The Miner

by Sōseki Natsume

  But if we take Sōseki at his word, he displayed not the least bit of interest at first in the young man’s graphic account of his experiences in Ashio Copper Mine. I find this very strange, almost unbelievable. Any practicing novelist would have to be attracted to background information regarding events that had recently commanded the whole society’s attention. And perhaps Sōseki was in fact interested, which would explain why he took such extraordinarily detailed notes (without which he might not have been able to write the novel), but he hesitated to make his interest public.

  Why, then, did Sōseki feel he had to pretend to be uninterested in the young man’s talk about the copper mine? My guess as a novelist is that he didn’t want his novel to be directly identified with a serious social problem. As recently as March of 1907 he had resigned his post as a professor at Tokyo Imperial University and launched himself as a professional novelist, a courageous move tantamount to diving off a cliff. No longer could he write fiction as a hobby from the transcendent position of a respected university professor. By becoming a special staff member of the Asahi Shimbun, he had committed to serializing one novel per year. This would require him to settle upon a mature writing style and to undergo a major change in lifestyle. In other words, this was a very delicate time for him, in addition to which he had always been a high-strung personality who suffered from severe stomach illness. He simply couldn’t afford at such a time to risk jeopardizing his literary style by choosing to tackle a major social problem head-on—or so it would seem to me. His concern at the time was directed not so much toward social problems as toward the mental activity of individual human beings. I think it can even be said that society was, for him (at that time at least), an unavoidable external factor that applied varying amounts of pressure to the minds of individuals to bring about something like chemical changes in them. In that sense, the factual social problems surrounding Ashio Copper Mine would have been too serious, too direct, as topics for him to make them his own.

  Sōseki was probably, moreover, too much of an elitist to feel sympathy for or to try to understand such laborers as the Ashio miners living in the lower depths of society. It simply might have been a practical impossibility for him to overcome this basic attitude all at once.

  Nevertheless, Sōseki was profoundly interested in the look and feel of Ashio Copper Mine as the young man had experienced it. This was a natural part of his makeup as a novelist. His interest was entirely healthy and richly nourishing to him as a creative writer, which is why he took such detailed notes. He could not have cared less about the commonplace love story that the young man wanted to sell him. He wanted to know what it was really like down there in the mine—the black honeycomb of shafts and passageways deep underground; the precarious ladders that went down and down forever; the brutal, violent, mud-smeared men who squirmed in the darkness as they struggled with their wretched circumstances: Sōseki wrote it all down.

  When it came to the practical problem of turning this material into a novel, however, Sōseki had few concrete options open to him. He could not, of course, write “proletarian” literature. Nor could he enter the domain of Zola’s social naturalism. Such possibilities simply did not lie within Sōseki’s field of vision. Which is why he chose for his protagonist an educated, well brought-up, city-bred nineteen-year-old (“an inexperienced, aristocratic miner” in the eyes of the other miners) and put his experiences into the form of dark underground “rounds of Hell.” Using such a character, the author was able to give his imagination free rein with relative ease and thus depict the events in the book as one particular extreme experience, skillfully avoiding any larger “socializing” of his novel and technically doing away with any decisive confrontation with members of the lowest rung of society on their level. This was almost certainly why Sōseki had to avoid any mention in his text of either the name “Ashio” or the riot that had occurred there.

  As will become clear on reading the novel, the only characters encountered by the protagonist who possess the slightest intelligence and humanity are Yasu, a highly educated man whom circumstances have reduced to becoming a miner (and who is seen by the other miners as superior to them), and the boiler boss, a man of some standing in miner society. All the other miners are depicted as ignorant savages or animals devoid of human feelings. Sōseki draws a sharp, almost amusing distinction between the two types in a way that is reminiscent of his 1906 Botchan’s distinction between the city-boy protagonist and the ignorant, unsophisticated country bumpkins who surround him. It may in fact reflect Sōseki’s own social stance.

