Sōseki by John Nathan (Grass on the Wayside)

– Soseki Modern Japan’s Greatest Novelist

JOHN NATHAN

+ 16

Grass on the Wayside

Japanese and Western critics like to call Sōseki’s novel Grass on the Wayside (Michikusa, 1915)1 his “only autobiographical novel,” but that is misleading.2 To be sure, details of the protagonist’s life closely parallel Sōseki’s experience in the period 1903 to 1905. In the novel, Kenzō, a young scholar who has just returned to Japan after an extended residence in a “distant country,” has a job teaching at the university that he resents because it takes time away from his research and writing, He is oppressed by expectations that he will help support his brother and elder stepsister, and he is alienated from his wife, who returns to her father’s house for the summer, taking their two daughters with her. Most vexing of all, his foster father reappears in his life for the first time in fifteen years to importune him for attention and money.

This was not the first time that Sōseki had incorporated his own experience into his fiction. Beginning with I Am a Cat and Botchan, most of his works contain episodes from his life and characters based on people he knew.3 More important, unlike the autobiographical novels that dominated the literary landscape until the 1930s, Grass on the Wayside, far from aspiring to literal accuracy, is artful. Sōseki is inventing, laboring to conform the facts of his life as he recalls them to the shape of the fiction he wishes to create. Henry James famously contrasted the historian and the fabulist: “The historian wants more documents than he can use, the fabulist wants more liberties than he can take.” Sōseki the novelist was less motivated to set down the “historical” details of his own life than to create a character worthy of exploration, though, to be sure, as with many other novelists, it may have occurred to him that what he knew about himself was a promising place to begin “fabricating” a complex character.

Grass on the Wayside reveals two examples of artful manipulation at work. The first is the ominous appearance in the first installment of the 232

foster father whom Kenzō has not seen for years. Readers conversant with details of Sōseki’s life will conclude that the novel opens in April/ May 1903 (the “narrow threads of rain” evoke springtime). Recently returned from abroad, Kenzō sits among the English books he has shipped home and commutes to work on foot (Tokyo Imperial University campus was a short walk from the Natsumes’ first residence in Sendagi). In fact, the figure whom Kenzō recognizes with a shudder as his foster father, Shimada (Shiobara Shōnosuke in real life) did not resurface in Sōseki’s life until 1909, six years later than in the novel. Shiobara’s actual timing was cunning: in 1909, preparing to begin And Then, Sōseki was a celebrated novelist being paid a handsome salary by the Asahi. A terse diary entry dated April 11, 1909, confirms that he was indeed being dunned for money and that he had angrily declined to pay: My brother shows up with Takada to say that Shiobara is ranting and raving about something he protests. Don’t ask me! His rapacious greed exceeds the bounds of common sense. I refuse to pay anything as an expression of a moral or emotional obligation. Since this is a matter of rights, I don’t feel I owe him anything. I’m not about to dip into my assets to maintain my own rights. And threats won’t get a farthing out of me.4

According to Komiya Toyotaka, the negotiation that ensued was concluded on November 28, 1909, when Sōseki received a signed warrant in which Shiobara guaranteed, in return for 100 yen duly received, never again to bother him for money or to intrude in his family affairs in any way.

Sōseki did not hesitate to tamper with the chronology of his own life because he needed the Shiobara incident for its dramatic impact on the fledgling writer Kenzō. With the novelist’s intuition, he foresaw that a story that orbited the Shiobara incident would be well suited to compelling his protagonist to reveal himself in his confrontation with his past. In that sense, the Shiobara incident as it appears in Grass on the Wayside is less autobiography than fiction, a narrative strategy.

