Transcriber’s Notes
Table of Contents added by Transcriber and placed into the Public
Domain.
Misspelled words have been corrected. These are identified by
♦♠♥♣ symbols in the text and are shown immediately below the
paragraph in which they appear.
Details and other notes may be found at the end of this eBook.
MASTERPIECES
OF
CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE FICTION
The Japan Times’ Series
*****
UNHUMAN TOUR
(KUSAMAKURA)
BY
SOSEKI NATSUME
[Illustration: logo]
TRANSLATED
BY
KAZUTOMO TAKAHASHI
THE JAPAN TIMES
INTRODUCTION
During the eras of Meiji and Taisho (1868–1926) the literary life of
Japan was enriched by a wealth of many notable productions, worthy of a
place in the atheneum of the world; but strange to say, no attempt has,
as yet, been made to embody them into any part of the works forming an
international library. It is true, that some Japanese novels have been
rendered into English, but such ventures have been few and far between,
and in any case, they have been of a fragmentary nature and cannot be
considered as a part of any systematic attempt.
Literature is the mirror of a living age in which is reflected the life
of a people. It is through literature, more than any other medium,
that students of the present and future eras may more readily gain an
insight into the characteristics and life of a people. The publishers
are convinced that the placing before the world, of representative
Japanese writings and fictions, will render an inestimable service
by bringing to it fuller and better understanding of Japan and the
Japanese.
“Masterpieces of the Contemporary Japanese Fiction” comprises a few of
the most representative works of the age, embodying as it does, the
favourite productions of those authors, and which have been rendered
into English as faithfully as it has been within the power of the
translators to do so.
In this present undertaking, the publishers are not actuated by any
other motive but to allow the world to understand, and to see Japan, as
she really is.
THE PUBLISHERS.
Tokyo, June, 1927.
PREFACE
KINNOSUKE NATSUME, better known by his pen-name “Soseki,” was one of,
if not, greatest fiction writers, modern Japan has produced. A man of
solid university education unlike many another of the fraternity, he
established a school of his own, in point of originality in style,
and what is more important, in the angle from which he observed human
affairs. More points of difference about him from others were the
complete absence in his case of romantic elements and adversities,
almost always inseparable from the early life of literary geniuses, and
the sudden blazing into fame from obscurity, except as a popular school
teacher and then a university professor, with some partiality for the
“hokku” school of poetry.
Soseki Natsume was born in January, 1867, a third son of an old family
in Kikui-cho, Tokyo. His education after a primary school course took
a deviation, for some years, into the old-fashioned study of Chinese
classics. It was probably then that he laid foundation, perhaps unknown
to himself, of the development of his literary talent, that later
blossomed out so picturesquely; and he was different, also, in this
respect from the later Meiji era writers, who went, many of them,
through a Christian mission school, and were all under the influence of
Western literature.
In 1884, our future novelist entered the Yobimon College, intending
to become an architect; but later changing his mind he took a course
in the Literature Department of Tokyo Imperial University, from which
he graduated in 1892. While in the university, Soseki formed a close
friendship with Shiki Masaoka, which lasted until the latter’s death
separated them in 1904. Shiki Masaoka was the greatest figure in the
revival of hokku poetry in ♦rejuvenated Japan, and Soseki’s association
with him accounts for the novelist’s mastery of that branch of
literature.
♦ “rejuvinated” replaced with “rejuvenated”
After finishing his post-graduate course in the university in 1895,
Kinnosuke Natsume taught successively in Matsuyama Middle School in
Iyo, and the Fifth High School in Kumamoto, making no name particularly
for himself except as a bright, promising scholar. He took a wife unto
himself in 1896, and was four years later sent by the Government
to England to study English literature. In three years he returned home
to be appointed Lecturer in Tokyo Imperial University. About this time
his “London Letters” in Shiki Masaoka’s Hokku magazine, the Hototogisu,
began to attract attention; but it was not till the publication of the
first book of maiden work “I Am A Cat”, that he suddenly entered the
temple of fame. That was in 1905.
