Sanshiro

by Sōseki Natsume

  As popular as he was with students in both Kumamoto and the University, Hearn was never more than a hired hand, a lecturer, and although his literary fame and his good relationship with the University president earned him twice the lecturer’s usual 200-yen monthly salary, he had to be reappointed from year to year. Especially now that he was a fully fledged Japanese citizen, he felt he deserved a professorial appointment. Instead, his position became increasingly insecure when the University president died in 1900 and was replaced by a man who was far more conscious of Hearn’s lack of academic credentials than he was impressed by his literary reputation. Hearn’s foreign colleagues at the University also made him uncomfortable. Two were devout Catholics, and made it clear they resented his abandonment of Christianity—and perhaps resented both his marriage to a Japanese woman and the worldwide fame of his exoticist writings as well. He heard the philosophy lecturer Raphael von Koeber (1848–1923) declare that all heretics should be burned alive to save their souls and that the world should be ruled by the Catholic Church, after which he never again set foot in the faculty room. (Koeber was also a very popular lecturer; Sōseki had attended an aesthetics lecture of his in 1896 and socialized with him in later years.) Instead, he would go out to the pond during class breaks with his native Japanese smoking paraphernalia in a bag, sit on a rock and smoke his long, slim kiseru pipe.6

  Things came to a head for Hearn in November 1902, when he requested a year’s leave to accept an invitation to lecture on Japanese culture at Cornell University. Annoyed at Hearn’s expectation of special treatment, the strongly nationalistic president, Inoue Tetsujirō (1855–1944), rejected his request and resolved to augment the English teaching staff with a native Japanese professor. The administration immediately began considering a plan to reduce Hearn’s weekly classroom hours from twelve to eight and use the savings to hire a Japanese instructor to share teaching duties with Hearn. The best candidate for that position, they determined, was Natsume Kinnosuke (i.e. Sōseki), who was then studying in London on a government stipend. The one problem with that plan was that rumors had been reaching Tokyo that Natsume might be having mental problems, so they decided to wait for him to return, and they sought Hearn’s advice on the matter. Hearn, of course, was already steaming over the Cornell debacle, and he absolutely refused to take reduced teaching hours with lower pay.

  Sōseki was on his way back to Japan when a letter arrived at Hearn’s home on 15 January 1903, expressing President Inoue’s regret that the University would be unable to continue his contract beyond 31 March. Word of Hearn’s resignation reached students at the end of February, and a heated campaign erupted to retain him. Some of the English students at a meeting on 2 March called for a mass resignation from the University if the administration moved to suppress the campaign (a position that did not receive unanimous support). A few student representatives visited Hearn at his home on 8 March and were allowed to read Inoue’s letter. Hearn was almost inaudible when he delivered his last lecture the next day, and he never came back to the University. Shocked at this sudden development, President Inoue visited Hearn and offered to let him stay with reduced hours, but Hearn would not hear of it. The break was final.

  Far from being the object of a student movement to force the administration to bring a Japanese professor into the faculty, then, Sōseki arrived at the University with the administration’s backing and with the students dead set against him. His first class, on the morning of 21 April 1903, only confirmed their antipathy. He called on individual students to read aloud and translate from Silas Marner and found himself correcting one error after another. Hearn had never trained them to look at texts closely and had even ingrained in the students an attitude of contempt for the learning of English for utilitarian purposes, providing inspirational lectures instead of requiring effort on their part in grammar, composition and conversation. They hated this new instructor for correcting their pronunciation and embarrassing them as if they were middle-school students. Who was this stiff-necked intruder with the plebeian name of Kinnosuke and a few essays in a haiku magazine who presumed to replace the world-famous Hearn? Natsume’s afternoon lecture, a theory of English literature with more psychology than literature in it, only made things worse. The students felt that his objective, Western-style analysis, in contrast to Hearn’s more emotive “Japanese” approach, was like taking a scalpel to things of rare beauty. Some students walked out and never came back. One First National College student, scolded by Sōseki for his poor performance, committed suicide that May, and Sōseki was not entirely convinced, despite assurances from others, that his scolding had not been the immediate cause. He blamed himself, too, for the large number of students who failed his University spring examinations (including Osanai Kaoru (1881–1928), who would later become one of the leading figures in modern Japanese drama), and he offered his resignation, which was not accepted.