A second indication that the novel is a confabulation is Kenzō’s relatively stable behavior. From Kyōko’s hair-raising descriptions of Sōseki in the years 1903 to 1905, corroborated at the time by his students and friends, we know that he was subject to deep depression and to fits of rage triggered by paranoid delusions. But symptoms as severe as that G rass on the W ayside 233

have been eliminated from Sōseki’s “autobiographical” account. He does acknowledge in the second installment that “most people who knew [Kenzō] considered him neurasthenic. But he believed that what they were observing was simply his nature.”5 With this disclaimer, Kenzō blithely discredits the possibility that he is mentally ill. Not that his behavior is entirely rational: his “bad temper” keeps the children away; he is “subject to sudden changes of mood”; he irritably kicks off the veranda a flower pot that was purchased for the children and sends it crashing to the ground. At such moments, he is filled with unexpressed remorse but reviles his wife for behaving “as if he were mad.” Did Sōseki elect to minimize the severity of his mental condition in his portrait, or was he in denial? Certainly, the insane “fragments” in his notebook at the time are untroubled by an awareness that his feelings and the behavior they inspired were aberrant. In any event, as revealed in the pages of Grass on the Wayside, the character Kenzō is a fabrication, not literally Natsume Sōseki. Accordingly, there is no guarantee that the autobiographical evidence distilled from his story is reliable.

Even so, the biographer is tempted to assume veridicality, to shine the light of Grass on the Wayside into undocumented or enigmatic corners of Sōseki’s past, particularly since the characters’ interior thoughts and feelings are rendered with a degree of precision that was new. Consider, for example, the minute dissection of Kenzō’s and his wife’s mutual estrangement. The shifting point of view, from husband to wife and back again, distinguishes Grass on the Wayside from the “I-novel” in lesser hands: His time passed quietly enough. But there was an irritant in the quietness, something that tortured him without surcease. Obliged to observe him from a distance and feeling helpless, his wife remained aloof.

Kenzō perceived this as a cold detachment that was unacceptable in a wife. And she harbored silently the same criticism of him. In her view, the more time he spent locked in his study, the less they would have to do with each other outside the realm of daily business. . . .6 . . . She didn’t think much, but she was savagely in touch with the result of her thinking. “I’m not able to respect him just because he bears the title of husband, even if I am forced. If he wants respect, let him become a man of sufficient substance to deserve respect and stand before me then. . . .”

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Curiously, Kenzō, who was educated, was also more old-fashioned on this subject. Dedicated to living his life for himself, he had always assumed without reflection that a wife existed solely for her husband.

“In every sense, a wife should be subordinate to her husband.”

This was the basis of the collision between them.

Kenzō recoiled the minute he sensed his wife attempting to assert herself as an independent person. “Doesn’t she realize she’s a woman!” he was likely to feel. “You’ve got some nerve!” he might say in the heat of the moment.

His wife held in perpetual reserve the phrase “Just because I’m a woman—” “Just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean I’ll put up with you walking all over me!” At times, Kenzō could read her mind in her expression.

“I’m not treating you like an idiot because you’re a woman, I’m treating you like an idiot because you’re an idiot! If you want respect, develop some character that deserves it.” Before he knew it, he had begun to use the same logic she hurled at him. And so they went, round and round.7

The analysis of alienation in passages like these is lucid. But does it apply with any accuracy to the relationship between Sōseki and Kyōko during those terrible years? Grass on the Wayside repeatedly gives rise to the same question: Did Sōseki attack Shiobara with the same vehemence that animated Kenzō’s initial refusal to pay Shimada a penny? And what about the unexpected birth of Kenzō’s daughter in the middle of the night that produced a “shapeless lump” that was revealed in the light of day to be a “species of sea monster” inert in its mother’s arms—can that grotesque distortion have been Sōseki’s actual experience of the birth of his third daughter, Eiko, in 1903?

The novel tantalizes the reader with numerous examples of previously undisclosed material to wonder about. A painful childhood memory, for example, of a silver pocket watch that Kenzō’s elder brother had promised would be his: Kenzō, who had never owned a watch, coveted this one: for two months he had waited breathlessly, picturing this silver accoutrement hooked into his obi and installing it in the very center of his future pride.

