The Miner

by Natsume Soseki

  A sophisticated student of Western—primarily English—literature and a lover of traditional Japanese (and Chinese) poetry and humor, Natsume Sōseki had been experimenting in fiction for three years, writing works of humor, fantasy, and melodrama, when he began serializing The Miner in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper on January 1, 1908. The Miner was his second novel as a professional writer. Sōseki had caused an uproar the previous year when he abandoned a teaching post at Tokyo Imperial University, the nation’s premier educational institution, to join the staff of the Asahi for the sole purpose of writing fiction, a genre associated with the world of the geisha and prostitute and far beneath the dignity of anyone with his own unimpeachable scholarly credentials. But “if being a newspaperman is a trade, then being a university-man is also a trade,” he had declared, plunging wholeheartedly into the creative writing that would occupy the final decade of his life.2

  The plunge was perhaps a bit too exuberant in the case of the first novel he serialized in the Asahi, from June to October 1907. Everything about The Poppy (Gubijinsō) shows that Sōseki was trying too hard. The language is labored and ornate, the characters painted in intense monochromes and acting out a convoluted plot with conflicting loves and obligations, chance encounters, sly machinations, and dramatic confrontations. The novel was a hit even before it reached the newsstands, thanks in part to the success of Sōseki’s earlier works and a lingering curiosity about his highly publicized resignation from the university. One department store sold “Poppy” robes, and a jewelry firm came out with “Poppy” rings. Once the novel reached the pages of the Asahi, the enthusiasm spilled over into a warm public reception, if not universal critical acclaim.3 The shortcomings of the book were clear to Sōseki himself, again even before serialization. On June 17, 1907, he wrote to a friend that he was already finding his manuscript unpleasant to read, and by July he confessed that he wanted to kill off his heroine. A few years later he rejected another friend’s suggestion that the novel be translated into German, saying that he would just as soon see the book go out of print in Japan, if it weren’t for the occasional royalty payment; still less did he want to compound the embarrassment by having Germans read the thing, too.4

  If the few brief mentions of The Poppy in his correspondence show Sōseki’s dissatisfaction with that novel, The Miner demonstrates conclusively his absolute rejection of it. No two books from a single hand could have been more starkly different. Both novels begin with their central characters walking through the countryside, but there the similarity ends. In The Miner, the elaborate locutions and circumlocutions have given way to a tough, telegraphic, colloquial prose—language that may suggest an unstoppable flow of thought but never invites the reader to linger over a well-turned phrase, as is so painfully true of The Poppy. And as different as the prose styles are the landscapes through which Sōseki’s characters walk. The squarely built aspiring diplomat Munechika and his tall, thin friend, the philosopher Kōno, who appear in the opening scene of The Poppy, are climbing the flanks of Mt. Hiei outside of Kyoto, gazing at the peak towering above them, its very name reverberating with the rich history of Japan’s traditional political and cultural center. Not only do we not know the name of the pine grove through which the protagonist of The Miner is walking, we never get to see what he looks like, so firmly are we locked inside his brain (or his text), and he is known to us only as “I” (jibun). Far from being rich with historical associations, the landscape is almost phantasmagorical—dark and abstract. And from it, inexplicably, materializes a series of Bosch grotesques: the fat-lipped Chōzō with his protruding bones and crooked, tobacco-stained teeth; the urinating tea-stand woman with her twisted mouth; men with suppurating eyes and sloping foreheads, pale skins and wasted flesh; a bland, faceless bumpkin eternally swathed in his stinking red blanket; a disturbingly batlike boy who swoops down alone from the hills.