The “Cat” with its perfect novelty of conception, style, study of human
nature, etc., made him, at once, a star of first magnitude in the
literary firmament, and from that time on, for the next five years, his
productions, long and short, followed in a constant stream, including
“Botchan” (Innocent in Life); “Kusamakura” (Unhuman Tour); “Sanshiro”;
“Kofu” (The Miner); “Hinageshi” (The Corn-poppy) and many others, some,
perhaps many, of which are assured an immortal life.
Soon after his debut as a fiction writer with meteoric brilliance,
Soseki resigned his post at Tokyo Imperial University and also First
High School, and accepted a position in the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun
(newspaper) Office as its literary editor. Five years later he was
♦seized with ulceration of the stomach, from which he never really
recovered, and he died in December, 1916.
♦ “siezed” replaced with “seized”
If Soseki’s rise to fame was meteoric, his retention of it was also
meteoric, it lasting only five years, before he bowed to an illness
that sent him to the grave in another five years.
All of Soseki’s writings have a ring distinctly his own and are
pervaded by a vein of thought, which is the happiest combination of
humour born of poetical acumen and well meaning cynicism of the human
heart. Especially is this true of “Kusamakura” or “The Pillow of
Grass,” which is a poetical way in Japanese of speaking of a journey or
tour, and is rendered into “Unhuman Tour” in the present translation,
from its contents rather than its literal meaning.
In “Kusamakura,” Soseki is at his best in giving free play to his
artistic fancies and contempt for conventional worldliness, to
♦visualise a refined Bohemianism, if there be such a thing, by summoning
all his literary skill. How his dissertations on his own dreamy
fancies, occurring frequently in the story, will take with the Western
readers is problematical; but they most fascinatingly appeal to the
Japanese mind, which always takes the highest delight in things that
are presented with philoso-poetical humour. “Kusamakura” was the
most successful of Soseki’s work, second only to “I Am A Cat.”
♦ “visionalise” replaced with “visualise”
It should be added that the present translator is not conceited enough
to think that his English version, which nearly covers the whole
original text of “Kusamakura,” is doing anything like justice to the
master strokes of its creator. He considers himself well repaid for
his labor, if he succeeds in giving an idea of the trend of thought
and atmosphere which Soseki loved to produce and for which he is so
ardently liked by his countrymen.
It is to be added that no attempt has been made at versification in
translating poems of all kind, but to barely transliterate the original.
TRANSLATOR.
Tokyo, June 21, 1927.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION
PREFACE i
CHAPTER I. 1
CHAPTER II. 19
CHAPTER III. 33
CHAPTER IV. 55
CHAPTER V. 76
CHAPTER VI. 93
CHAPTER VII. 111
CHAPTER VIII. 121
CHAPTER IX. 132
CHAPTER X. 146
CHAPTER XI. 159
CHAPTER XII. 164
CHAPTER XIII. 182
NOTES.
Transcriber’s Notes.
CHAPTER I.
Climbing the mountain, I was caught up into a train of thought.
Work with your brains, and you are liable to be harsh. Punt in the
stream of sentiment, and you may be carried away. Pride stiffens you
to discomfort. Heigh-ho, this is a disagreeable world to live in. When
the disagreeableness deepens, you wish to move to a world where life
is less uneasy. It is precisely when you awake to the truth, that move
where you will, it will be hard to live, that poetry is born and art
creates.
This human world of ours is the making neither of God nor of the Devil;
but of common mortals; your neighbors on your right; your neighbors
on your left, and your neighbors across the street. Hate you may this
world of common mortals, but where else can you go? If anywhere else,
it must be an unhuman world, but you will find an unhuman world a worse
place to live in than this of humanity. Things being disagreeable in
the world you cannot depart from it, but you must resign yourself
to making the best of disagreeableness, by rubbing off its sharp
corners and relaxing its pinches, to what degree you may, to pass
pleasantly, even for a brief while, this life of so short a span. Here
arises the heaven-ordained mission of the poet and the painter, and
blessed are they, who with their art, make life in this world more rich
and more cheerful.