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When the invalid died, his widow honored his word and announced in front of the whole family that the watch would go to Kenzō. Unfortunately, this memento of the deceased was in a pawn shop, and Kenzō lacked the means to redeem it. He had as good as inherited from his sister-in-law a right of possession, but the watch itself remained out of reach.

One day when everyone was gathered for a meal, his elder sister’s husband, Hida, produced the watch from inside his kimono. It had been polished and glittered unrecognizably. It was attached to a brandnew ribbon with a coral bead at the end of it. Hida placed the watch in front of his elder brother.

“We’ve decided to present this to you.”

His big sister echoed her husband.

“Sorry to have put you to so much trouble. I’ll accept this gratefully.” Expressing his thanks, his brother took the watch.

Kenzō observed his three relatives in silence. It seemed that none of them was aware of his presence in the room. To the end, he maintained his silence but felt deeply humiliated. They were oblivious.

Kenzō, who hated them for their treatment of him as if they had been enemies, couldn’t imagine how they could be so spiteful.

He didn’t assert his right to the watch. He didn’t request an explanation. He simply wrote them off in silence. In his judgment, severing his bond with his own brother and sister was the most dreadful punishment they could receive.8

There is no way to know if this is a genuine memory, and deeming it authentic takes the critic onto thin ice. All that can be said with confidence is that Sōseki has dramatized a plausible clue, one of many, to Kenzō’s mistrust of his family and his misanthropy in general. Grass on the Wayside should be read as the disturbing portrait of a man who has been brought to bay by the circumstances of his life and is bereft of hope for the future.

The novel concludes on a note already sounded by Sōsuke, the protagonist of The Gate, when he responded to his wife’s enthusiasm about spring by reminding her that winter was on its way. Kenzō pays Shimada 100 yen and receives a signed document guaranteeing no further interference. His wife expresses relief that this matter at least is finally settled, but Kenzō will not allow her any satisfaction: 236 G rass on the W ayside

“What’s settled is only on the surface. You’re satisfied with that because you like formalities.”

“Then what would have to happen for it to be truly settled?” his wife asked resentfully.

“Almost nothing in this world gets truly settled. Once something gets started, it never ends. It just changes shape so we don’t realize it’s still around.”

The closing lines evoke the chasm that separates husband and wife: “He spat the lines out bitterly. In silence, she lifted the baby. ‘There’s a good girl. We don’t understand a word of what Daddy’s saying, do we!’

She repeatedly kissed the infant’s ruddy cheeks.”9 Grass on the Wayside is the bleakest exposition of a vision conveyed in The Wayfarer and Kokoro, that communication between two people, not to mention love, is impossible. Stylistically, it appears to represent a transition from the earlier novels to what would have been a whole new stage in Sōseki’s fiction had he survived the unfinished Light and Dark that followed. His efforts to narrow the gap between the capacity of the English language for psychological realism and the tenacious vagueness and subjectivity inherent in Japanese are visible throughout. The result is a new clarity of focus on the interior of his characters that he continued to sharpen in Light and Dark.

Grass on the Wayside was serialized from early April to June 1915. In March, before he had begun work on the book and after mailing in the last installments of his memoir, Inside My Glass Doors, Sōseki set out for what turned out to be his last trip to Kyoto. Earlier that year, his friend and painting teacher, Tsuda Seifū, had moved back to Kyoto and had invited Sōseki to visit him. Feeling distressed and unsociable as usual, he was reluctant to accept the invitation, but Kyōko insisted that an opportunity to sightsee and paint would be good for his physical and mental health, nagging him until he gave in and took the train on March 19, intending to stay a week. His hosts were Tsuda and his elder brother, Nishikawa Issōtei, the seventh-generation head of a school of flower arranging founded by his family and, like other masters of this gorgeous art, a painter, a calligrapher, and a well-published connoisseur of the Japanese fine arts in general.10 Sōseki had not informed his acquaintances at Kyoto University or at the Osaka Asahi shinbun that he was coming, and he requested a quiet, private place to stay. Nishikawa knew G rass on the W ayside 237

a recently opened inn, the Kita no Taiga (in Kiya-machi sanjō), and arranged for a sunny room on the second floor with glass doors opening onto a verandah that overlooked the Kamo River.

