Light and dark

Introduction by John Nathan

NATSUME SŌSEKI¹ (1867–1916) endured the transformation of Japan, during the span of his lifetime, from a feudal society into a modern state modeled on Western blueprints and poignantly chronicled the emotional and intellectual turmoil that accompanied it, the paralyzing cost, in his words, of “incurring” a culture from the outside.² Between 1905 and 1916, Sōseki — in Japan he is known by his pen name alone — conveyed his bleak vision of life in thirteen novels, each one a giant step forward in his effort to elevate the fledgling Japanese novel to a level of observation that would make it “true to life” in the manner and degree of Western realism. A number of his early efforts were, as George Eliot might have said, more diagram than picture: characters are scantily revealed, and they step forward to deliver monologues that are thinly disguised lectures on themes he wants to promulgate. The narrator also intrudes didactically, delivering set speeches of his own. But book by book, Sōseki is to be observed refining the art of his fiction, merging identifiably Japanese shades of indirection and reticence with the obtrusive approaches to inquiry he adapted from the Western novel. No other writer of the Meiji period (1868–1912) was so well equipped to achieve this synthesis: steeped in the Japanese and Chinese classics, an accomplished calligrapher and brush painter and a gifted haiku poet, Sōseki was at the same time possessed of an impressive command of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English poetry and fiction, particularly after two years in London, from 1900 to 1902, that he devoted to reading in English. His later novels are informed by his deep reading of Jane Austen, about whom he wrote at length, and of George Meredith and Henry James.

LIGHT AND DARK, Sōseki’s final novel, unfinished at the time of his death, began appearing in daily installments in the Tokyo and Osaka editions of the Asahi shinbun on May 16, 1916.³ It was the ninth novel he had serialized in the Asahi since he had contracted in 1907 to publish at least one novel a year in the newspaper in return for an annual salary substantially higher than his stipend as a senior lecturer at Tokyo Imperial University.⁴ A letter to an Asahi editor dated May 21 suggests that he had begun work on the novel a mere week in advance of the first scheduled day of serialization: “I have been feeling poorly recently, in and out of bed, and apologize for my slightly delayed start with the new novel.”⁵ The illness to which he stoically refers was the gastrointestinal malaise — an infernal combination of intestinal catarrh, bleeding ulcers, and hemorrhoids — that had plagued him his entire adult life. On June 10 Sōseki writes to the same editor that he has mailed off installment 24; on that day installment 15 was published, indicating that he had managed to accumulate nine installments in advance of their serialization, a slim lead that he maintained until the final outbreak of his chronic condition overcame him on December 9.⁶

One can scarcely imagine the effort it must have cost Sōseki to create a book as minutely observed and unsparing as Light and Dark in daily installments while suffering bleeding and intestinal pain that required him to bind his stomach with a belly band. Small wonder that he sought respite in Japanese brush painting and composing Chinese poetry in the afternoons from the demanding, largely unpleasant characters he was tethered to each morning. He makes reference to this in a letter dated August 21 to two of his disciples living in the same boarding house, Kume Masao, unknown to Western readers, and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, whose sardonic short stories are well represented in translation:⁷

As before, I am at work on Light and Dark every morning. I feel a mixture of pain and pleasure but proceed as if mechanically. I am grateful above all for the unexpectedly cool weather. Even so, writing a thing like this every day, nearly one hundred installments now, leaves me feeling vulgarized. For several days I have been making it my business to work on Chinese poetry in the afternoons, assigning myself one poem a day if possible. Seven characters a line, not easy. But I quit when it gets hard so I don’t accomplish that much.⁸

In a second letter written just days later, on August 24, he counsels the young writers to carry on doggedly with an analogy distinguishing a cow from a horse, an exhortation that was obviously addressed no less to himself:

It’s necessary by all means to become a cow. Somehow or other we want to be horses; it’s not easy to become thoroughly a cow. Even a cunning old dog like me is scarcely more than the half-breed spawn of a horse and a cow….

You mustn’t hurry. You mustn’t muddy up your mind. Come out fighting and persist. In the face of persistence the world will bow its head; fireworks are accorded only an instant’s memory. Push hard until the end. That’s all there is to it. A cow proceeds phlegmatically with its head down.⁹

Toward the end of the summer, Sōseki’s physical decline becomes evident in the pages of his manuscript:¹⁰ his hand begins to waver, the characters grow fainter, and revisions scrawled between the lines increase conspicuously. Nonetheless, he was resolved to follow the novel wherever it should lead him, though increasingly troubled by his inability to conclude it. On November 16 he conveys his frustration to another disciple, studying in New York at the time, Naruse Seiichi: “It troubles me that Light and Dark gets longer and longer. I’m still writing. I’m sure this will continue into the New Year.”¹¹

Sōseki did not live to see the New Year. Too ill to write more, he took to his bed on November 21 after completing what was to be the final installment, number 188. He had intended to continue: a page of manuscript with the number “189” inked in the upper-right corner was found on his desk. In 188 installments—745 pages in the first edition published by Iwanami Shoten the following year — Sōseki’s final novel, though unfinished, was 200 pages longer than his next longest, the bitingly comic I Am a Cat (1905), and twice the length of anything else he wrote.