  Yojirō’s campaign to make Hirota a University professor, then, is in effect a reversal—and a parody—of the situation that pertained when Sōseki began to teach at Tokyo Imperial University. Subsequent events also had their ironical implications. That fall, Sōseki’s lectures on Shakespeare transformed him from the least popular to the most popular lecturer in the Faculty of Letters. As for Hearn, once his break with the University was complete, he was dealt a final blow in the form of a letter from Cornell withdrawing their invitation because the city of Ithaca and the university campus were experiencing a typhoid epidemic that eventually killed eighty-five people. Hearn took one final teaching position, at the less prestigious, private Waseda University, beginning in March 1904, but he died from a heart attack in September at the age of fifty-four and was buried in Tokyo’s Zōshigaya Cemetery.7

  Meanwhile Sōseki, who had been scolded by his brother for wanting to be a writer in his mid-teens, and who had fantasized at thirty about leaving academe for the writer’s life, would shock the public in 1907 by resigning from the nation’s most prestigious educational institution to become a newspaper staff novelist. He continued to think of himself as a scholar, however, and he surrounded himself with a dozen young “disciples,” some of them former students, as he produced a prodigious stream of publications (including two sizeable tomes of literary theory and criticism based on his University lectures) before joining Hearn in Zōshigaya Cemetery in 1916.

  This translation is based primarily on the virtually identical texts of Sanshirō in volume 5 of the 29-volume Sōseki zenshū (Complete Works), published by Iwanami shoten in 1993–9, with annotations by Yoshida Hiroo, and in volume 26 of the 60-volume Nihon kindai bungaku taikei (Shōgakkan: 1969–74), annotated by Shigematsu Yasuo. Most of the annotations are taken from these copiously annotated editions without individual attribution. The Iwanami text is unusual in that it indicates the breaks between newspaper installments, and though the present translation does not go so far as to number each section, the breaks are indicated here with the symbol *.

  The choices made in the translation of three very common words are worth noting: kage (shadow), mori (forest), and onna (woman).

  Focusing as it does on a generally innocent young man, Sanshirō is a work with much radiant imagery, but it does have its shadows, hinting at disillusionment to come. Sōseki often uses the word kage, which can also mean “image” or “reflection” or “the hidden side” of an object, to convey these dark hints almost subliminally. The English text employs the word “shadow” somewhat more frequently than strictly idiomatic translation would require.8

  Mori usually means “woods” or “forest,” and as such it is often as richly symbolic as any forest in a Grimm Brothers’ fairytale, but it can also mean “a grove where a Shinto shrine is located,” and when it appears in Sanshirō as the surname of the assassinated Minister of Education, Mori Arinori (1847–89), it is also an important element in one character’s deepest memories. Ironically, Mori was a renowned modernizer who once suggested that English should be made Japan’s national language, and he
was murdered for having supposedly violated the sanctity of a nationally revered Shinto shrine.

  Onna can mean a woman of any age, and in Sanshirō it refers to the dangerous woman on the train, to that woman as a mother, to Sanshirō’s own mother, to the lovely young women in Tokyo who figure so prominently in Sanshirō’s new world, and to the pretty little girl of twelve or thirteen glimpsed in a funeral procession by Professor Hirota twenty years before. Mineko, the young woman loved by Sanshirō, removes herself from the progress of his life when she becomes enshrined in a painting, unchanged, as “Woman in Forest” (mori no onna). The little girl whose image was burned into the brain of Professor Hirota, after which he went on changing with the passage of time, was someone he saw first in the funeral procession for Mori Arinori, and then in the forest of his dream, which makes her also an unchanging mori no onna.

