Natsume Soseki, Japanese Writing, and the Heart of Loneliness
What Kokoro Teaches About Introspective Storytelling
All literary masters claim a great emotion. It’s part and parcel of their fabric, and what makes them, them.
Reading their work, one will notice how, almost unconsciously, they’re pulled back towards their special emotion again and again.
The Japanese writer, Natsume Soseki, is a master of loneliness.
His books are invitations into the intimate consciousness of another. He treats every buzzing thought, including the most mundane and fleeting, with careful attention and intricate description.
Soseki also has a profound capacity to foster empathy in his readers. At first, his characters are disorienting, but eventually, they always invite deep understanding and feeling.
Soseki’s special technique for nurturing loneliness: he writes his books purely in the first person.
He allows his readers to experience the rich inner monologue of one character while cutting them off from everyone else. Distant from the depths of Soseki’s protagonists is the desolation of all his other characters, whom he shrouds in dark, incomprehensible motivations.
Thereby, the insulated perceptions of his lonesome protagonists have free reign to dominate the narrative.
And Soseki’s protagonists are usually self-centered people. Incapable of understanding others, and unyieldingly in a state of personal crisis.
Only at the very end of his stories does Soseki let us into the other.
That final revelation recontextualizes all the past misunderstandings the reader is misled into by seeing the world through the eyes of a flawed protagonist.
His book Kokoro — which translates to heart or innermost feeling– is a masterclass in first-person storytelling and introspective prose.
A Short Word on Kokoro
It’s difficult to sum up Kokoro in a few words.
One journal describes it as capturing the interplay between self-obsession and our unshakable need for others.
I’d say, it’s also about a kind of solitude special to the modern world.
The book is set in 1910s Japan and is split between two protagonists. The initial protagonist is a young man entering his first year of university. While on vacation, the young man meets an older figure whom he begins to idolize. Throughout the narrative, he only refers to that older figure as ‘Sensei.’
Our protagonist forms what can almost be called a friendship with Sensei. He regularly visits Sensei for conversation, meets Sensei’s wife, and takes all of Sensei’s advice to heart. But while he admires Sensei, he is also frequently bewildered by him.
Sensei lacks strong opinions. He’s unsociable. Indifferent. Sensei hardly pays attention to his own life, and he doesn’t allow anyone, including his wife, to glean his real thoughts.
Sensei also never seeks more than a superficial connection with others.
This frustrates our protagonist, who attempts to learn about Sensei’s past, only to be met by resistance and evasion.
The sole hint of a leaning in Sensei is in his near-religious visits to the grave of a former friend. He goes frequently, but refuses to reveal the friend’s identity or the true reason he visits the grave.
Gradually, tension mounts, as our protagonist finds Sensei’s indifference and concealment increasingly grating.
Until a dramatic break happens halfway through the book.
While the protagonist is visiting his sick father in the countryside, he’s suddenly telegraphed a suicide note from Sensei. The note is a confessional, where Sensei offers the first unadulterated peer into his heart.
And for Sensei, the protagonist of Kokoro, the only means of escape from his loneliness is death.
The rest of the novel is narrated by Sensei, through the note, where he talks about his past, his self-disdain, the death of his friend, and precisely what he was thinking in the moments he chose to not be forthcoming with our first protagonist.
We never revisit that initial protagonist, or glimpse his reaction to the letter. From then on, Sensei becomes the ‘hero’ of the novel.
In introspective voice, we’re thrown into the extent of Sensei’s burdens, the betrayals he experienced, the betrayal he inflicted, his solitude, and what he lacked the power to testify truthfully to others while alive.
Soseki uses the latter half of the book to build empathy for a person we could not measure fairly through the perception of our first protagonist.
Soseki’s Foundations and Meiji Japan
Earlier, I brought up that writers have certain foundations they tend to come back to.
I like to think the context surrounding their lives offers hints at how these foundations first emerge.
Soseki was born in Edo a year before the city would be renamed Tokyo, marking the beginning of the Meiji era.
The Meiji era may have been the fastest societal transformation in human history. In fifty years, Japan went from a traditionalist feudal society to a modern nation-state, with a burgeoning middle class, heavy industry, and sprawling infrastructure.