The diary that Sōseki commenced11 on the day of his departure is an elaborate account of five leisurely days in the company of the brothers.

It includes sumptuously detailed descriptions of the temples and estates belonging to people they knew in the city and the surrounding hills, as well as notes on the cuisine they savored at restaurants open only to those who were known there, duck and fish broiled in miso and vegetables stewed with savory herbs in clay pots, sashimi of carp and sea bream, shrimp bisque, mountain herbs, and mushrooms. Surprisingly, they preferred to dine in at night, having shopped earlier for the food they wanted prepared. A portion of most days was devoted to painting together, spreading rice paper on the tatami in Sōseki’s room, or practicing calligraphy or discussing scroll paintings that Nishikawa brought along. It was an impressive testimony to Sōseki’s status that he was able to pursue his hobby in the company of two renowned artists.

In the evenings, Sōseki sat with his hosts drinking and talking and doubtless delighting in—to the extent that anything could delight him— the lively and almost certainly seductive company of a woman well known in the Gion entertainment quarter, a retired geisha, Isoda O-Tami, the proprietress of a chaya (teahouse) called Daitomo that belonged to her family.12 O-Tami was a “literary geisha” who cultivated friendships with writers, including Koda Rohan and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, who wrote a book about her, and she was known in the demimonde as a quick wit and a gifted performer of dramatic passages from puppet-theater texts.13 Before Sōseki left Tokyo, a textile magnate who was a major art collector and patron had urged him to contact O-Tami when he got to Kyoto, and when he mentioned her name to Nishikawa, who was something of a bon vivant, he was pleased to arrange an introduction. Her name appears for the first time on March 20, the day after Sōseki arrived: “Invited O-Tami for dinner and the four of us sat around chatting until 11 p.m.” Two days later, on March 22: “Back to the inn in the rain. Lonely, I call O-Tami and ask her to come over. Wishing to feed her, I choose the food myself: duck, carp roe, shrimp stew, carp sashimi. O-Tami brings a cake from Kawamura. Issōtei arrives.” The next day, March 23, Sōseki mentions for the first time that his stomach is bothering him, always an ominous sign. O-Tami has suggested an outing to view the plum 238 G rass on the W ayside

blossoms in Kitano, but when he phones her on March 24, he learns that she will be away until the end of the day. Disgruntled, he goes off to a museum on his own. That evening, he takes O-Tami to a Western restaurant for dinner and has a bad meal. They stroll around Shijō kyōgoku, and he has stomach pains. Back at the inn, he proposes to Seifū an excursion to Nara and arranges for a sleeping car.

O-Tami visits the next morning. It is cold and Sōseki’s stomach hurts.

He puts himself in her hands: She orders me to postpone my trip and to call a doctor. I cancel the sleeping car and go to bed like an invalid. That evening, she returns with two young geisha, O-Kimi and Kinnosuke. Seifū is here already, and as the four of us sit talking, I begin to feel better. The doctor arrives at 11 and orders two to three days of bed rest. A cable informs me my stepsister’s condition is critical. I’d be just as sick in Tokyo as I am here, so I resign myself.14

The two young geisha Sōseki mentions for the first time in this entry, O-Kimi and Kinnosuke (a female nickname in this case, though it is the same as Sōseki’s given name), had begged O-Tami to introduce them when they learned that the great sensei was in town. According to Nishikawa Issōtei, Kinnosuke was unattractive, but O-Kimi was pretty and a coquette into the bargain. Both clever and lively, they became regular visitors. Issōtei recalled watching Sōseki sketching in the tablets they brought with them—yellow daffodils arranged in a vase in the tokonoma, or purple wisteria, or the willow trees on the opposite bank of the river as they appeared through the glass doors—and thinking that his technique lacked finesse. At the time, he did not anticipate that his critical eye would place him in an awkward position.