  I felt some urgency about translating Sanshirō when I first read it in my early thirties, thinking that its youthful appeal might not outlast my own youth. Students I recommended it to always loved it, and my own enthusiasm for the novel has only grown over the years. I have probably spent more time reworking it for this edition, in my mid-sixties, than I did for the original translation, which was published by the University of Washington Press in 1977 and made available to students until 2009 by the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan. Much of the pleasure this time around came from consulting with Professor Maeda Shōsaku, a linguist with insatiable curiosity about the English translation of Japanese literary texts. Other friends who have read and commented on the manuscript include Ted Goossen, Lindeth Vasey, Shibata Motoyuki, Shibata Hitomi and, as always, my wife Rakuko. My first translation of Sanshirō was dedicated jointly to my young son, Gen, and his grandmother, my mother Frances or “Baba.” Let this version be dedicated to the memory of Baba and to my own wonderful grandchildren—Makena, Kaia, and my daughter Hana’s new baby, Kai.

  NOTES

  1. Sanshirō comes from Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands, and is taking a 730-mile, 3-day trip to Tokyo, spending almost 40 hours on the train, plus two stopovers. After the first 50 miles (covered in about 2½ hours by train), he would have taken a 15-minute steam ferry connection from the port of Moji on the northeastern corner of Kyushu to Shimonoseki on the southwestern tip of the main island, Honshu (tunnels were not completed until 1942 and 1944), and continued on by a San’yō Line train to Tokyo, with stops at Hiroshima (175 miles from home), Kobe (365 miles, where the line becomes the Tō kaidō ), Osaka (385 miles), Kyoto (410 miles) and Nagoya (500 miles). When we first meet him, Sanshirō is on the Kyoto-Nagoya leg of his trip and is about to spend his second night on the road. A 29-hour “Extreme Express” [saikyūkō] from Shimonoseki to Tokyo was available at the time of the novel, but this would not have matched Sanshirō’s itinerary, most notably his all-important stopover in Nagoya. A likely itinerary was this: depart Saigawa on local Kyushu train at 11.12 a.m., arrive Yukuhashi 11.36; depart Yukuhashi 12.06, arrive Kokura 13.08; depart Kokura 13.16, arrive Moji 13.43; ferry 13.45–14.00; San’yō Line train #42 depart Shimonoseki 14.40, arrive Kyoto (end of line) 8.58 the next day. Tour Kyoto. Tōkaidō Line train #36 depart Kyoto 16.58, arrive Nagoya (end of line, still 230 miles from Tokyo) 22.39. Overnight in Nagoya. 8.00 a.m. train #24 from Nagoya, arrive Tokyo 20.06; Professor Hirota’s presence on this train is never explained.

  2. In 2006, Saigawa became part of the town of Miyako-machi. The area is still rural and remote, and rail service is limited to a small line, the Heisei–Chikuhō Railway, which runs only one or two one-car trains an hour.

  3. See Takagi Fumio, “Sanshirō no jōkyō,” in Tamai Takayuki et. al. (eds), Sōseki sakuhin-ron shūsei 5: Sanshirō (Tokyo: Ōfūsha, 1991), pp. 149–160. My re-creation of Sanshirō’s itinerary is based partly on this source and largely on Tezuka Takemasa (ed.), Kisha-kisen ryokō annai, No. 164 (May 1908), pp. 36–40, 72–5, courtesy of Kōtsū kagaku hakubutsukan (Modern Transportation Museum), Osaka, kindly obtained for me on a blazing summer day in 2008 by Professor Maeda Shōsaku.

  4. Edward Seidensticker, Low City, High City (New York: Knopf, 1983), p. 243.

  5. See Nihon kindai bungaku taikei, 60 vols (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1969–74), vol. 26, pp. 106 n5, 197 n17, 198 n1, and 576 n 87.

  6. Etō Jun, Sōseki to sono jidai: Dai-ni-bu (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1970), pp. 242–3. On kiseru, see note 26 to the main text.

  7. Ibid., pp. 243–8.

  8. For a more detailed discussion of this and other elements of the book’s visual imagery, see my “Sanshirō and Sōseki: A Critical Essay” in the earlier version of this translation, as published by the University of Washington Press (1977), Perigee Books (1982), and the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan (2002), pp. 213–48.

  SANSHIRŌ

  1

  He drifted off, and when he opened his eyes the woman was still there. Now she was talking to the old man seated next to her—the farmer from two stations back. Sanshirō remembered him. The old man had given a wild shout and come bounding onto the train at the last second. Then he had stripped to the waist, revealing the moxibustion scars1 all over his back. Sanshirō had watched him wipe the sweat off, straighten his kimono, and sit down beside the woman.