Light and Dark is unlike any of Sōseki’s thirteen antecedent novels, and entirely unlike anything else in Japanese fiction of the same period (or, for that matter, later periods). Thematically, it may be read as vintage Sōseki: an exploration of the conflict between selfishness and love in which the victory inevitably goes to the former. What distinguishes and, indeed, qualifies it as perhaps the only work of fiction in twentieth-century Japanese literature that can be called a “modern novel” in the Western sense of the term is the degree of interiority it achieves. The protagonists, Tsuda Yoshio, thirty, and his wife, O-Nobu, twenty-three, are revealed at a depth that Sōseki had never achieved in his previous work, and they emerge onto the page with a gratifying complexity that qualifies them as the first three-dimensional characters in Japanese fiction. If this is true of Tsuda, an emotional dullard (the critic Hirano Ken described him as a tsumarananbō, a “nonentity”), it is startlingly true of O-Nobu. Coquettish but not exactly beautiful (Sōseki alludes to her “small eyes” thirteen times), O-Nobu is quick-witted and cunning, a snob and narcissist no less than her husband, passionate, arrogant, spoiled, insecure, vulnerable, naive, idealistic, and, perhaps above all, gallant. Sometimes she reminds us of a Japanese version of Emma Woodhouse, or Gwendolen Harleth, or even Scarlett O’Hara (if one can imagine a less than ravishing Scarlett); in any event, under Sōseki’s meticulous scrutiny she emerges as a flesh-and-blood heroine whose palpable reality has no equal in other Japanese fiction.

Rendering the minute psychological observation at the heart of Light and Dark required Sōseki to forge a new language. The natural genius of Japanese is a proclivity for ambiguity, vagueness, and even obfuscation; Sōseki needed a scalpel capable of dissecting a feeling, a convoluted moment, and even, as here, a glance:

The glance [O-Nobu] cast in O-Hide’s¹² direction at that moment was lightly touched with panic. It wasn’t a look of regret about what had happened or anything of the kind. It was awkwardness that followed hard on the self-satisfaction of having triumphed in yesterday’s battle. It was mild fear about the revenge that might be exacted against her. It was the turmoil of deliberation about how to get through the situation.

Even as she bent her gaze on O-Hide, O-Nobu sensed that she was being read by her antagonist. Too late, the revealing glance had arced suddenly as a bolt of lightning from some high source beyond the reach of her artifice. Lacking the authority to constrain this emergence from an unexpected darkness, she had little choice but to content herself with awaiting its effect. (124:273–74)

“We don’t analyze a glance this way,” a Sōseki specialist at Waseda University assured me, “we direct a glance, aim a glance, and that’s as far as we go!” The sensei was suggesting that the focus of this passage was anomalous; Light and Dark abounds in similar passages, unfamiliar realism expressed in radically unfamiliar ways.

The effect Sōseki achieves, subsuming not only the minute registration of his observation but also the mode of expression he developed to convey what he revealed, is in its way unmistakably Western.¹³ More particularly, it is informed by an understanding of irony as a device for revealing character that is not to be found elsewhere in Japanese fiction. Certainly Jane Austen was one of his teachers. In Theory of Literature (1903–1905), Sōseki declares Austen “the leading authority in the world of realism. Her ability to score points while putting the most commonplace situations to paper far outstrips any of her male rivals.” He demonstrates with an excerpt from chapter 1 of Pride and Prejudice, in which Mrs. Bennet effuses about the wealthy bachelor about to move into Netherfield Park to her husband, whose affectionate skepticism escapes her entirely. Sōseki comments:

This really is the domain of our daily life, its customs and manners. By spreading this unaffected domestic scene out before our eyes, Austen permits us to take pleasure in the minute detail that lies behind objective appearances…. Austen does not simply portray the innocuous conversation between an ordinary married couple…. Anyone who can read will see that it is a matter of the character of the husband and wife in this passage, which is so vivid that it flies off the page.¹⁴

