by Kansuke Naka
Kansuke’s Older Brother Kin’ichi
In considering Naka Kansuke’s life and writing, we cannot ignore his older brother Kin’ichi. Kansuke was Kan’ya’s fifth son, but three of his older brothers had died young, leaving only the second oldest, Kin’chi (1871–1942), alive. Kansuke also had two older sisters and two younger sisters.
Kin’ichi studied internal medicine at the Imperial University of Tokyo. In 1902, the year he married Nomura Sueko, Viscount Nomura Yasushi’s daughter, then nineteen years old, the government sent him to Germany to study medicine further and, upon his return, in 1905, he was appointed professor at the Fukuoka Medical School (upgraded to the Imperial University of Kyūshū, in 1911).
But less than four years after his return from Germany and at the height of his career, Kin’ichi suffered a severe stroke and, born bully that he was, became a half-crazed invalid, speech-impeded and violent. For the next thirty years, he would wreck not just the life of his wife Sueko—the woman that Kansuke’s friend, the eminent philosopher and educator Abe Yoshishige (1883–1966), described as someone “I respected and loved the most, who was attractive and at the same time admirable, in addition to being a natural person who was furthest from malice”17—but his brother Kansuke’s life as well. With him incapacitated, Japan’s family system then prevailing thrust Kansuke into the position of family head to take on what he called “the house burden.”
Kansuke adored his sister-in-law Sueko—he simply called her “my older sister” (ane)—as sharer in this difficult situation, and he wrote heartfelt essays about her in diary style, among them Breaking the Ice (Kōri o waru), which covered a period after a stroke—subarachnoid hemorrhage—had cut her down, in 1940, and Honey Bee (Mitsubachi), which covered a period after her death, in 1942. He called her a “honey bee” for resolutely taking care of her husband while assiduously discharging domestic work despite Kin’ichi’s “hostility, cruel treatment, and illness,” and her “bleak solitude for forty years, her difficulties for forty years.”18
Natsume Sōseki and The Silver Spoon
Naka went to the First Higher School, then to the Imperial University of Tokyo. His professor of English at both was Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916). Sōseki resigned from his university post in early 1907 and joined the daily newspaper Asahi Shinbun as an “associate” to write full time—with the agreement that he would write at least one full-length novel a year for the paper. Several months later, Naka switched from English to Japanese literature at the university. He graduated in 1909.
While Sōseki was still teaching, some of his students began to visit him, and these visitors, later to become prominent writers, scholars, and educators, would be called Sōseki’s “disciples” (monjin, deshi). Naka, too, visited him, and also would become sufficiently well-known, but with his reserve, aloofness, and misanthropy, he kept out of the group, even though Sōseki played a pivotal role in his debut as a writer. According to Natsume Sensei and I (Natsume Sensei to watashi), the essay Naka wrote for the November 1917 issue of Mita Bungaku,19 he liked the three novellas collected in Sōseki’s Quails’ Cage (Uzura-kago),20 published in 1907, the one called Grass Pillow (Kusamakura) most of all, but he didn’t like I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru), Sōseki’s first work, which had won him plaudits and popularity. He found the title itself “repellent,” he wrote. He made it plain in the essay, and probably in person, that he wasn’t a good, let alone admiring, reader of his former professor’s writings.
Still, it was to Sōseki that Naka sent the childhood memoir he had written and called The Silver Spoon. Sōseki, a remarkably tolerant man despite the periodically severe bouts of neurasthenia that he suffered,21 was impressed, and pushed for its publication in the Asahi Shinbun. He wrote to an editor at the daily:
. . . The other day I had requests to read two works. Both are interesting and the Asahi would in no way embarrass itself by carrying them with the thought of introducing unknown writers. One of them in particular, which is by a bachelor of arts, a man named Naka Kansuke, is a record of how he grew up until he was eight or nine, and it is by far the worthier for the Asahi to introduce in its pages, I believe, because his prose is equipped with freshness and dignity and also his way of writing is genuine. The only thing is that, unlike novels written to be illustrated, it doesn’t have much drama (henka) or development (shinten). . . .22
The Asahi accepted Sōseki’s word and serialized The Silver Spoon, from April 8 to June 4, 1913. Sōseki, in fact, did not just recommend the memoir. He gave the young Naka a good deal of advice about his writing: spelling errors, the tendency to ignore paragraphs, to write interminable sentences in kana syllabary, not using kanji, “Chinese characters,” appropriately.23 In the Japanese writing system, kanji serve as distinct syntactical markers.