  Sanshirō and the woman had boarded this train in Kyoto, and she immediately caught his eye. She was very dark, almost black. The ferry had brought him from Kyushu the day before, and as the train drew closer to Hiroshima, then Osaka and Kyoto, he had watched the complexions of the local women turning lighter and lighter, and before he knew it he was homesick.2 When she entered the car, he felt he had gained an ally of the opposite sex. She was a Kyushu-color woman.

  She was the color of Miwata Omitsu. At home, he had always found Omitsu an annoying girl, and he had been glad to leave her behind. But now he saw that a woman like Omitsu could be very nice after all.

  The features of this woman, however, were far superior to Omitsu’s. Her mouth was firm, her eyes bright. She lacked Omitsu’s enormous forehead. There was something pleasant about the way everything fitted together, and he found himself glancing at her every few minutes. Several times their eyes met. He had a good long look at her when the old man took his seat. She smiled and made room, and soon after that Sanshirō drifted off.

  The woman and the old man must have struck up a conversation while he was sleeping. Awake now, Sanshirō listened to them.

  Hiroshima was not the place to buy toys, she was saying. They were much cheaper and better in Kyoto. She had to make a brief stop in Kyoto in any case and bought some toys near the Tako-Yakushi Temple. She was happy for this long-delayed return to her native village where her children were staying, but she was concerned about having to live with her parents now that the money was no longer coming from her husband. He was a laborer at the Kure Navy Yard near Hiroshima, but had gone to Port Arthur during the War.3

  He came back for a while when the War ended, but left again for Da-lien because he thought he could make more money there. His letters came regularly at first, and money arrived every month, but there had been neither word nor money for the past six months. She knew she could trust him, but she herself could no longer manage to live in Hiroshima without work. At least until she learned what had become of him, she would have to go home to her parents.

  The old man did not seem to know about the Tako-Yakushi Temple or care about toys. He responded mechanically at first. But the mention of Port Arthur brought a sudden show of compassion. His own son was drafted into the Army and died over there, he said. What was the point of war, anyway? If there were prosperity afterward, that would be one thing, but people lost their sons and prices went up; it was so stupid. When there was peace, men didn’t have to go off to foreign countries to make money. It was all because of the War. In any case, he said, trying to comfort her, the most important thing was to have faith. Her husband was alive and working, and he would come home soon. At the next stop the old man wished her well a
nd stepped briskly from the car.

  *

  Four other passengers followed the old man out, and only one got in. Far from crowded to begin with, the car now seemed deserted. The sun had gone down: maybe that had something to do with it. Station workers were tramping along the roof of the train, inserting lighted oil lamps into holders from above. As though reminded of the time, Sanshirō started to eat the box lunch he had bought at the last station.

  The train started up again. It had been running for perhaps two minutes when the woman rose from her seat and glided past Sanshirō to the door of the car. The color of her obi caught his eye now for the first time. He watched her go out, the head of a boiled sweetfish in his mouth. He sunk his teeth into it over and over and thought, she’s gone to the toilet.

  Before long, she was back. Now he could see her from the front. He was working on the last of his dinner. He looked down and dug away at it with his chopsticks. He took two, three bulging mouthfuls of rice, and still it seemed she had not come back to her seat. Could she be standing in the aisle? He glanced up and there she was, facing him. But the moment he raised his eyes, the woman started to move. Instead of passing by Sanshirō and returning to her seat, however, she turned into the booth ahead of his and poked her head out of the window. She was having a long, quiet look. He saw how her side locks fluttered in the rush of wind. Then, with all his strength, Sanshirō hurled the empty wooden lunchbox from his window. A narrow panel was all that separated Sanshirō’s window from the woman’s. As soon as he released the box into the wind, the lid appeared to shoot back against the train in a flash of white, and he realized what a stupid thing he had done. He glanced toward the woman, but her face was still outside the window. Then she calmly drew her head in and dabbed at her forehead with a print handkerchief. The safest thing would be to apologize.