Picture your hard-to-live-in-world, turned into one of bliss and
thankfulness, with all its disagreeableness taken away, and you have
poetry, a painting, or music, or sculpture. Nor need you produce it
actually; when you fancy you see it before your eyes, poetry springs
into life and songs arise. You hear the ringing of a silver bell within
you, even though you have not written a line of your verse on paper,
and your mind’s eye drinks of the beauties of the rainbow without paint
on the canvas. You attain your end as soon as you soar to the height of
taking this view of the human life you live in and see the soiled and
turbid latter-day world purified and beautified in your soul’s camera
obscura. Thus a poet may not have a single uttered verse and a painter
not a solitary sweep of the brush; but they are happier than a social
lion; than the most fondled child; nay, than a great prince, in that
they can have their own cleansed view of life; in that they can rise
above lust and passions, and live in a world of etherial purity; in
that they can build up a universe where differences all disappear, and
can break away free from the bondage of greed and selfishness.
Twenty years of life taught me that this is a world worth living in;
at twenty-five I saw that light and darkness are but the face and back
of a thing, there being a shadow where the sun shines. My thoughts,
today, at thirty, are these: When full of joys sorrows are as deep, and
the more pain the greater pleasure. Cut sorrows asunder from joys and
I won’t be able to get along. Shall I fling them away? that will make
an end of the world. Money is precious; but anxiety will eat you up,
even in sleep, when it accumulates. Love is sweet; but you will yearn
after the days when you knew it not, so soon as its very sweetness
begins to weigh heavy on you. The shoulders of His Majesty’s Ministers
are supporting the feet of millions and the whole country is weighing
heavily on their backs. You miss nice things when you part with them
without tasting; but you want more of them when you take only a
little of them, while you get sick if you overload yourself....
Here my train of thought broke, as I found myself sitting involuntarily
on a good-sized boulder, my left foot having, in its effort to avert a
peril, caused by a slip of my right foot, landed me in that posture.
Fortunately I was none the worse for the accident, except that my
color-box jerked itself forward from under my arm, which was not much.
As I rose from my forced rest, I saw at a distance, to my right, a peak
of mountain, the very shape of a bucket with its bottom up, covered
from foot to summit by thick dark greens, studded with blossoming
cherries in a dreamy relief, behind a screen of haze. A little nearer
there rose a bare mountain, rising shoulders above the others, with its
flank cut straight down as by a giant’s axe. The foot of its craggy
side sank into a dark abyss. A figure of man wrapped in a red blanket
was coming down from the height and I thought my climb would have to
take me up there. The road was very exasperating. If clay only, it
would not have required such very great labor to negotiate, but there
were boulders, which refused to be smoothed. Clay may be broken, but
not rocks and there they lay determined not to give way. If unyielding
on their part, then they must be passed by going round or else by
surmounting them. The place was not easy to go up even without rocks;
but to make it worse, it made a sharp angle in the centre, the sides of
which rose sharply, so that it was more like walking the bed of a river
than going up a road. However, not being in a particular hurry, I took
time and slowly came up to the “Seven Bends”.
As I trudged upward, my ears suddenly caught a lark, his song coming
up, as it were, from just below my feet. The carol was giddily busy and
incessant, but my eyes saw nothing. That bird never stops and must,
it appears, sing out the whole Spring day and every second of it till
night. I looked down the valley left and right into the air, and up
into the sky, but all in vain, as the unseen singer was heard to rise
higher and higher. I thought the lark must have died in the clouds and
his song only was floating in space. The road made a sharp turn here
by an angular rock. A blind man might have plunged head first down
the crag. But I managed to turn safely. Down in the valley the golden
blossoms of the rape were in full bloom.
But the lark! It was Spring—Spring, when the whole creation feels blasé
to drowsiness; cheerful to ecstacy. The cat forgets to pounce on the
mice. Men become oblivious of being in debt; so oblivious, indeed,
that they even fail to locate their own souls. But they come back to
themselves, when they see a distant field waving with a golden sea of
flowers, such as I was looking down upon in the valley. And they may
locate their souls when they hear the lark. The lark does not sing with
his throat; but it is his whole soul that sings. Of all creatures, of
which you hear their soul’s activity in their songs, none is as lively
as the lark. It was, indeed, joy itself, and as I thus thought, I
became joyful, and thus, was Poetry.