  Let me emphasize that these views are entirely my own freewheeling inferences as one novelist assessing another. I do not mean to criticize Sōseki from a later generation’s point of view. It goes without saying that the fundamental role of the novelist in any period is to be true to his own ideas, not to maintain political correctness. Of course in Sōseki’s day the idea of political correctness was all but nonexistent.

  Earlier I noted the extreme lack of lead time between the author’s gathering of his materials and his shaping of them into a novel. If I can (perhaps somewhat presumptuously) offer my view of the matter, this time constraint seems to have been both a plus and a minus for the book. On the plus side was the fact that Sōseki was not given a chance to prepare thoroughly for the novelization of his materials. This required him to write it spontaneously, forging ahead with the work almost as soon as he had obtained the information on which it was based. This resulted in the book’s uniquely lively style and deepened its experimental quality. I imagine that if another, more ordinary, novelist had undertaken the work, it would have turned out either as a novel focused on a social problem or as a conventional Bildungsroman; that is, as a device intended to educate and enlighten the general populace or as a story showing how one intelligent nineteen-year-old came through a series of outlandish and brutal experiences to emerge as a mature adult. Certainly no one else would have written a social novel like The Miner that stubbornly maintains the protagonist’s individualistic stance to the very end and avoids (or positively rejects) any active engagement with society on the part of the protagonist. I make a point of calling The Miner a “social novel” here because it possesses great practical value as a first-class historical document conveying what life was really like for late-Meiji laborers inside Ashio Copper Mine. If this novel didn’t exist, there might never have been any way for us to learn about the world of the copper mine in such concrete detail. This is an undeniable fact.

  On the minus side, obviously, is the fact that the novel lacked the necessary “fermentation period” for bringing it to maturity. Usually when novelists find material they want to write about, they’ll leave it to ferment in their minds until they begin to see whether it will work as a novel, and if so they give it more time so they can think about what form it will take. In the case of The Miner, though, time is exactly what Sōseki was not given. He had to present it to the public before the work could fully ripen—a literary minus, to be sure. If, however, Sōseki had had plenty of time to let his materials ferment, I suspect (and this is pure speculation, of course) that he never would have written the novel at all, and we never would have had a chance to encounter this odd book called The Miner. And that is because, finally, the materials Sōseki had to work with were incompatible with his literary world. The longer he had left it to ferment, the more clearly he might have seen that it was never going to turn into a novel, and he might have put the notes away in a drawer for good. In that sense, we were probably lucky that he wasn’t given enough time to let the novel take shape.

  The first time I started reading The Miner, I assumed it would turn out to be a kind of Bildungsroman. The young man was encountering so many trying experiences as I turned the pages, he was sure to undergo a kind of personal transformation in the end and discover some deep meaning in his experiences. When I came to the last line, however, I was astounded. By that point, the young protagonist has managed to spend five months of
his life at the mine (though not as a miner digging down into the earth); he has witnessed this hellish world and has himself survived his passage through it, and yet he does not appear to have undergone the slightest change as a human being. He might have changed in some unknown way (not to have changed at all after such an ordeal is unthinkable), but the author says nothing about that. To all appearances, the protagonist leaves the mountain as nonchalantly as he first entered it, without a thought in his head. He just goes with the flow in everything. He went with the flow to enter the mine, and he goes with the flow when he leaves it. He spent five months in this alien world, and yet the author says absolutely nothing about how this experience caused him to grow as a human being or how his worldview has changed or how his social consciousness has deepened: nothing. A blank. The alien world is as alien as ever, tied to nothing and nowhere. Most readers must feel this to be rather odd. And the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that Sōseki deliberately excluded from the book all the usual novelistic elements that come with the story of a young man’s coming of age.

  Why would he do such a thing? If he had included a few such elements, The Miner would certainly have turned out to be a more novelistic novel, and there would have been no need for the protagonist to make awkward excuses at the end about how “this book never did turn into a novel.” But Sōseki almost certainly rejected such an approach. To the very last line, he almost perversely maintains his protagonist’s detached posture, in which the alien world is simply that—an alien world.

