through the 850-power lens were grape-shaped bacteria as vividly colored as if they had been photographed.

  Fastening his hakama, Tsuda reached for the leather wallet he had placed on the same table and abruptly recalled the bacteria. The association was a breath of uneasiness. Having inserted the wallet inside his kimono in preparation to leave, he was on his way out when he hesitated.

  “If it’s tuberculosis, I suppose it wouldn’t heal even if you performed what you call fundamental surgery?”

  “If it were tubercular, no. In that case it would burrow straight in toward the intestine so that just treating the opening would be ineffective.”

  Tsuda winced involuntarily.

  “But mine isn’t tubercular?”

  “That’s right.”

  Tsuda looked hard at the doctor for an instant, as if to determine the degree of truth in what he was saying. The doctor didn’t move.

  “How do you k
now? You can tell from just an examination?”

  “That’s right—from how it looks.”

  Just then the nurse, standing at the entrance to the room, called the name of the next patient, who had been waiting for his turn and immediately appeared in the doorway. Tsuda was obliged to exit quickly.

  “So when can I have this surgery?”

  “Any time. Whenever it suits you.”

  Promising to pick a date after thinking it over, Tsuda stepped outside.

  [ 2 ]

  ON THE streetcar home, he was feeling low. Wedged into the crowded car with no room to move, gripping the overhead strap, he directed his thoughts inward. Last year’s screeching pain rose vividly to the stage of his memory. He saw distinctly his own pathetic figure laid out on the white bed. He heard clearly his own moaning, a sound that might have issued from a dog unable to break its chain and run away. And then the glitter of the cold blade, the metallic clink of scalpel against speculum, a pressure so powerful that it squeezed the air out of both his lungs in a single gasp, and a riotous agony that felt as if it could only have come from the impossibility of expressing the air as it was being compressed—these impressions assaulted his memory all at once.

  He felt miserable. Shifting his focus abruptly, he cast an eye around him. The passengers near him were impassive, not even aware of his existence. He turned his thoughts back on himself.

  Why did I have such an agonizing experience?

  On his way home from viewing cherry blossoms at the Arakawa Wharf, the pain had struck with no warning, its cause a mystery to him. It wasn’t strange so much as terrifying. There’s no guarantee that a change won’t occur in this body of mine at any hour of any given day. For that matter, some sort of change could be taking place even now. And I myself have no idea. Terrifying!