The ironic revelation of character embedded in the “unembellished” details of quotidian life and manners that Sōseki admires in Austen is evident throughout Light and Dark. Even so, the novel’s narrative strategy recalls Austen’s exquisite deftness less distinctly than it does Sōseki’s contemporary Henry James’s tenacious (and somber) exactitude, a quality that Ezra Pound characterized, describing The Odyssey, as “Jamesian precisions.” In his 1907 preface to Portrait of a Lady, James wrote, about Turgenev, that “it began for him always with some person or persons, who hovered before him, soliciting him… interesting him and appealing to him just as they were.”¹⁵ The challenge, he continued, speaking now for himself no less than for “that beautiful genius,” was to find for his characters “the right relations, those that would bring them most out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the situations most useful and favorable to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to produce and to feel.”¹⁶

Sōseki doubtless began reading Henry James during the two dismal years he spent studying English literature in London. At the time of his death, his library contained Partial Portraits, French Poets and Novelists, Notes on Novelists, and the 1905 Methuen edition of The Golden Bowl heavily annotated in classical Japanese.¹⁷ In a fragment entered in a notebook in 1908, he writes, “James is a writer who succeeds at revealing character without resorting to dialogue.”¹⁸ On another page he adds, “Henry James devotes more than a thousand words to describing a single instant in Charlotte Stant’s thinking,” and continues, “George Meredith takes an entire chapter to dissect the psychological interior of a character standing at London Bridge in the instant before he throws himself offit.”¹⁹ His remarks suggest that Sōseki’s attention was on the revelation of interior consciousness, a microscopic inquiry he achieved in Light and Dark.

There is no basis for asserting that Sōseki was consciously emulating Henry James. But clearly he was resolved to reveal his characters in their however contradictory entirety, and clearly he was less concerned with a story—“plot, nefarious name!” James declared — than with surrounding the protagonists with “satellite characters” likely to draw them to the surface in the manner of an astringent.

The plot of Light and Dark is a paltry matter: its 700 languorous pages proceed in an atmosphere of insistently quotidian, if highly charged, stasis. Tsuda undergoes surgery for what may or may not be hemorrhoids (I shall return to this ambiguity). During the week he spends recovering in bed, he is visited by a procession of intimates: O-Nobu; his younger sister, O-Hide, antipathetic to O-Nobu, whose extravagance she blames for her brother’s financial difficulties; his importunate, self-lacerating friend, Kobayashi, a ne’er-do-well who might have stepped from the pages of a Dostoevsky novel; and his employer’s wife, Madam Yoshikawa, plump, conniving, a meddler with a connection to Tsuda that is unknown to the others. In the longest scene in the novel, Madam manipulates Tsuda into acknowledging that he still thinks about Kiyoko, the woman who left him abruptly for another man shortly before his marriage to O-Nobu. For reasons of her own, which are left unclear,²⁰ the lady reveals to Tsuda that Kiyoko is recuperating from a miscarriage at a hot-springs resort south of Tokyo and urges him to visit her there, volunteering to pay his travel expenses. In the final 100 pages, Tsuda journeys to the spa for an encounter with Kiyoko. Light and Dark terminates with a scene in her room at the inn, during which Tsuda probes unavailingly for some indication that she retains feelings for him.

In place of a compelling plot, Sōseki created an environment, a web of interrelated characters designed to exert maximum social pressure on the two principal objects of his inquiry.²¹ While Tsuda’s and O-Nobu’s parents reside in Kyoto and do not figure directly in the action, the three Tokyo families with whom the protagonists are involved are well known to one another. Tsuda’s uncle Fujii, his father’s younger brother, raised him “more like a son than a nephew” while Tsuda’s father was posted to western Japan as a civil servant. The Okamoto family, O-Nobu’s aunt and uncle, looked after her in a similar way while she was growing up and sharing a room in their house with her younger niece Tsugiko, developing her sharp tongue at her uncle’s knee. Okamoto and Fujii graduated from the same college and are old acquaintances.

Tsuda’s employer, Yoshikawa, is a crony of Tsuda’s father, who has asked him to keep an eye on his son while he is in Tokyo. Yoshikawa has provided Tsuda with a nondescript job in his unspecified business and, while he treats him no less perfunctorily than he would any subordinate, lets him know that he is watching him and will alert his father to any irregular behavior. Yoshikawa and Okamoto, in London together at the coronation of Edward VII in 1901, are “close as brothers.”

Tsuda’s sister and her husband, Hori, the eccentric scion of a once wealthy merchant family, are also factors in the interpersonal equation in which obligation and deference determine the power to impinge. Hori has interceded with Tsuda’s father on Tsuda’s behalf, persuading him to lend his son money, and is being held responsible for Tsuda’s failure to keep his end of the bargain. O-Hide feels compromised by this burden on her husband and transfers responsibility to Tsuda, who feels constrained to save face with his brother-in-law.