  For years, this feature of the novel has been seen as a structural weakness, and it is one of the reasons that The Miner has not received high marks among Sōseki’s works. In short, there is very little by way of novelistic catharsis in the book.

  Yet that is the very thing that strikes me about The Miner—its unsatisfying ending, its weak catharsis, its stubborn detachment. I felt that way when I first read it years ago, and again when I reread it for this commentary. It’s like reaching for the next rung of a ladder in the darkness and grabbing only empty space. “What’s going on here?” you feel when it’s all over, as if the author has deliberately thrust you away and left you feeling stranded, alienated, empty. You get that same kind of parched sensation that a good postmodern novel can give you. Perhaps we can call it a sense of meaning in the very lack of meaning.

  This probably sums up what I love and value about The Miner. Thanks to the extremely short lead time between his obtaining his materials and his fashioning them into a work, Sōseki virtually had to strip-mine the novelistic unconscious lurking inside him, bringing it to the surface so openly and forcefully that it surprised even him. In more or less tangible form, this fresh surprise went on to influence all the great novels that flowed from his pen after that, from Sanshirō (1908, Sanshirō) to Light and Dark (1916, Meian). As a novelist myself, I can’t help imagining this to have been the importance of The Miner to Sōseki, and when I do think of the novelist Natsume Sōseki in this way, I feel closer to him, almost as if he were a contemporary.

  Finally, on a personal note, I would like to say that I had The Miner in mind as I was writing my Underground (1997), a non-fiction study of the 1995 sarin gas attack against the Tokyo subways by the Aum Shinrikyō sect. I spent a year interviewing 64 survivors of the attack (and members of the victims’ families) and compiling the massive stack of transcripts into one thick volume. I did virtually nothing else for that year. I listened carefully to what they had to say, I took down their words, and I did my best to recreate the scene and atmosphere of the incident as vividly and faithfully as I could. In doing this, I simultaneously had to suppress my creative self and to work my imagination as hard as I could. The task added much to my growth as a writer.

  Of course, The Miner is a novel and Underground is non-fiction, so they are very different sorts of books, but I’ve always felt that deep down they share something in spirit. There is an attitude in both that says, “I’m a writer, and I’m going to try my best to visit this other hellish world as an honest witness (an active observer) while keeping my sanity intact and shedding my own kind of light on it.” Another important goal on my part was to establish my text as reliable primary material. Whether that attitude was appropriate or not, whether the work I produced was a success or not, history will judge over the long haul. I can only leave it up to time.

  In that sense, it makes me very happy to know that even now I can read this novel written over a hundred years ago as if it were a contemporary account and be deeply affected by it.

  December 2014

  The Miner

  Been walking and walking through this band of pine trees. It’s so long—longer than any band of pine trees I ever saw in a picture. Can’t tell if I’m making headway with only trees around. No point walking if the trees aren’t going to do something—develop. Better to stay put and try to outstare a tree, see who laughs first.

  Left Tokyo at nine last night, walked like mad straight north. Worn out, sleepy, no place to stay, no money. Crawled onto a Kagura stage1 in the dark for a nap. Hachiman shrine, probably. Cold woke me up. Still pretty dark. Pushed on without a break, but who feels like walking when there’s no end to these damned trees!

  Legs weigh a ton. Every step is torture. Like having little iron hammers strapped to my calves. Kimono tail tucked up for hiking, legs bare. Anywhere else, I’d be set to run a race. But not with all these pine trees.

  Here’s a tea stand. Through the reed blinds I see a rusty kettle on a big clay stove. A bench in front sticks way out into the road, a few straw sandals hanging over it. A man in a kimono—a hanten or dotera2 or something—sitting there with his back to me.