Yes, poetry! Soon I was trying to repeat Shelley’s song of the lark;
but I could recite only these lines:
“We look before and after
And pine for what is not
Our sincerest laughter
With pain is ♦fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of
saddest thought.”
♦ “frought” replaced with “fraught”
I once more lost myself in a reverie of thought. Happy as the
poet may be, he may not go heart and soul into singing of his joys,
forgetting everything, like the lark. The Chinese poets, to say
nothing of their brothers of the West, sing of “immeasurable bushels
of sorrow”. It may be, with common mortals, that their sorrows are
measured only by the pint not by the bushel. Who can say nay, then,
if the poet soars to the height of joys unreachable by his vulgar
brothers, he has also unfathomable griefs? It is perhaps, well, that
one thinks twice before one decides to become a poet.
My eyes captivated by the golden rape on the left, a coppice hill on
the right and the road under foot running on a smooth level, I stepped
now and again on humble dandelions, crushing them, as I thought, under
my heels; but on looking back regretfully, I found the lowly beauty
nestling, none the worse, in their double-toothed leaves. Easy is the
life of some of God’s creations.
I continued my climb, returning again to my thoughts of reverie.
Sorrow may be inseparable from the poet. But once in an humour, in
which you forget yourself, listening to a lark or gazing at a bed of
golden rape, all gloom and pain disappear. Going along a mountain
path so entranced, dandelions make your heart leap with joy. So do the
blossoming cherries—the cherries had now gone out of sight, by the way.
Up in the mountain, in the bosom of nature, everything that greets you
fills your heart with joy, with not a shadow of misery. If any misery,
it would be no more than that of feeling tired in your feet and of not
having good things to eat.
But how can this be? Nature unrolls herself before you as a piece
of poetry, as a scroll of a picture. Since poetry and a picture, no
thought occurs to you of getting possession of this home of nature, nor
a desire to make a scoup of money by making it accessible by building a
railway. Nothing darkens this scenery, to rob it of its charms, which
help neither to fill your belly, nor add something to your salary, as
long as it gladdens your heart merely as scenery, so long shall you
feel no pain, no weight on you. So great is the power of nature that it
intoxicates you, transports you, in an instant, to the world of poetry.
Love may be beautiful, and so also filial devotion, and noble and
edifying may be loyalty and patriotism. But it will be different
when you are yourself a figure on the stage, a cyclone of conflicting
interests making you too dizzy to appreciate the beautiful or the
noble, but to become entirely lost to the poetry of the thing.
You have to make an onlooker of yourself with room for a sense to
understand, in order that you may see the poetry. Placed in that
position, you will enjoy dramas, and novels will interest you; because
you have got your personal interests packed and put away on the rack.
You are a poet the while you enjoy reading or seeing.
Even at that, common dramas and novels are not free from humanities
of afflictions, anger, quarrels, and weeping, that carry you into
corresponding moods. The only saving feature may be that no sense
of gain and selfishness is acting on your part; but this absence of
personal interest will make your heart-strings the more tense and
active in other respects, and that is what I hate to bear.
I have come through my thirty years enough, indeed more than enough,
of wallowing in the mud of troubles, of fuming in anger; of being in
rows; or of sinking in sorrows; all which are indivorcible from human
life. I want poetry that lifts me above the dust and noise of
the world. I know, of course, there can be no drama, however great a
masterpiece, that is absolutely transcendental of human sentiment, or
scarcely a novel that can rise completely above all sense of right and
wrong, this being especially the case with Western poetry of which the
stock ♦paraphernalia are Sympathy, Love, Justice, Freedom, and so forth,
the staple goods in the bazaar of human life. It is no wonder that the
lark made Shelly heave a deep sigh. To my joy, poets of the Orient can,
some of them, soar above this earthly atmosphere. Let Tao Yuan-ming of
ancient China recite his lines:
“Chrysanthemum I pick from the Eastern hedge,
On the Southern hill leisurely I cast my eyes.”
♦ “paraphenalias” replaced with “paraphernalia”
Not that there is a charming one on the other side of the hedge, nor
a dear friend on the hill; but the two lines take you with Tao into
a sphere beyond the reach of the worries and cares of the world. Or
listen to Wang Wei of the same land:
“Softly I harp and sing alone,
In the quietude of wooded bamboo;
Not a soul into deep solitude, but the
Tell-tale moon comes, and speaks its heart.”