Tsuda’s friend Kobayashi is connected to the others in two ways: he works as an editor on Uncle Fujii’s coterie magazine and considers him his mentor, and he knows about Tsuda’s love affair with Kiyoko. Even so, he is an outsider, indeed an outcast, and it is precisely his otherness that enables him to unhinge Tsuda and O-Nobu. A failed writer on his way to self-imposed exile in the Japanese colony of Korea, Kobayashi is brined in self-pity and takes his bitterness out on Tsuda. He is a rebarbative figure, and the reader grows impatient with his tirades. But Sōseki has written him with passion and invested him with conviction and fluency that make him hard to dismiss; moreover, the substance of his attacks on Tsuda’s self-indulgent life of “latitude” have the ring of truth. Kobayashi may be the only moralist in the novel. Even as he torments O-Nobu with his knowledge of Kiyoko, he tells her, “It may surprise you to know that I consider myself a perfectly ingenuous person, a natural man. Compared with you, Mrs. T, I believe I’m guileless” (86:192), and we are tempted to believe him. It seems likely that Sōseki intended him to function as a beacon of integrity in the murkiness of dissimulation and self-interest.

It is no accident, for example, that, among Tsuda’s critics, only Kobayashi succeeds in puncturing his complacency. At their farewell dinner, he insists that Tsuda read a letter from someone he does not know. A cry for help from its author, suffering in the isolating darkness of his despair, the letter enables Tsuda to see something about himself to which he has been blind and creates the possibility of a step forward, but for only an instant:

Something had startled him. Until now he had been wont to assume that the world was what he beheld in front of him, but just now he had been obliged abruptly to turn and look behind. He had halted in that attitude, his gaze fixed upon an existence opposite to himself. As he stared at that ghostly presence he was encountering for the first time ever, he cried out to himself Ah, this is a person, too!…

Here he stopped and circled. But he didn’t advance a single step. He went no further than understanding the meaning of the repellant letter in a manner that befitted him. (165:364)

It is in their self-conscious interactions with Kobayashi and the others that Sōseki discovers and illuminates his protagonists’ innermost feelings: relationship becomes the key to unlocking characterization in depth. Here, for example, is Tsuda, “a man who prided himself on his unfaltering perspicacity where his own interests were concerned,” revealing the cynicism he is at pains to conceal as he calculates the dynamics of the extended family:

The truth was, he didn’t care for O-Nobu to the extent people assumed he did….

Tsuda had a particular reason for allowing this misunderstanding to obtain. Kobayashi had disinterred the reason. It was in the soil of this misunderstanding that the Okamotos’ good intentions toward him grew, and it was in his interest to preserve those feelings as best he could. Treating O-Nobu solicitously, in other words, was the same as currying favor with the Okamotos, and inasmuch as Okamoto and Yoshikawa were as close as brothers, it stood to reason that the better care he took of O-Nobu, the more assured his future became. (133–134:293)

In long, successive scenes we observe O-Nobu dueling with Kobayashi, with her husband, and with her sister-in-law, O-Hide. Tsuda engages in his own fraught dialogues with O-Hide, Kobayashi, and the manipulative Madam Yoshikawa. These strategic engagements now and then explode into moments of intense emotion — jealousy, rancor, recrimination — that will surprise English readers conditioned to expect indirectness and delicacy, not to mention reticence, of Japanese social behavior.

IN SEARCH OF an overarching theme, Japanese and Western critics have leaped at the doctor’s diagnosis in the opening installment: that curing Tsuda’s condition will require “a more fundamental treatment.” This has been read to mean that the crises he encounters in the course of the novel will affect him in the nature of a cure, healing in some basic way his social, emotional, and moral infirmity. Yet the text offers no corroboration of such a reading. Tsuda suffers, often the result of wounds to his vanity, but, as with many another narcissist, his pain afflicts him but generally fails to move him toward a deepened understanding of himself. By the time they reach the end of the novel, readers are likely to feel certain that Tsuda’s focus on himself has destined him to remain, as it were, in the dark.

