Natsume Soseki — Kokoro (tr. Edwin McClellan)
My book club buddy made us all read it because he was dating a Japanese girl and wanted to learn more about her culture (I hope one day someone reads Prus for me, that would be real love). Anyway, they’ve been married for a while now, so that should give you an idea how behind I am with my reviews.
After all the melodrama of the Western literature, reading Kokoro was a refreshing experience of emotional restraint. It’s an absolute classic, written in 1914, the end of Meiji era when Japan was going through somewhat tumultuous cultural changes after centuries of isolation.
All the reviews will tell you that ‘Kokoro’ means the metaphorical heart, the feeling, the heart of things. It’s an apt title even if all those things remain unsaid, ambiguous and floating. Despite its delicate nature this book is really about a cultural clash of the Zen Buddhist values of calm observation and passionless life and the brave new world of obsessive individualism courtesy of the Western Civilisation. You can find the traces of the Western literature (so beloved by Soseki) in a certain despair and hopelessness that often characterises Victorian novels. However, the drama is missing, the passion if it exists is under a lock and key, so in its heart (see, what I did there?) it is definitely a Japanese novel.
The book opens with the narrator, a young student, observing an older man (henceforth called Sensei) bathing in the sea. I can’t be the only one detecting some homoerotic undertones in the obsessive admiration that the narrator develops on spot. I mean, I probably think about sex too much, but come on! All that stuff about wind drying wet naked bodies. Come on!
What follows is a story of a baffling friendship between the two, where nothing of consequence is ever said. Ironically, the most important theme of the book is loneliness, the kind that can never be escaped, the kind that’s the price that needs to be paid for the indulgence of choosing self over a group.
Kokoro fixates on the guilt and penance but somehow neglects to mention that the kind of penance chosen by Sensei is the one that punishes unfairly everyone around him too; it’s the most self-involved kind of punishment. I fail to see anything noble about it.
So should you read this book? Do you care for occasionally exhausting existential ennui and a reminder that we are all alone inside our own heads, forever? If so, then yes, by all means.