A world looms up from the four verses, the charm of which is not that
of popular novels, but a good you feel from a sound and all-forgetting
sleep you have had, after being thoroughly tired of steamers, railways,
rights and duties, morals and formalities. Sleep? Yes, and if sleep
be necessary even in the Twentieth century, equally indispensable
to the Twentieth century is this super-earthly poetical sentiment.
Unfortunately poetry makers and poetry readers are nowadays all
enamoured of the Westerners, and none seem to care to take a boat and
float to the land of the immortals. I am not a poet by profession, and
am interested in no way whatever in spreading propaganda for the kind
of life led by Wang Wei and Tao Yuan-ming, in the present world. Only
to me it appears that such inspired feelings as are sung by the Chinese
poets are more powerful in remedying the ills and evils of the day
than theatricals and dancing parties. They are, at all events far more
agreeable to me than Faust or Hamlet. I come into the mountain with a
colour-box and a ♦tripod for my sole companions, all because I yearn to
drink direct from nature of the poetical wine of Tao Yuan-ming and
Wang Wei; to be away from the world-smelling and world-sounding world,
nay, to ♠breathe and live in an unhuman atmosphere, even for a brief
while. It is a weakness of mine if you like to call it so.
♦ “triped” replaced with “tripod”
♠ “breath” replaced with “breathe”
I am at any rate, a living block of humanity, and however fond I may be
of unhumanity, my love of it cannot go so very far. I do not suppose
that even Tao Yuan-ming had his eye on the Southern hill, year in and
year out; nor is it imaginable that Wang Wei slept in his bamboo jungle
without a mosquito net. In all likelihood Tao sold his chrysanthemums
to a florist after keeping what he wanted, and Wang his bamboo sprouts
to a green grocer. I myself am not unhuman enough to live under the
blue sky in the mountain, just because the lark and golden rape
captivate my fancy. Such as the place is, human beings are not a
rarity,—men with their heads wrapped in a towel and their kimono tucked
up at the back; country lasses in red skirts and so on, and sometimes
also even long faced horses. Breathing the mountain air, hundreds of
feet above the sea level, surrounded by a million cypresses, I could
not still be rid of human smell. Nay, I was crossing the mountain to
reach the hot spring hotel of Nakoi as my destination for the night.
However, things assume shapes or colour as you will, according to the
way you look at them. In the words of Leonardo Da Vinci to a pupil of
his “the bell is one; but listen, and its sound may be heard in all
sorts of ways.” Opinions may differ in a man or a woman, all depending
upon how you look at him or her. I had come out in my present tour to
indulge in unhumanity and people would appear different from what they
did when I was living round the corner in the crowded Mud-and-Dust
Lane, if I looked at them now, I thought, bearing in mind my unhumanity
idea. Impossible as entirely getting away from humanity may be, I
should be able to bring myself up or down to suit the frame of mind,
in which one finds oneself at a “Noh”(1) play. The “Noh” has its
humanity or sentimental side. Who can be sure not to be moved to tears
by the Shichikiochi or by the Sumidagawa? But the “Noh” performance is
seven-tenth art and three-tenth sentiment. The attractions of “Noh” do
not come from the life-like presentation of things human in this
mundane world; because the life-like in it appears only from under
many, many layers of art, which give it an air of extreme tranquility
and halcyon serenity, never to be met in the world of reality.
Note—♦Bracketed numerals and alphabet letters at the end of words
refer to notes at the end of the book, explaining Japanese terms and
expressions.
♦ “Bracketted” replaced with “Bracketed”
How would it do to interpret all the events and people I came across
in the present tour as part of performances on the “Noh” stage? I
could not cast aside humanity altogether. To be poetical at the bottom
of my whole venture, I should like to let unhumanity carry me into a
“Noh” atmosphere, by doing away with humanity as much as possible.