If there is a central theme in Light and Dark, it is precisely the impossibility of recovery from the suffering in isolation caused, in Sōseki’s view, by attachment to the self. This was by no means a new idea. Daisuke, the hero of his novel And Then (1909), has stepped aside selflessly to allow his best friend to marry a girl he himself covets, but when the couple returns to Tokyo in financial straits he declares his love for Michiyo and wrests her from her husband. The novel ends with Daisuke confronting madness as he contemplates the social implications of his actions. The married couple in The Gate (1910) has transgressed in a similar way and lives a lonely life in the shadow of an overhanging cliff, seeking refuge in each other from the ostracism they have brought upon themselves. The hero, roughly Tsuda’s age, tries meditation at a Zen temple but finds that the gates of enlightenment are closed to him and returns in resignation to his tedious, haunted life. The sensei in Kokoro (1914), Sōseki’s best-known novel in the West, torments himself with responsibility for driving his friend “K” to suicide by stealing the woman he loves before “K” can find the courage to propose to her. He warns the student narrator that nothing he tells him will allow him to change the way he leads his own life, and the novel demonstrates that he is right: the student remains trapped in his own selfishness. The sensei’s wife asks poignantly, “Can two hearts ever beat as one?” and the answer the novel implicitly provides is a resounding no. On the evidence of his work, Sōseki surveyed the world around him and concluded that his fellow man could not improve. Nor was he tempted by the possibility of redemption as an article of Christian faith that led to the pardons, marriages, and babies that end many a Victorian novel happily.

Like the hero in The Gate, Tsuda is in quest of self-knowledge as an alleviation of the uneasiness he carries inside himself. And the novel lofts the possibility that the mystery woman Kiyoko may hold the key to what he seeks. But the prelude to the actual meeting with Kiyoko suggests that enlightenment for Tsuda was not Sōseki’s intention. His journey to the spa where Kiyoko is staying deep in the mountains is long and fraught with obstacles, the most overtly symbolic of which is the dark boulder lying athwart the road in front of his carriage. His experience on arrival at the inn augurs badly: the building is dark, mostly underground, and labyrinthine. Shortly after arriving, he loses his way back to his room in the endless corridors, and his encounter with himself in a mirror just before Kiyoko’s first appearance at the head of the stairs above him is not encouraging:

He looked away from the water and encountered abruptly the figure of another person. Startled, he narrowed his gaze and peered. But it was only an image of himself, reflected in a large mirror hanging alongside the sinks….

He was inveterately confident about his looks. He couldn’t remember ever glancing in a mirror and failing to confirm his confidence. He was therefore a little surprised to observe something in this reflection that struck him as less than satisfying. Before he had determined that the image was himself, he was assailed by the feeling that he was looking at his own ghost. (175:387–88)

The meeting he finally arranges with Kiyoko, the last scene Sōseki was able to write before he collapsed, is a masterpiece of indirection and provocative hints that lead nowhere. One senses that Kiyoko’s apparent serenity may be counterfeit, that she is not so indifferent to Tsuda as she seems; one senses as well her contained anger. But Tsuda’s confusion when he ponders the meaning of her smile on the way back to his room is understandable. Choosing not to reveal her, Sōseki has managed to install Kiyoko as a mystery generating tension at the heart of the novel.

Light and Dark is also in the shadow of a second, not unrelated, mystery, or at least ambiguity: the nature of Tsuda’s illness. Ostensibly, he is suffering from hemorrhoids (although the word for “hemorrhoid” never appears). Why, in that case, is he seeing a doctor whose specialty seems to be venereal disease? This fact is revealed implicitly in a scene in the waiting room at the clinic:

The members of this gloomy band shared, almost without exception, a largely identical past. As they sat waiting their turn in this somber waiting room, a fragment of that past that was if anything brilliantly colored cast its shadow abruptly over each of them. Lacking the courage to turn toward the light, they had halted inside the darkness of the shadow and locked themselves in. (17:54)

Waiting his turn, Tsuda recalls unexpected encounters at the doctor’s office with two men within the past year. One is his brother-in-law, Hori, a playboy, who seemed uncharacteristically “nonplussed” to see him. The other is an “acquaintance” with whom he engaged over dinner after leaving the doctor’s office together in a “complex debate about sex and love,” which had subsequently resulted in a rift between them.

These passages, coupled with the fact that the medical details Sōseki provides are inconclusive, lead the reader by indirection to the speculation that the undisclosed “friend” may have been Seki, the acquaintance for whom Kiyoko had left Tsuda. Was Seki infected? Might his illness have been responsible for Kiyoko’s miscarriage? And what of Tsuda himself: Was he immune to the allure of Tokyo’s pleasure quarter? The following exchange with O-Nobu is an invitation to wonder:

“You stopped off somewhere again today?”

It was a question O-Nobu could be counted on to ask if Tsuda failed to return at the expected hour. He was obliged accordingly to offer something in reply. Since it wasn’t necessarily the case that he had been delayed by an errand, there were times when his response was oddly vague. At such times he avoided looking at O-Nobu, who would have put on makeup for him.

“Shall I guess?”

“Go ahead.”

This time, Tsuda had nothing to worry about.