March 26 was the sort of terrible day that was a regular occurrence in Sōseki’s life: “A wordless day, flat on my back, no food or drink. By the afternoon my stomach feels a little better. The doctor comes.”

The next day O-Kimi, Kinnosuke, and O-Tami visit. They eat and Sōseki watches them, drinking milk. O-Tami leaves early, but the younger geisha remain, talking until after one in the morning. The following day, Sōseki worked on the drawing pads they left with him, writing and drawing and erasing as though in thrall. The doctor visited and administered a dose of Carlsbad salts.

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On March 30, to thank the brothers for their hospitality, Sōseki hosted an evening’s entertainment at O-Tami’s chaya, Daitomo, which included an elaborate dinner and a performance by the Gion’s famous dancing girls (he had cabled Kyōko to send an extra 100 yen to help cover expenses). Ignoring suggestions that he take a rickshaw, he went on foot, wishing to savor the atmosphere of the Gion15 at night. As he watched the performance, Sōseki developed stomach cramps and had to lie down on a mattress laid out for him in the banquet hall. He ended up spending the night at Daitomo. The next day, he was alarmingly ill and was being attended by O-Tami and his two favorites, Kinnosuke and O-Kimi. O-Tami cabled Seifū to inform him that Sensei had suffered a relapse and was in serious condition. The painter interrupted his work in progress, a plum orchard in the breeze, which he was sketching from the verandah of his house in nearby Momoyama, and rushed back to Kyoto.

On April 1, Seifū asked O-Tami to cable Kyōko while he accompanied Sōseki in a rickshaw back to the inn, where he was put to bed in his room on the second floor. Seifū recalled feeling apprehensive when Kyōko cabled back to say she was taking an express train that night, since Sōseki had explicitly asked that his wife not be informed.

The next morning, April 2, Tsuda took the geisha Kinnosuke with him to meet Kyōko at Kyoto Station and brought her to the inn. That afternoon, when she informed Sōseki that she intended to go to the theater after an early dinner, he snapped, in Tsuda’s presence, “The theater?— What have you come to Kyoto for? I’m sick in bed, and you spend the whole day wandering around, and now it’s off to the theater?”16 (The scene in Light and Dark when O-Nobu leaves her husband in bed following his surgery to join her uncle and his family at the kabuki theater may have been inspired by this moment.)

Kyōko remained in Kyoto for two weeks until the night of April 16 when Sōseki was well enough to return to Tokyo. While her account of the Kyoto sojourn17 is rendered in the voice of a dutiful wife, she manages nonetheless to convey resentment and possibly a hint of jealousy.

O-Tami, thirty-six at the time (Sōseki was forty-eight), had spent her whole life in the company of men she was expected to entertain, not to mention beguile, and she was famous for her seductive charm. Kyōko was unlikely to have been overjoyed at the thought of her husband disporting

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himself with O-Tami and her young geisha friends, and what she writes, or does not write, reinforces that impression: “She was most interesting to talk to and a talented performer of theater pieces. Whenever he was free, he would have her come to the inn and listen to her stories or ask her to perform. She must have been fun, an excellent leisure-time companion.”18 There is something guarded about this, intentionally dry.

Kyōko’s description of the two younger geisha is similarly offhand: The one they called Kinnosuke was good-natured and funny, a geisha who was proud of her skills as an entertainer, and must have contributed to the merriment, but the other [the pretty one], O-Kimi-san, was just the opposite, aloof in the manner of an elegant lady and prim. In any event, each of these three was a Kyoto type very different from Tokyo women, and I’m told that he had them visit the inn from time to time and relaxed with them and enjoyed himself.