When Naka wrote a sequel the next year, Sōseki again “liked it very much,” he wrote to Naka, even as he noted that it is “eventless (jiken ga nai) so that philistines may be unable to read it.”24 Again the Asahi accepted his recommendation and serialized the work, from April 17 to June 2, 1915, this time under the title of The Contrarian (Tsumujimagari). It would become Part II of The Silver Spoon.
When the second serialization was complete, Sōseki even offered to pen an introduction to the childhood memoir to have it published in book form. But Naka said it was too short and, when Sōseki suggested he add another piece to fatten the volume, he said he disliked the piece Sōseki named. So nothing came of it.
Publication in Book Form and Growing Popularity
In 1922, Naka’s classmate Iwanami Shigeo (1881–1946) published the memoir through the imprint he had started, Iwanami Shoten, as a paste-up of the newspaper serializations, with some deletions. Four years later, the same publisher issued it as a regular book. For this edition Naka made extensive revisions and deletions to shape the story into its present form, cutting not only repetitions but also passages that placed him in an unduly favorable light. In doing so he reduced the number of installments or episodes in Part I from fifty-seven to fifty-three and in Part II from forty-seven to twenty-two—in the latter, practically obliterating the initial installment format.25
The readership clearly began to increase after 1935, when Iwanami included The Silver Spoon in its paperback series and published it with Watsuji’s afterword quoted earlier. The reprint history since then is proof of the book’s steady popularity.
In October 1943, in the midst of Japan’s war with the United States and others that was quickly turning into a colossal defeat for the nation, Naka wrote a poem called “Stamp” (Ken’in) and referred to the book’s “unexpected twelfth printing,” giving its run at 15,000 copies.26 By then the publishing industry was under tight government control and paper shortages were mounting.27
More than a half century later, in 1999, when The Silver Spoon reached its 108th printing, Iwanami Shoten brought out a new edition. It, too, did well. By the end of 2006 it had seen eleven printings, selling a grand total of a million copies since the first edition came out, in 1935.28
The Silver Spoon has appeared in various other forms and editions, among them two sets of Naka’s “complete works”: the first set, in thirteen volumes, published by Kadokawa Shoten from 1960 to 1965, and the second, in seventeen volumes, published by Iwanami Shoten from 1989 to 1991. Publishers other than Iwanami have also published the memoir in paperback editions.
If The Silver Spoon did not sell particularly well for the first two decades or so, the main reason may well have been what Natsume Sōseki pointed out: lack of drama and development, and lack of events. As contrast, Sōseki could have mentioned one of his own earlier works, Botchan, popular since its first publication in 1907. Dealing with the narrator-protagonist’s boyhood only at the very outset, the whole novella is meant to be satirical and comical. Still, it is written in terse, vigorous sentences, it is full of drama, it moves fast, and it is packed with entertaining events.
What then are the charms of The Silver Spoon?
&nbs
p; Again, Sōseki seems to have hit the mark. Naka recalled his former professor of English literature bringing up in conversation Tom Brown’s School Days, Thomas Hughes’s novel published in 1857, and Peck’s Bad Boy, George W. Peck’s newspaper series first collected in 1883, to observe that “the areas they write about are different.” He also mentioned Boys (Shōnen), a short story by Naka’s contemporary Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), to observe, again, that “it’s a little different in character”—an understatement, considering that Boys concerns adolescent sadism and masochism. Nagai Kafū (1879–1959), the editor of Mita Bungaku, had praised the story extravagantly, along with four other pieces, among them Shisei (The Tattooer), putting the new writer Tanizaki in the limelight.