“The Yoshikawas.” (14:48)

Entangling Hori and Seki and Tsuda would be structurally satisfying. But there is no hard evidence, only the absence of definitive detail on the one hand and oblique suggestion on the other. In this way, controlling ambiguity, Sōseki keeps observant readers on the edge of their hermeneutic seats.²²

If Tsuda is doomed to continue wandering in the fog of his attachment to Kiyoko, O-Nobu also inhabits a world of illusion, choosing to believe that her superior cleverness will enable her to have her way in life. Her formula for happiness, reiterated with the passion of a credo, sounds simple enough: “It doesn’t matter who he is, you must love the man you’ve chosen for yourself with all your heart and soul, and by loving him you must make him love you every bit as deeply no matter what” (78:177).

In an ironic scene in which she attempts to persuade O-Hide, married to a philanderer, that love must be unconditional, absolute, and exclusive, she exposes her naiveté and, by implication, the sense of entitlement that proceeds from her own egoism. She is of course aware that Tsuda’s love, assuming he loves her at all, is a far cry from what she expects. In the cruelest moment in the novel, tormented by the knowledge that there is, or has been, another woman in her husband’s life, O-Nobu appeals to him to allow her to feel secure:

“I want to lean on you. I want to feel secure. I want immensely to lean, beyond anything you can imagine.”…

“Please! Make me feel secure. As a favor to me. Without you, I’m a woman with nothing to lean against. I’m a wretched woman who’ll collapse the minute you detach from me. So please tell me I can feel secure. Please say it, ‘Feel secure.’”

Tsuda considered.

“You can. You can feel secure.”

“Truly?”

“Truly. You have no reason to worry.” (149:326–27)

Observing that O-Nobu’s tension has eased, Tsuda feels reprieved and turns to placating his wife, “abundantly employing phrases likely to please her.” The reader is stunned to observe that this transparent ploy is effective:

For the first time in a long while, O-Nobu beheld the Tsuda she had known before their marriage. Memories from the time of their engagement revived in her heart.

My husband hasn’t changed after all. He’s always been the man I knew from the old days.

This thought brought O-Nobu a satisfaction more than sufficient to rescue Tsuda from his predicament. The turbulence that was on the verge of becoming a violent storm subsided. (150:328)

One source of animating energy in Light and Dark is the tension between the antipodes of precision and ambiguity. Some scenes feel excessively interpreted. Elsewhere, often at key moments such as this one, the narrator slips out of the room, leaving the reader to interpret the passage on his or her own. And what are we to think? In driving O-Nobu into a gullibility as hopeless as this, as hapless and pathetic, is Sōseki revealing a lack of respect for this inexperienced, passionate young woman? Does he share what amounts to Tsuda’s contempt? Is the reader to pity or condemn her? We are left deliberating in a troubled way, which is perhaps what Sōseki intends. We are obliged to ask ourselves, what is to become of this valiant, vulnerable heroine?

SINCE ITS PUBLICATION in 1917, Light and Dark has inspired conjecture about how Sōseki intended to conclude his novel. He left no outline, and the only oracular reference is O-Nobu’s prediction to Tsuda that “the day was coming when I’d have to summon up my courage at a certain moment all at once… courage for my husband’s sake” (154:339). This has been taken to mean that O-Nobu would travel to the hot — springs resort to do battle with Kiyoko for Tsuda. In his preface to the Shinchō paperback edition, the haiku poet Nakamura Kusatao paints the grimmest picture: Tsuda and Kiyoko fall back in love, and O-Nobu, failing to win Tsuda away from her, commits suicide. In Ōe Kenzaburō’s version, O-Nobu hastens to the hot springs accompanied by Kobayashi and remonstrates with Kiyoko. But in her naiveté she is no match for her rival and, defeated, falls physically ill. Tsuda nurses her back to health and rediscovers his love for her. Together they return from the realm of darkness—Ōe locates the hot springs in a Stygian realm, the “darkness” in Light and Dark—to the world of life and “light.”²³ The novelist Ōoka Shōhei (Fires on the Plain) postulates a variety of endings.²⁴ Kiyoko concludes that she has paled on seeing Tsuda at the bottom of the stairs because she still has feelings for him, and her confession rekindles their romance. O-Nobu travels to the hot springs and accuses her rival of violating the sisterhood of women, much as the archetypal wife, O-San, pleads with the archetypal courtesan, Koharu, in Chikamatsu’s eighteenth-century Bunraku play, Love Suicide at Amijima. Unlike Koharu, who sympathizes with O-san, Kiyoko pleads her own grief at miscarrying as a consequence of an infection that her libertine husband has passed to her. (Ōoka is the only Japanese critic I have read who takes Sōseki’s intimation to heart.) Under the stress of this impasse, Tsuda begins to hemorrhage and collapses. O-Nobu nurses him, and Kiyoko, perceiving the bond between them, departs.