  Ironically, The Poppy, with its roots firmly planted in nineteenth-century realism, was entirely fictional, whereas the abstractly modernist Miner was based in part on the experience of a young man who visited Sōseki with the express purpose of selling his “story” as material for a novel. We know from the notes Sōseki took at the time that the young man spent his first night on the road in Ōmiya, that the procurer took him to Maebashi to board the train for Utsunomiya, and that he went to work in the famous (or, for its pollution, notorious) Ashio Copper Mine, but Sōseki has removed nearly all such identifiable labels from his narrative.5 Whereas it is possible to learn something about the scenery east of Kyoto or about wealthy Tokyo lifestyles from The Poppy, The Miner is worthless as travel literature, and it gives us hardly more than a glimpse of the life of the miners, for Sōseki has done everything he can to make the excursion of his protagonist a psychological one. He is clearly speaking of himself when he has his narrator say, “Thank goodness, I do have this great gift … the ability to dissect my experience with an open mind and to evaluate each little piece of it” (p. 93). This is the foundation of all Sōseki’s mature fiction, and it is the direction in which he decisively turned, beginning with The Miner.

  Natsume Sōseki is two writers: the popular comedian of I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru, 1905–6) and Botchan (1906), and the intellectual’s tragedian of The Wayfarer (Kōjin, 1912–13) and Kokoro (1914).6 The comedian makes us laugh at greed, dishonesty, and affectation; the tragedian reveals only “betrayal, guilt and loneliness,” the theme that Sōseki was “obsessed with throughout his later career,” in the words of Edwin McClellan.7 Although the contrast between the two Sōsekis is clear, the precise timing and nature of the change in Sōseki’s writing have been less well defined.

  Howard Hibbett has traced a parallel between periods of mental suffering that Sōseki experienced and the deepening darkness of the novels. “If [Sōseki’s] early novels reflect more clearly the surface changes of his society,” observes Hibbett, “it is in the later novels, in which he probes his own darkest psychological problems, that he symbolizes the widespread anxiety beneath those exciting changes.”8

  The key here is self-analysis. In Kokoro, the Sōseki novel most widely read in the West and surely one of the author’s finest works, the protagonist’s misanthropy comes less from what he sees in others than what he discovers in himself.

  When I was cheated by my uncle I felt very strongly the unreliableness of men. I learned to judge others harshly, but of my own integrity I knew I could be certain. I thought that in the midst of a corrupt world I had managed to remain virtuous. [When I caused K to commit suicide,] however, my self-confidence was shattered. With a shock, I realized that I was just as human as my uncle. I became as disgusted with myself as I had been with the rest of the world.9

  Likewise, Hibbett observes, as Sōseki’s “courageous efforts toward self-discovery continued, he found in himself an aggressive element which he shared with those ‘others’ whom he had feared and despised.”10

  Whether or not we follow Hibbett in his use of the term “aggressive,” there can be little doubt that the change in the novels has much to do with the degree to which Sōseki’s protagonists are willing to recognize undesirable traits in themselves that they share with others. As long as they are confident of their own superiority, they can afford to stand back and ridicule, but as the gulf diminishes, the intellectual distancing of humor becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. The laughter becomes muted in Sanshirō (1908), and in And Then (Sore kara, 1909) it finally dies.

  Rather than their capacity for “aggression,” I would like to emphasize Sōseki’s later protagonists’ growing awareness of their own vulnerability to change. For all their misanthropy, the later characters condemn man not as inherently evil but as “unreliable.”11

  Sensei, the protagonist of Kokoro, sees in the uncle who cheated him of his inheritance “the personification of all those things in this world that make it unworthy of trust.”12 In And Then, the protagonist Daisuke sees his entire nation tempted by money. But Daisuke understands and sympathi
zes with his harried countrymen, for introspection has taught him to doubt the honesty of his own motives and hardened his resolve to absent himself from the social battlefield.13 Someone as simpleminded as the hero of the early Botchan, of course, cannot plumb such complexities and has no capacity for sympathy. When he says “There’s nothing so unreliable as people,” he sees himself surrounded by liars and cheats.14

  Much of the humor in Sōseki’s earlier fiction springs from the difficulties faced by simple characters who classify people as either good or bad. One particularly amusing example can be seen in Autumn Wind (Nowaki, 1907) when the idealistic philosopher Dōya is telling a young admirer how few readers have responded to his essays. A notable exception, Dōya says, was a patent medicine salesman who came to ask him to use his writing skills to compose an advertisement for a new brand of eye drops. This Dōya refused to do, but the man proceeded to ask for Dōya’s help with some advertising balloons. Dōya’s job, had he taken it, would have been to get people to look up at the balloons.

