And Then
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All of these facets, attesting to the multiplicity of Sōseki’s talents and energies, tend to obscure the novelist. Etō Jun’s Natsume Sōseki (Rev. ed.; Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1965) is a milestone in Japanese Sōseki studies in its effort to retrieve the complex human being from the sanctified master and in its sensitivity to the artist. Yet even Etō says that it is Sōseki the representative Meiji intellectual who commands more interest than his works. He finds it regrettable that this is the case with so great a writer but argues that it is inevitable because of the unhappy relationship still existing between the Japanese and the arts. This observation, which reveals more about Etō and the cultural-intellectual state of Japan today than it does about Sōseki, is yet another ironic testimony to the continued validity of Sōseki’s sociocultural concerns. The Japanese are still asking what art is, and if true art is possible in Japan, perhaps in a way similar to the American posing of these questions earlier in the history of the United States. The more Sōseki the “critic of civilization” (Etō’s phrase) prospers, the more the artist suffers. One hundred years from now, will the struggling artist who grappled with the perennial questions of the universe, whose answers can be reduced neither to ethical values nor to socio-historical concerns—will that artist be remembered? Will he ever be known abroad?
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
The following is a list of current translations in English of Sōseki Natsume’s works:
Botchan. Translated by Umeji Sasaki. Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1967.
___. Translated by Alan Turney. Palo Alto: Kodansha International, 1967.
Grass on the Wayside (Michikusa). Translated by Edwin McClellan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.
I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru). Translated by Katsue Shibata and Motonari Kai. London: Peter Owen, 1971.
___. Translated by Aiko Itō and Graeme Wilson. Rutland, Vt.: E. Tuttle, 1972. (This is an incomplete translation.)
Kokoro. Translated by Edwin McClellan. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1957.
Light and Darkness (Meian). Translated by V. H. Viglielmo. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1971.
Mon. Translated by Francis Mathy. London: Peter Owen, 1972.
Sanshirō. Translated by Jay Rubin. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977.
Ten Nights of Dream, Hearing Things, The Heredity of Taste (Yume jūya, Koto no sorane, Shumi no iden). Translated by Aiko Itō and Graeme Wilson. Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1974.
The Three-Cornered World (Kusamakura). Translated by Alan Turney. London: Peter Owen, 1965.
The Wayfarer (Kōjin). Translated by Beongcheon Yu. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967.
The following is a small selection of books and articles that may be helpful to the general reader:
Doi, Takeo. The Psychological World of Natsume Sōseki (Sōseki no shinteki sekai). Translated by William Jefferson Tyler. Cambridge: East Asia Research Center, Harvard University, 1976.
Etō, Jun. “Natsume Sōseki: A Japanese Meiji Intellectual.” American Scholar, XXXIV (1965), 603-19.
Hibbett, Howard S. “Natsume Sōseki and the Psychological Novel.” Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture. Edited by Donald S. Shively. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.
McClellan, Edwin. Two Japanese Novelists: Sōseki and Tōson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.
Miyoshi, Masao. Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
Ueda, Makoto. Modern Japanese Literature and the Nature of Literature Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1976.
Yu, Beongcheon. Natsume Sōseki. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969.