Elsewhere, it sounds as if Kyōko is being careful not to sound offended by what she might well have considered slights. When she learns, for example, that Sōseki has asked his friends not to let her know that he is ill: “When Sōseki heard they were debating whether to let me know, he apparently said, ‘There’s no reason to bring the old lady here.’ When they asked why, he replied that I’d be asking constantly how he was doing and the very thought made him shudder.”19 Kyōko continued, Sōseki loved puns and apparently O-Tami was good at them, too, and they often traded them back and forth. I heard that he told her when I was on my way that they’d better stop punning because his old lady hated puns and she’d get angry at him. . . . It’s true I wasn’t very good at puns and often didn’t get the point of his.20

At moments in her memoir, Kyōko emerges as outspoken and even domineering, despite the expectation that she will defer. But in her chronicle of the Kyoto episode, as if loath to invite pity, she avoids any show of disapproval, even though, judging from her and others’ accounts, Sōseki was behaving insufferably.

Home on April 17, Sōseki spent two days writing thank-you letters. His note to Nishikawa Issōtei on April 18 and their ensuing correspondence

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reveal the vanity that he usually was at pains to mask beneath false modesty. Sōseki’s letter concluded with a request: I am hoping you will honor me with a critique of the two landscapes I am enclosing. Please don’t hesitate to be frank. I have made the same request of Tsuda-kun, and if on appraising the paintings, you are of the opinion that they are well done, please have them mounted. If you decide they don’t deserve mounting, I’ll make my peace with that. I’m extremely busy, so I’ll end here. Natsume Kinnosuke21

In a candid reminiscence written in 1929, Issōtei made it clear that responding to Sōseki required tact: Natsume-san’s calligraphy had a flavor and originality, but in my view, not a single one of his paintings revealed any technical or artistic merit.

In one of his short pieces, he described New Year’s Day utai to the accompaniment of (Takahama) Kyoshi’s nō drum. In contrast to the robust beating of the drum, Sensei’s chanting was feeble and irregular from the beginning, overwhelmed by the drum and quivering helplessly as though he were in need of a transfusion. To my mind, his painting was exactly like his chanting. Natsume is probably spinning in his grave, furious to think I could barely wait until he was in the ground to belittle his work, and I do have a bad habit of criticizing other people with too little reserve.22

Issōtei claimed that he did not remember the words he used in his letter, but he had saved Sōseki’s response: Thank you so much for critiquing the paintings. Just as you say, the blacks in the first one are too intense and do indeed create a gloomy feeling. I was delighted to hear that the lower half was interesting, and I wonder what it is exactly about the upper half, ill defined perhaps.

I’d welcome a bit more explanation about that. . . . As for the other, I suppose the composition is wrong and creates a feeling of uneasiness?

Fat on top and skimpy below? Seifū-kun said I need to highlight the flowers lest they recede and create their own imbalance. I think the blossoms are the wrong shade and also feel that the tree itself is too small and dominated by the towering mountains above it. Should you 242 G rass on the W ayside

decide that one or both of these deserves mounting, please do mount them and allow me to cover the expense.23

The persistence in Sōseki’s letter—clearly he wanted the professional to join him in assessing every detail of his painting—must have been bothersome. Issōtei’s initial critique cannot have been altogether complimentary, yet Sōseki could not abandon the possibility that his work might deserve to be mounted. Issōtei felt that he had to write again, presumably to criticize Sōseki’s work more candidly, and this time, Sōseki’s letter indicates that he had taken offense: May 8: 6–7 p.m.

Now for the first time, I sense that you have allowed the truth to gush out. I suppose I’d call your criticism a relief in a scathing sort of way.

I have no problem with the substance of it, but your language was a bit too harsh; I wonder if I’m wrong to feel that you were agitated when you wrote it?

In view of what you say, it appears that these paintings of mine have no value at all and certainly aren’t worth mounting. If that is the truth, please don’t bother. And if by chance, they do warrant mounting, even though you disparage them, then by all means proceed; I certainly have no objection. In either case, do as you see fit without worrying about me. . . . Needless to say, there is no need to respond to this letter.24

Sōseki’s tone, irritated and petulant, is an example of what his friend Tsuda Seifū had in mind when he spoke of “stepping on the tiger’s tail.”