  “How were you supposed to do that?”

  “All I’d have to do was walk along or ride the streetcar, and whenever I saw a balloon I was supposed to say, ‘Look! Look! A balloon! It must be an ad for Tenmeisui Eye Drops!’”

  “What a laugh! So he wanted you to fool people. You have to admire his nerve.”

  “Yes, it was very funny—if a little ridiculous. I told him he didn’t need me to do a job like that. All he’d have to do was hire some rickshaw puller. But that wouldn’t work, he said. Nobody would listen to a rickshaw puller. It would have to be a serious-looking person, preferably a man with a moustache, or no one would be taken in.”

  “Now that’s going too far! Who was this fellow, anyway?”

  “Who was he? Just an ordinary human, out to fool the world and looking for someone to help him do it. What did he care? Ha ha ha.”

  “But this is shocking! I would have beaten the stuffing out of him!”

  “Start beating up one and you have to beat them all up. It won’t do any good to get so angry. The whole world is made up of men like him.”15

  Dōya does not seem to include himself among the “ordinary humans,” which places him with the earlier Sōseki characters who see people in terms of stereotypes or categories. Kiyo, the old woman so devoted to Botchan, warns him of the evils of country people, while in her letters from rural Kyushu, Sanshirō’s mother warns him to beware of city people.16 Instead of making for humor, a dialogue on the relative merits of country versus city people in Kokoro is what leads to Sensei’s dark observation that “there is no such thing as a stereotype bad man in this world. Under normal conditions, everybody is more or less good, or, at least, ordinary. But tempt them, and they may suddenly change. That is what is so frightening about men.”17

  The problem for Sōseki’s later protagonists, then, is that introspection has taught them the fragility of “ordinary” human nature (including their own), the ease with which good becomes evil, the difficulty of observing the change, and the consequent insecurity that underlies all human relationships.

  This is the stuff of modern tragedy, but it is far from what Sōseki’s contemporaries were expecting from him as late as March 1908. In that month, the journal Chūō Kōron carried a symposium in which thirteen prominent writers and intellectuals gave their views of Sōseki. They saw him as an original stylist, a pioneer in humor, a writer attempting to transcend the real world, and a man “incapable of writing tragedy” whose works “are finally not modern fiction.”18

  Sōseki was serializing The Miner in the Asahi at the time, and receiving universally negative reviews. Yet this novel, still so little appreciated even today, was the very work in which Sōseki formulated the view of human nature that underlies his late masterpieces.

  So full of passion and anxiety are Sōseki’s later novels that it would seem to be an error to search for the source of their tragic insights in a work so cool and detached as The Miner, yet this oddly humorous book, in which the laughter is provoked less by human foibles than by the thinking process itself, served as an indispensable test-tube for Sōseki in his search for an appropriate fictional medium. And with all the clarity of a test-tube, The Miner yields up the results of the experiment with maximum visibility, even if, in its vitreous starkness, the vessel itself is not immediately appealing.

  The story of a young man whose love life has fallen to pieces, The Miner simply shows the nineteen-year-old protagonist fleeing from Tokyo, being picked up by a procurer of cheap labor for a copper mine, then traveling toward—and finally burrowing into the depths of—the mine where he hopes to find oblivion. As set forth in this book’s Introduction, the unusual setting was suggested to Sōseki by a young man who suddenly showed up on his doorstep in November 1907 and insisted on selling the story of his disastrous love affairs and subsequent experience in Ashio Copper Mine as material for a novel. The young fellow, known to posterity only by his surname, Arai, needed the money for a train fare, he said. Sōseki had no time to listen to his story just then but gave him the fare and told him to come back that evening, never expecting to see him again. Surprisingly, Arai returned as promised and told Sōseki his story for three hours, concentrating on the events leading to his departure from Tokyo. Not wishing to reveal another’s personal affairs, Sōseki suggested that Arai write his own story and Sōseki would try to have it published, but this never happened. Instead, Sōseki obtained Arai’s permission to use only the details of the life of the miners, then set about writing his own entirely original novel, which began appearing on January 1, 1908.19