In the following passages in Naka’s account, Sōseki is referred to as Sensei, “Teacher”:
. . . I heard from a friend that Sensei was defending The Silver Spoon all by himself against people’s criticisms of it. And I thought, It may be that Sensei likes The Silver Spoon more than I do.
I don’t remember when, but commenting on The Silver Spoon, Sensei said,
“It’s not what you’d call sentimental.”
Hearing this, I thought someone must have criticized the book using that word [“sentimental”].
. . . It is pretty (kirei da), Sensei said. Detailed descriptions, he said. He also said, It has originality. When I heard the word “originality,” I thought, I haven’t heard that word since my university days. Sensei said, It’s a mystery to me that it is so well chiseled and yet that hasn’t harmed the truth. I thought, It’s no mystery that chiseling for truth shouldn’t harm the truth. When talk turned to certain people who’d said The Silver Spoon isn’t interesting at all, Sensei named some of those who’d said it was not interesting, and said, So-and-so finds interesting only things like the two people eating a single peach. Also he went so far as to say, So-and-so should be made to read something like this, as if it were terribly inappropriate that some should find uninteresting what others find interesting. . . .
One can well believe Sōseki’s words as Naka recollected them because, as these passages indicate, Naka was a contrarian who would not hesitate to contradict to his face anyone offering words of praise. Sōseki called him a henjin, an oddball or eccentric, Naka admitted.
There is also a certain “nostalgic” purity to The Silver Spoon. This quality may have struck some of Naka’s contemporary readers as mundane and unexciting, but it may be the most pleasurable aspect to the readers of later generations, as Iwanami’s survey in 1987 showed. In that survey to mark the sixtieth anniversary of its launch of the paperback series, the publisher asked “readers representing various fields” to name the three books in the series that stayed in their hearts, and The Silver Spoon came out on top. (The number one cumulative seller was Plato’s Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates.) Many of the three hundred respondents reported that the memoir depicts the child’s world so sensitively, so beautifully, that it “purifies their mind.” But they most commonly said that it revived for them their own childhood and boyhood.29
In this regard, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s Childhood Years (Yōshō jidai)30 presents an illuminating contrast to The Silver Spoon. Both cover about the same period in history and the author’s life, from the second half of the 1880s to the early 1900s, from infanthood to boyhood. But the similarities end there.
Naka described life mainly in the Yamanote whose inhabitants were largely of the gentry class; Tanizaki, life in the Shitamachi whose inhabitants were predominantly commoners. Naka wrote his memoir in his late twenties to early thirties, apparently relying on memory; Tanizaki wrote his when he was seventy, relying not just on his own memory but also on the recollections of his relatives, acquaintances, and old friends, as well as records, historical commentaries, even classical texts. Naka, in reliving the past, limited himself to the immediate surroundings and the people that entered his sphere as a child and the senses and emotions they provoked; Tanizaki extended his interest to the overall setting and age to reconstruct his youthful days over a span of a dozen years.
But the most remarkable difference may be what Watsuji Tetsurō, in his afterword to the 1935 edition of The Silver Spoon, pointed out as “unprecedented”: that it is “neither a child’s world as a grownup sees it, nor is it anything like childhood memories recollected in a grownup’s experience.” Instead, it is a simple, precise record of things a child observed and perceived. Childhood Years, in contrast, is either or both of what Watsuji judged Naka’s memoir was not. Tanizaki at times leaves a child’s sensibilities and thoughts far afield, bringing in a retrospective view—e.g., “now that I think of it”—to reinforce what he thinks he felt, how he reacted to things and people. What he wrote is a layered account of la recherche du temps perdu.
The Silver Spoon in Naka’s Oeuvre
Naka, as noted, has left us a sizable body of literary work. It includes fables collected in Stories of Birds and other fictions. A few of them are highly realistic. One of them, Dogs (Inu), which he wrote in 1922, was too much so for its time in its descriptions of sexual intercourse, albeit between dogs. The publisher of the story, Iwanami Shigeo, was summoned to the Metropolitan Police Department and agreed to censor certain descriptions, leaving them blank. The story was banned altogether anyway.31 It dealt with an old Indian ascetic who, overcome by lust for a young beautiful woman, turns both her and himself into dogs so he may have sex with her to his heart’s content.