Soseki’s life stretched from the very beginning to the end of that transformation. So, over a lifetime, he saw his world completely change.
He experienced tradition, the gradual loss of tradition, and an unrecognizable, modern world.
It’s no coincidence, that above deep experiences of loneliness, Soseki’s characters are always middle-class, highly-educated, and betrayed. First, because it mirrored his own experience. But more importantly, it’s because there was a noticeably strange tension about the Japanese middle class in this period.
They were torn between the customs of a recent, samurai past, and the new demands of a fast-emerging present. And for them, the past wasn’t a thing of their great-grandfathers, but in most cases, their fathers.
Some, including Soseki, came from families of nobles or samurai who had lost rank in the old rigid social order. They were thrown, detached, into an unpredictable society where income and work, instead of name, dictated worth.
This created a unique consciousness in the middle class, which Soseki constantly sought to capture in his work.
Traditional values — like obligation to one’s family and one’s peers — clashed with imported Western values, which pushed for the actualization of the individual, self-determination, and progress.
In individuals of the emerging Japanese middle class, those clashing values often manifested into a mixture of concealing one’s true feelings, loneliness, and self-destruction.
The revealed reason that Sensei in Kokoro feels obligated to frequent his friend’s grave, is because his betrayal caused his friend’s death.
In a way that would be deemed somewhat old-fashioned by Soseki’s time, Sensei believed he was not permitted to enjoy the smallest pleasure in life because of that betrayal, so he withdrew from the world and all other people. Harkening back to an older, traditional Japanese morality.
Sensei also betrays the initial protagonist of Kokoro. Before committing his ‘suicide of obligation,’ Sensei made the false promise to speak again with him soon. Therefore, Sensei felt duty-bound to write him a testament, even though he felt reluctant to share his emotions.
Solitude, ‘honorable death,’ and inability to communicate true feelings, all reflected tensions Soseki saw and experienced as Japan transitioned from a society based on obligation, to one based on the individual.
A mess of traditional commitments and new, ‘selfish’ values, with often horrible ends for the afflicted.
Concealment, Loneliness, and Tragic Ends
The treatment of hidden emotions in Kokoro reminds me of Kierkegaard’s famous retelling of the story of Abraham.
Abraham is instructed by God to take his son Isaac to Mount Moriah as a burnt offering. The tension of the story, Kierkegaard says, is fostered by the fact that Abraham cannot reveal what he’s about to do to anyone else.
This concealment creates moral isolation for Abraham. He is forced to wrestle with the guilt and responsibility of choice alone, which makes it all the heavier.
Kierkegaard says Abraham’s choice, a father sacrificing a son, cannot be justified by ethics. Yet Abraham believes that the sacrifice is demanded by his faith. This creates an additional layer of isolation, because even if Abraham wished to, he could never make his choice understandable to an outside observer.
Only he, the individual who received the ‘divine command’, can understand the necessity of the action.
Ultimately, he’s rewarded for his faith when God saves Isaac. But to Kierkegaard, it’s not quite a heroic story.
Because a hero’s actions are understandable within the context of morality. Abraham’s actions are driven by blind faith, and trust in providence, even when compelled to do something immoral and unthinkable.
The reader, with full access to Abraham’s internal dilemma, is left to contemplate whether such obedience to faith is truly good.
Concealment plays a similar role in Kokoro. The characters are morally isolated. Instead of sharing their great struggles, they bear the terrible choices they make in isolation, like Abraham. Though they are never rewarded for their concealment.
Soseki’s simple, first-person writing, as well as the heavy moral burdens his characters, especially Sensei, carry, pull us into their loneliness, and the difficulty of their feelings.
Even if we believe Sensei’s choices are wrong in the end, we understand him deeply and grasp why he feels compelled to a tragic end.
At the beginning of his ‘testament’, Sensei himself questions why he needed to write the letter. Admittedly, he believed it was pointless. But he felt the need to write it regardless.
Maybe he was pulled by an unshakeable need for another person, regardless of his self-obsession.
Yet alone, he still kept the tragedy inside himself, until it was too late.