Different in nature from the “Southern hill” or the “bamboo grove,”
nor identifiable with the lark or blossoming rapes, I still would see
people from a point of view as near those objects as possible. The
man Basho(2) saw something poetical and made a “hokku”(3) even of a
horse stalling near his head! I would deal with everybody I was going
to meet—farmers, tradesmen, the village office clerk, old men, old
women—seeing in them only objects, complementing a picture. However
unlike figures on the canvas, they would move as they please. It
would be grossly common, however, to enquire, as does an ordinary
novelist, into the cause of each of them going his own way, to dig
into their mental state, or to try to solve the tangle of their human
affairs. I shall not care, move as they will. They won’t trouble me,
as I shall regard them as characters in a picture in motion. Painted
figures cannot get out of the plane of the picture, no matter how
they may move. Troubles would arise of conflicting views and clash of
interests, the moment you think, the characters might jump out of the
plane and act cubically. The more troublesome the matter grew, the
more impossible it would become to look at it ♦æsthetically. Wherever
I might go and whomever I might meet, I should look at them as from
a transcendental height, so that human-magnetism might not easily
pass between us, and I shall, then, be not easily affected, however
animatedly they might act. In short I am to assume the position of one
standing before a picture, and looking at the figures in it, running
hither and thither on its plane. With three feet between, you can
calmly look on, without any sense of danger. In other words, you run no
risk of anybody snatching away your weapon and you may give yourself up
altogether to studying their doings from an artistic point of view.
With undivided attention you may see and judge the objects before you
as beautiful or as not beautiful.
♦ “æthetically” replaced with “æsthetically”
By the time I had come to this decision, the sky began to assume a
doubtful aspect. A bank of clouds of indistinct foreboding had no
sooner mounted overhead than it went tumbling and overspreading until
the whole space seemed to turn into a hanging expanse of dark sea. From
the sea soft Spring rain began to fall. I had long since gone past the
golden rape blossoms and was now toiling along between two mountains;
but the threads of rain being so fine as to appear as mist, I could
not tell how distant they were. Now and again, as the gusts of wind
blew asunder the high drapery of cloud, a grey ridge of mountain showed
itself to the right as clearly as within reach of a hand: probably the
range ran on the other side of the valley. The left side seemed to be
the foot of another mountain. Back of the semi-transparent screen of
rain, trees—they might be pines—appeared and then disappeared, with an
endless frequency. Was it the rain that was moving? Or was it the trees
in motion? Could it be that I was dreaming a floating dream? I
trudged on, feeling strange.
The road became wider than I had imagined, and quite level also.
Walking was no longer a task; but being not prepared for rain, I had to
hurry.
About the time the rain-water began to fall in drops from my hat, I
heard a jingle, jingle of a bell some yards away, and there appeared a
pack-horse driver leading an animal behind him.
“Hello, any place to stop around here, man?”
“A mile more or so, you will come upon a tea stall. Getting pretty wet,
eh?”
A mile more! The figure of the rustic dissolved into rain like a magic
lantern view, as I looked back.
The misty rain had now become thick and long until each drop could be
seen distinctly like a pencil flying in the wind. It had long since
soaked through my outer garment, and then penetrated to the skin.
The heat of my body made lukewarm the water in my under-wear and the
feeling produced was by no means the most pleasant. I pulled my hat to
one side and quickened my pace.
The drenching figure of myself, running through a grey expanse of
space, with innumerable silver shafts beating at it slantingly
will make poetry, an ode, when I look at it as not my own. I make a
beautiful harmony with a natural scenery, as a figure in a picture,
when I forget my material self completely and take a purely objective
view of myself. Only, I cease to be a figure in poetry, or in a
picture, the moment I feel vexed with the falling rain and take to
heart the tiredness of the stamp, stamp of my feet. I then find myself
only an indifferent individual of the street, blind to the changing
humour of the flying clouds; untouched by the falling flowers, and the
carols of birds; nay, a perfect stranger to the beauty of my own self
going alone and quietly through a mountain in Spring. I walked first
with my hat pulled to one side; but later I kept my eyes pivoted on the
back of my feet. Finally I went gingerly, shrugging my shoulders. The
rain shook the tree tops all round, and closed in from all sides upon
a lonely traveller. I felt I was having rather too strong a dose of
unhumanity.