Receiving his letter, Issōtei regretted having labeled his paintings “immature” and proposed, not entirely persuasively in the last paragraph of his essay, that their “unaffected simplicity” distinguished them from selfconscious attempts to appear slick and professional. In any event, Sōseki rarely held a grudge and maintained a warm correspondence with Issōtei into the fall of that year.

Sōseki’s letter to O-Tami was among the first he wrote; he informed her it was his fourteenth letter of the day. Thanking her for her hospitality, he apologized for having inconvenienced her by getting sick at her establishment and asked whether she might like an art book of ukiyo-e G rass on the W ayside 243

reproductions. The letter is polite, slightly formal—signed “Natsume Kinnosuke”—and gives no hint of the impending outburst.

On May 3, he wrote again to assure her, even though she had not received it, that he had indeed sent her a copy of Inside My Glass Doors.

In passing, he reveals something that seems to be bothering him: If the package hasn’t reached you, it must be divine retribution. I’m sure you remember having promised to take me to the Tenjin Shrine in Kitano and then going off to amuse yourself in Uji that day without a word to me. You should know that irresponsible behavior like that never leads to anything good.25

The admonition is rendered casually enough to be mistaken for joshing.

Sōseki proceeds with a similarly light touch to scold O-Tami for her illegible handwriting and for using the formal, epistolary style in her letters.

But there is no mistaking the anger in his next missive, dated May 16.

Sōseki begins by thanking her for a package of delicacies she has sent from Kyoto and then moves into a long-winded reprimand. His indignation seems to have been triggered by what he alluded to in his previous letter, a broken promise to escort him to Kitano to see the Tenjin Shrine. The tone of his prolix letter is sanctimonious: I can’t bring myself to retract having called you a liar. I’m glad that you apologized, but your insistence that you had no memory of having made any such promise strikes me as duplicitous and leaves a sour taste. You are a kind person and a fascinating person to talk to, and I am well aware of that. But ever since your disingenuous denial, I live with the sinking feeling that you are, after all, a professional.26 I’m not writing to discomfit you, nor am I complaining. I harp on this because I don’t wish to become cold or indifferent to the O-Tami whose beauty and virtues I have begun to know. Because it would be a shame if our connection should be severed just as it was commencing. Over the course of a month, I had many opportunities to observe your fascination and your kindness. But I have the feeling that we separated before either of us could be influenced by the other with regard to moral character. And that gives rise to the following concern: Simply put, if my accusation that you are feigning ignorance is untrue, then I become the villain of the piece. And if it turns out to be true, then it 244 G rass on the W ayside

is, conversely, you who turns into the villain. Herein is a hazardous moment when a confession might be possible, when the villain might repent and reform and apologize in earnest and we might succeed in what I call influencing, redeeming each other’s character. But for now, since I can’t help thinking that you are being deceitful, even if you claim that you forgot, it appears that you haven’t instilled me with sufficient virtue to influence my character and that I don’t possess sufficient strength to influence yours. I regret deeply feeling that this critical interaction isn’t happening with someone so dear to me. I’m not speaking here to O-Tami the professional, the proprietress of Daitomo. I say this as an ordinary friend speaking to an ordinary, an uninitiated, O-Tami-san. I could just write you off as the proprietress of a chaya and that would be the end of it. But now that we are off to such a good start, I don’t want the superficial connection I could have with a professional, and that is why I am writing about this at such length.

As I am neither your sensei nor your preceptor, a merely civil, largely indifferent relationship would be possible and less effort for me, but for some reason, that isn’t what I want with you. I cannot but believe that something fine and benevolent lurks beneath the surface of your nature. So please don’t take offense at my rudeness in saying all this.