  Once he had stripped away all the melodramatic elements of Arai’s story, Sōseki was left with little more than the bare bones of the journey and the descent into the mine. He then turned this virtually non-existent plot material into a 250-page novel by having the protagonist reflect at length on his every thought and perception, in terms both of what he noticed at the time and of what the experience means to him now as a mature adult. This prolix analysis of non-events (such as a split-second of visual clarity that requires three pages of description and commentary) drove some readers to distraction. “You’d think Sōseki was some kind of antique dealer, the way he attaches a certificate of authenticity to everything in the novel,” fumed one critic who had read about half the installments.20

  These remarks appeared in the March 1908 symposium on Sōseki cited earlier. Not one of the contributors had a good word for The Miner. Even one enthusiastic fan who claimed to have hungrily devoured everything Sōseki had ever written admitted to reservations about that one novel. After a year of spectacular popularity with I Am a Cat, Botchan, and Pillow of Grass (Kusamakura, translated as The Three-Cornered World and as Kusamakura) in 1906, Sōseki had disappointed critics (if not the general public) with Autumn Wind and The Poppy in 1907. He was not living up to his early promise, it was felt, and The Miner seemed to confirm his decline.21 The editor of the magazine feature concluded that while Sōseki’s decreasing popularity was being interpreted by some as merely a reaction to the excessive early praise, the inferiority of The Miner was undeniable.22

  One can hardly blame critics in 1908 for reacting negatively to a work that discarded all the conventions of modern fiction—conventions that were still being learned by a relatively unsophisticated readership. Instead of plot and character, Sōseki gave them perceptions and analyses of perceptions, and neither his lively colloquial tone of voice nor the eccentricity of his focus seemed to compensate for the loss of familiar elements. The opening passage, in which the protagonist first sees the procurer Chōzō and analyzes the situation before turning and walking back to him, truly comprises a “certificate of authenticity” to tax the patience of any plot-hungry reader.

  Sōseki himself was aware of the difficulties many readers would have in identifying with the novel. Some, he told an interviewer, would object to the retrospective narration for its cooling and distancing effect, but he had chosen it for the opportunity it ga
ve him to dissect the character’s every action and analyze his motives. This was an extremely complicated business, he noted, for we ourselves are not aware of many of our own motives. A precise analysis of motives would be virtually impossible to set down on paper in any case, and an attempt to do so would involve a lot of maddening hairsplitting and would not be very interesting to read. That was why not many writers were attempting to do it—and why Sōseki himself wanted to give it a try. “I am not so much interested in events themselves as in laying bare the truth behind them.” He did not want to investigate cause-and-effect relationships that link events, he said, but rather to analyze the elements that compose events, each discrete from the other. The interest here lay in satisfying a certain kind of intellectual curiosity about how events in life are constituted, but “people lacking such intellectual curiosity will not find it much fun.”23

  To be sure, despite its snatches of lively dialogue and its comically obsessive pursuit of trivia, few readers have found The Miner to be fun, and this includes the scholarly world. The novel is never included in “selected” works of Sōseki, only the complete works. One self-proclaimed “indispensable” Sōseki handbook has no article on The Miner.24 Many of the numerous collections of scholarly essays on Sōseki omit studies of the book.25 Etō Jun’s famous 1965 study of Sōseki, which did much to shape all subsequent scholarship, devotes less than a page to The Miner, concluding only that it was an étude leading toward the more accomplished characterizations in And Then.26 Miyoshi Yukio reluctantly grants that The Miner was “one door” that Sōseki had to pass through on his way toward the later works, but he sees the novel as “merely a product of chance” owing to the journalistic exigencies that led Sōseki to fabricate it from materials lying at hand.27 Edwin McClellan’s pioneering introduction of Sōseki to Western readers does not even suggest that The Miner exists.28 Beongcheon Yu’s later book-length study devotes five pages to The Miner and credits it with being an antinovel, but it negates the book’s thematic connection with Sōseki’s other works and contains factual misstatements that suggest a less-than-careful reading.29