There are other extrapolations, but none clarifies or deepens significantly the vision that Sōseki has already conjured: the unlikelihood of an escape from the prison of vanity and self-interest into the light of liberating self-knowledge. Among the writers who have essayed to “conclude” the novel with a full-length sequel — there have been four published attempts²⁵—only Mizumura Minae has conveyed the pessimism that is Sōseki’s primary color. Her Light and Dark, the Sequel (Zoku Meian, 1990), begins boldly with the final installment of Light and Dark and develops the game of cat-and-mouse that Sōseki initiated. At moments, Kiyoko appears on the verge of lowering her defenses; she even declares provocatively, “I’m afraid of what will happen if I stay here.” Eventually Tsuda badgers her into divulging an explanation for having turned away from him: “When all is said and done I can’t trust you,” she obliges. “For example, here you are, you came all this way…. I can’t help wondering if I might have been betrayed in this same way if we’d gotten together.”²⁶ Coming from the woman who inhabits his dreams, this unsparing put-down might have withered Tsuda with chagrin, for he is guilty as charged of betraying his wife. But, as always, he is insulated against humiliation by his own self-regard and feels only anger. Just then O-Nobu arrives, but there is no confrontation between the women, only a moment of breathtaking awkwardness. Kiyoko returns to the inn with a soft “Farewell,” and the couple is left alone to suffer in silence. Thus Mizumura’s sequel concludes on a note that seems congruent with Sōseki’s intent: difficult lessons have not been learned, and the way ahead is no clearer than it ever was.

The question remains: Is Light and Dark incomplete as Sōseki left it? Certainly he intended to continue writing, but an author’s desire to augment a novel needn’t be taken ipso facto as proof that the work is unfinished; in view of the inconclusiveness that characterizes much of Japanese fiction, the question may not be as frivolous as it appears. How “complete,” for example, is Snow Country by Kawabata Yasunari, a series of impressionistic episodes loosely assembled over a period of long years, or, for that matter, the same author’s open-ended portrait of an old man preparing for death, The Sound of the Mountain? How complete is Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s Some Prefer Nettles, which ends with the mistress O-Hisa kneeling enigmatically in the doorway? And what of Tanizaki’s magnum opus, The Makioka Sisters, which leaves the reader with Yukiko, suffering from diarrhea, boarding a train for Tokyo to begin her new life as the wife of an architect who is not introduced?

Let us not belabor the point. Light and Dark appears to be as complete as many Japanese novels in the twentieth-century canon: everything the reader needs to know about its principal characters to anticipate the ineluctable outcome Sōseki intends has been revealed. The details of the ending are missing, but the essence of his conclusion is already encoded in the text: Tsuda will not succeed in liberating himself from the egoism that blinds him, and O-Nobu will continue to pursue an exalted version of love that she will not ultimately attain. This motif is a refrain that sounds throughout Sōseki’s oeuvre. It is the contradictory, terrifying, ultimately unaccountable complexity of human consciousness microscopically examined in Light and Dark that installs it as a landmark in twentieth-century Japanese fiction.

Notes

1. His family name was Natsume; his given name, Kinnosuke. At twenty-two, he chose “Sōseki” (漱石) for a pen name from an ancient Chinese story. The phrase means “to gargle with stones.” In the anecdote, collected in a popular Chinese language primer, a civil servant intending to become a recluse declares, mistakenly inverting a Chinese expression, that he will “pillow his head on the river and gargle with stones.” Corrected, he argues intractably that his mistake was intentional. In taking the name, Sōseki is representing himself as a contrarian. His choice suggests a self-conscious identification with China’s literati.

2. Natsume Sōseki, “The Civilization of Modern-Day Japan,” in Kokoro: A N ovel and S elected E ssays, trans. Edwin McClellan, essays trans. Jay Rubin (Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1992), 278

3. Even in his day, Sōseki was hardly light reading. It was the Asahi’s policy to appeal to less ambitious readers by serializing a second, less demanding novel in parallel with Sōseki’s. Light and Dark shared the pages of the paper with two works by Nakarai Tōsui, a “newspaper novelist” less famous for his writing than as the writing teacher who broke Higuchi Ichiyo’s heart.

4. Sōseki defended his decision to resign his lectureship at the most prestigious university in the country to become a “newspaper man” in a somewhat facetious article, “Statement on Joining the Asahi.” See Natsume Sōseki, Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, ed. Michael K. Bourdaghs, Atsuko Ueda, and Joseph A. Murphy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 155–58.