And please do take me seriously.27

The letter was not simply a scolding; in a condescending and covert way, it was also the closest thing that has survived to a love letter from Sōseki to a woman. There is no knowing how O-Tami responded. But since this was Sōseki’s last letter to her in his collected letters, it is safe to assume that her reply was not pleasing to him.

Scholars have combed Sōseki’s life for evidence of another woman and have come up with nothing substantial. This is anomalous, since in Japan, keeping at least one mistress has been expected of all heterosexual artists and of writers in particular. Dazai Osamu, to take an extreme case, fathered a child with one of his women, lured two others to attempt love suicides with him, and finally succeeded in ending his life with a third. Others sustained lifelong concealed liaisons while married to accomplished women to whom they appeared to be devoted. In Sōseki’s case, not only is there no evidence of a relationship outside his marriage, it is far from clear that he ever loved another woman. Etō Jun and others have insisted that he was guiltily in love with his brother’s G rass on the W ayside 245

wife, Tose, who died, five months pregnant, in July 1891 when Sōseki was twenty-four (see chapter 4). The standard narrative identifies as his first love the girl with her hair in “a butterfly chignon” whom he met at the eye doctor’s office and stammered about in a letter to Shiki.

Another woman, sometimes called Sōseki’s “eternal love,” was Ōtsuka Kusuoko, the wife of his close friend Ōtsuka Yasuji (the family name was hers), a professor of aesthetics at Tokyo Imperial University and the model for the aesthetician Dr. Bewildered in I Am a Cat. The eldest daughter of the chief justice of the Tokyo Court of Appeals, Kusuoko was a waka poet, a translator of Gorky and Maeterlink, a pianist, a painter, and a novelist. Certainly, she appears to have been precisely the sort of woman to whom Sōseki might have been irresistibly drawn. In the words of her poetry teacher, “possessing an abundant literary gift, refined, sensitive, she was that rare woman in whom talent and beauty coexist.”

Sōseki would have known her from the time she married his friend in 1895. Between 1907 and 1910 he wrote her six short letters, each having to do with his efforts on her behalf to persuade the Asahi to publish one of her novels, which he admired. There was more to their relationship than business, however.28 In Inside My Glass Doors, writing in early 1915, five years after her death, Sōseki devoted an installment to a chance encounter in 1904 or 1905. Walking in the rain near his house in Sendagi, his heart “heavy with the uneasiness that constantly gnawed at [him,]” he sees a rickshaw approaching down the deserted street and imagines that the passenger must be a geisha. As the rickshaw passes, the woman inside bows to him and smiles, and he recognizes Kusuoko, “her pale face exceedingly beautiful in the falling rain.”29 Another day, she calls on him just as he is squabbling with Kyōko, and he secludes himself in his study lest she see him in an angry mood, leaving her to chat briefly with his wife. Subsequently, he goes to her house to apologize: “The truth is, we were fighting. I don’t imagine my wife was very cordial to you. I thought it would be rude to expose you to my bitterness, so I hid away until you were gone.”30 In light of Japanese reticence about disclosing family matters, this was an intimate confession and indirectly a betrayal of Kyōko. Sōseki concludes his elegiac piece with the haiku that he composed “in tribute” on learning of Kusuoko’s death in the newspaper on November 13, 1910. At the time, he was in bed at the Nagayo clinic, having just returned from his own brush with death at Shuzenji and easily moved by indications of the evanescence of life: 246 G rass on the W ayside

Aru hodo no kiku nage-ireyo kan no naka ni

Hurl the mums all you can gather into the coffin31

On the surface, this haiku is about regretting not having been well enough to attend Kusuoko’s funeral and offer flowers to her memory, but it also conveys a deeper regret, and considerable anger, at her death.

Remember that the bitter haiku Sōseki composed when Tose died are cited as evidence of his forbidden feelings for his sister-in-law. Intriguing as they are, neither of these examples allows certainty that Sōseki was in love with one, or both, of these women.

G rass on the W ayside 247

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