  I’m moving past and peeking from the corner of my eye and wondering whether I should stop and rest or forget it when this fellow halfway between a hanten and a dotera spins around in my direction, smiling. His tobacco-blackened teeth show between two fat lips. I start feeling queasy but he turns serious. I see he’s been enjoying a talk with the old lady in the tea stand and for no good reason swung around to the road where that smile of his landed smack on me. So he turns serious and I relax. I relax and then I feel queasy again. His face is serious and he keeps it sitting there in a serious position, but damned if the whites of his eyes don’t start creeping up my face—mouth to nose, nose to forehead, over the visor and up to the crown of my cap. Then they start creeping down again. This time they skip the face, go to the chest, to the navel, and come to a stop. Wallet in there. Thirty-two sen inside. Eyes lock onto it right through my blue-and-white kimono. Still focused on the wallet, they cross my cotton sash and arrive at my crotch. Below that, only bare legs, and no amount of looking is going to find anything to see on them. They’re just feeling a little heavier than usual. After a long, careful look at the heavy parts, the eyes finally arrive at the black marks my big toes have rubbed onto the platforms of my geta.3

  When I write it out like this, it sounds as if I was standing there in the one spot for a long time practically inviting him to look me over, but that wasn’t it at all. In fact, the second the whites of his eyes started moving, I was sure I wanted to get out of there. But knowing what I wanted to do wasn’t enough, it seems. By the time I had my toes scrunched up and was ready to turn my geta, the whites of his eyes had stopped moving. I hate to say it, but he was fast. If you think it took a long time for his eyes to creep all over me like that, you’re wrong. Sure, they were creeping, and they were calm as could be. But they were fast, too. Damned fast. Here I was, trying to walk past this place, and all I could think of was how strangely a pair of eyes can move. If only I could have managed to turn away before he had finished looking me over! I was like somebody who announces that he’s leaving a place after he’s been ordered to get out. You feel like a fool. The other fellow’s got the upper hand.

  Once I started walking, I had a strange, angry feeling for the first ten or twelve yards. But those ten or twelve yards were all it took for the feeling to disappear—and for m
y legs to grow heavy again. I’ve still got the same legs, don’t I, and the same iron hammers strapped to them? Of course I can’t move quickly. Maybe I was born slow, but that can’t be the reason those eye whites crawled all over me. When I think about it like this, my anger begins to seem pointless.

  Besides, I’m not in any position to let little things bother me. I’ve run away and I’m never going home again. I can’t even stay in Tokyo. I’m not planning to settle in the country, either. They’re after me. They’ll catch me if I stop. Once my troubles start running around my brain, there’s no place far enough out for me to relax. So I keep walking. But since I’m walking with no particular goal in mind, I feel as if a big, blurry photograph is hanging in the air in front of my face. Everything’s out of focus, and there’s no telling when it might come clear. It stretches off ahead of me into infinity. And it’ll be there as long as I live—fifty years, sixty—stretching out in front of me no matter how much I walk, no matter how much I run. Oh hell, what’s the difference? I’m not walking to get through this foggy stuff out there. I know damn well I could never get through it if I tried. I’m walking because I can’t stay still.

  I thought I knew all this when I left Tokyo at nine last night, but my nerves have been on edge ever since I started walking. Now my legs are heavy, and these endless rows of pine trees are making me sick. Finally, though, it’s not the legs or the pine trees that are bothering me: the ache is in my gut. It’s a new kind of pain, one so bad I know I can’t go on living a second longer if I don’t keep walking, but I have no idea what I’m walking for.

  And that’s not all. The more I walk, the deeper I can feel myself tunneling into this out-of-focus world with no escape. Behind me, I can see Tokyo, where the sun shines, but it’s already part of a different life. As long as I’m in this world, I can never reach out and touch it. They’re two separate levels of existence. But Tokyo is still there, warm and bright, I can see it—so clearly that I want to call out to it from the shadows. Meanwhile where my feet are going is a formless, endless blur, and all I can do for the rest of my life is wander into this enormous nothing, lost.