5. Yamamoto Shōgetsu was editor of the literary arts section. See Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū (SZ), 28 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2004), 24:532.

6. The tyranny of the daily installment is perceptible in the text. Sōseki went out of his way to end many of the installments with contrived cliff hangers, and others begin with recapitulation. A few strokes in red pencil by an editor may easily have effaced these minor blemishes, but editing a master’s manuscript is considered disrespectful in Japan, and emendation of this kind is outside the translator’s jurisdiction.

7. On February 19, 1916, Sōseki had written the young writer a letter of fulsome praise for his short story “The Nose”: “Create another 20–30 stories of this quality and see what happens — you will find yourself a member of our literary brotherhood without equal” (SZ 24:510–11). Archived in the Museum of Modern Japanese Literature together with the letter it contained, Sōseki’s envelope has been torn open, as if Akutagawa had been unable to control his impatience to see what the master had written.

8. SZ 24:554–56.

9. SZ 24:558–62.

10. The original manuscript of Light and Dark is in the archives of the Museum of Modern Japanese Literature in Tokyo and may be examined on request in advance.

11. SZ 24:589–90.

12. O-Hide is pronounced O-HE-day.

13. Yoshimoto Takaaki characterized Sōseki’s style in later years as “consciously motivated by his wish to experiment with narrowing the gap between an English prose style and that of Japanese” (quoted in Reikō Abe Auestad, Rereading Sōseki: Three Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Novels [Wiesbaden: Herassowitz, 1998], 149).

14. Sōseki, “Interrelations Between Literary Substances,” in Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, 107–11.

15. Henry James, The Art of Criticism, ed. William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 288.

16. Ibid.

17. In the margin of page 103 he notes: “This writer’s prose style aims to express things easily understood in language that is hard to understand” (SZ 27:159).

18. SZ 19:359.

19. SZ 14:239.

20. Madam Yoshikawa suggests that a trip to visit Kiyoko will be “the best possible treatment for O-Nobu” and explains ambiguously, “Just watch, I’ll teach O-Nobu-san how to be a better wife to you, a more wifely wife” (142:311). Some Japanese critics have interpreted this to mean that O-Nobu must be taught, however painfully for her, that her emphasis on the nature of the love she receives from Tsuda is an unseemly attitude for a wife, who should be focused on helping her husband maintain favor with his relatives. See Ōe Kenzaburō, Saigo no shōsetsu (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1988), 161. Perhaps. Or perhaps she is simply jealous. Or possibly this is just characteristic perversity: “With no limits on her time, [Madam] needed no invitation, given the opportunity, to meddle in the private affairs of others, and she enjoyed looking after people beneath her, particularly those she was fond of, all the while making clear unabashedly that she was acting principally in the interests of her own amusement” (132:289).

21. In his preface to the Iwanami paperback edition of the novel, Ōe Kenzaburō reminded “contemporary and particularly young readers” that the influence exerted by relatives in Japanese social life and personal relationships was “decisively more powerful in the Meiji and Taisho periods than it is today” (Natsume Sōseki, Meian [Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2010], 599).

22. Japanese readers tend to object heatedly to this interpretation. As evidence that Sōseki did not intend any particle of doubt about Tsuda’s condition, they cite two lines of text (emphasis mine in both): “About to explain that his doctor’s specialty was in an area somewhat tangential to his particular illness and that as such his offices were not the sort of place that ladies would find inviting” (12:46); and “Supposing that Tsuda was afflicted with the same sort of illness as his own, [his friend] had spoken up without any hesitation or reserve, as if to do so were perfectly natural” (17:54). In fact, the second sentence contains its own ambiguity. The verb I have translated as “supposing” (omoikomu) means “to assume something, sometimes — but not always — mistakenly.” To be sure, both lines may be read as negating the possibility that Tsuda suffers from a venereal disease. At the same time, it seems obvious that at the very least Sōseki is playing them contrapuntally against seeds of doubt that he has intentionally planted.

23. Ōe, Saigo no shōsetsu, 170–71.

24. Ōoka Shōhei, Shōsetsuka Natsume Sōseki (Tokyo: Chikuma Shōbō, 1988), 425–29.

25. Kumegawa Mitsuki, Meian Aru Shūshō (Tokyo: Ronsōsha, 2009); Tanaka Fumiko, Natsume Sōseki Meian no Dabi (Tokyo: Tōhōshuppan, 1991); Mizumura Minae, Zoku Meian (Tokyo: Chikuma Shōbō, 1990); Nagai Ai, Shin Meian (Tokyo: Jiritsu Shobō, 2002).

26. Mizumura, Zoku Meian, 260, 261.