Naka wrote this and a similar story, Devadatta,32 when he was contemplating the choice of either “suicide or priesthood,”33 and imposing a stoic’s life on himself. For a period he ate such poor food that he suffered from severe beriberi. It was at this time that he told himself: “If being in love with someone aims at sexual acquisition or makes it a prerequisite, I do not have love nor do I want to have love. I am someone determined to control all lusts, purify them, make full use of them through wisdom, and turn them into material for moral improvement.”34
Except for such fables and fictions, Naka’s writings largely consist of what he chose to call shōhin, “small pieces,” and what others characterize as nikki-tai zuihitsu, “diary-style essays.” They are both recordings of daily occurrences and observations shaped into essays. The Naka scholar Watanabe Gekisaburō has compared them to one large river called “life chronicle” that began with The Silver Spoon.35
These seemingly innocuous pieces were not without problems, however. The novelist Nogami Yaeko (1885–1985), for one, noted in her diary, as early as 1935, that Naka’s approach required him to constantly “idealize” himself, turning him into “a kind of hypocrite.” In 1951 she observed that she was “put off” by the way Naka “shut himself up in an egotistic, self-righteous shell . . . never forgetting to bemedal himself as a good boy whenever he talks about himself.” In 1954 she found it “troublesome” that he so readily invoked his “admirers.”36 Indeed, not many writers would think of turning a collection of fan letters into an essay, as he did in Yosei (Remaining Life), published in 1947. It was largely made up of responses by the readers of his Honey Bee. Some of them came from the front in wartime.
The scholar of French literature Ikushima Ryōichi also sensed Naka’s “egotism” under the gentle exterior of his personality and writing, noting that he imagined Naka “always battling this egotism in the innermost part of his heart.”37
Still, Nogami’s criticisms are notable in part because she once confessed her love for Naka and evidently remained fond of him, even after marrying his classmate, Toyoichirō, who went on to become a distinguished educator. Weakling that he may have been as a boy, Naka grew to be a tall, good-looking man: Kobori Annu (1909–98), a daughter of the great Meiji writer Mori Ōgai (1862–1922) and herself a writer, remembered him for his “deeply sculpted, Nordic-style, fine features and his towering, magnificent physique that placed him slightly apart from the Japanese.”38 He did not lack lady friends, for all his resolve regarding sexual desire. H
e remained unmarried until 1942, when he turned fifty-seven: his bride, Shimada Kazu, was forty-two years old.
The Style of The Silver Spoon and Its Translation
Perhaps to recreate the thought processes of a child, Naka often places amid short declarative sentences long, sinuous ones that take full advantage of the remarkable tolerance that the Japanese language has for sentences loosely linked by connectives. He uses direct and indirect speech, sometimes with quotation marks, sometimes without. He uses punctuation arbitrarily. Though these features are not necessarily what sets Naka apart as a writer, I have tried to reproduce them wherever possible; I have always tried to remain faithful to the original in translation. As a result, this translation in many places will not read well, though saying this reminds me of Vladimir Nabokov’s caustic remark: “I constantly find in reviews of verse translations the following kind of thing that sends me into spasms of helpless fury: ‘Mr. or (Miss) So-and-so’s translation reads smoothly.’”39
Aside from Naka’s style, The Silver Spoon has several further features that make its reading less than perfectly smooth—not just for foreign but also for modern-day Japanese readers. Naka is precise in recalling details. He names names—of trees, plants, and insects, not to mention festivals and such, along with their paraphernalia, all with vivid specificity. He introduces a plethora of historical and literary references. Little wonder that some years ago Iwanami decided to provide a couple of dozen endnotes in its paperback edition. In translating The Silver Spoon, I have expanded the scope of items to be annotated because things that may still be common knowledge among Japanese readers may not be so among English-language readers.