Reading Challenge Self-Sabotage

If I’d had another Yūko Tsushima book on my shelf, I would have chosen that to read in January (for Tony’s #JanuaryInJapan + Meredith’s Japanese Literature Challenge17). I should know better than to pick just any book, especially a classic, in order to be part of the group. I don’t do that well in groups, or with literary challenges, so this was my punishment or delight. It took me two weeks to finish, not because it takes very long to read (it’s only 146 pages long) but because it brought out my disinclination to read, however it did inspire me to write and share a story.

During the time I should have been reading it, I spent a weekend looking after two dogs, few distractions I thought, comfortable reading spaces. I sat down to read it and thought of the irony that it is a book about an artist who takes a meandering walk up a forested hillside.

I had just come back from a walk on a forested hillside. On his walk he encounters certain characters whom he observes and listens to while pondering art. My walk was over but the effect of was too present to be able to read more of the artist’s journey. I turned to the blank end pages and wrote out my walk in two parts, a story of intuitive insight, intrigue and fear.

You can read The Not So Great Escape here.

A New Month, A New Mood

A week later, I (re)turned to Kusamakura and found his walk took him in a more interesting direction, engaging him more with characters he met, a young woman confronting her past, her brother his uncertain future, their father, his latter years.

The book is by turns introspective as the artist attempts to create, he has his painting equipment with him, though it is to words and poetry he finds expression, and to understand something about beauty and form. The first night at an inn, he writes a series of short poems and in the morning discovers additions, not of his hand.

I tilt my head in puzzlement as I read, at a loss to know whether the additions are intended as imitations, corrections, elegant poetic exchanges, foolishness or mockery.

He often finds himself alone in places where he would expect there to be people. There is a sense of isolation and temporary abandonment he is disturbed by. Though he does not seek company, he seems to prefer his aloneness in the presence of others. He writes of mists and clouds and dew, of becoming the things he sees and wonders how to recreate that feeling to embody in a way that makes sense to others.

Eventually he accompanies the young woman, her brother and father on another journey, out of the hillside towards the train station, the train upon which he projects his thoughts of the changing civilisation, fast approaching modernity, the compact carriage carrying humanity stripped of their traditional freedoms, it will take this young brother towards war.

We are being dragged yet deeper into the real world, which I define as the world that
contains trains.

Context Can Elevate the Experience

For me, reading about this book afterwards, a little about the life of the author and of the context of the era, written just as Japan was opening itself to the rest of the world and the significant, irreversible change that would bring, brings another layer of understanding to the text, one that is not as easy to comprehend without that context.

In a brief piece entitled My Kusamakura, Sōseki stated that his aim had been to write a “haiku-style novel”. Previous novels, he said, were works in the manner of of the senryū, the earthier version of haiku that looks at everyday human life with a wryly humorous eye. “But it seems to me,” he wrote, “that we should also have a haiku-style novel that lives through beauty.”

The novel has been previously translated by Alan Turney with the title The Three-Cornered World, however Meredith McKinney has stayed with the Japanses title Kusamakura which literally translates as grass-pillow, a traditional literary term for travel, a kind of poetic journey.

Further Reading

Kusamakura reviewed by Tony Malone: A Grass Pillow For My Head

Article: Tony Malone on The Translations of Natsume Sōseki

Author, Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916)

Natsume Kinnosuke (Sōseki was his nom de plume) was born in 1867, the final year of the old regime, into a family of minor bureaucrats whose fortunes declined rapidly with the onset of the Meiji era. A late and unwanted child in a large family, he was adopted the following year by a childless couple, then returned nine years later, when the couple divorced, to his parents (whom he believed to be his grandparents). This loveless and lonely childhood marked him with a sense of estrangement and dislocation that haunted him through his adult years and that echoed the dislocations and questioning of identity that were hallmarks of the Meiji-era Japan.

Considered the foremost novelist of this era, he was one of Japan’s most influential modern writers. He wrote 14 novels, as wall as haiku, poems, academic papers on literary theory, essays, and autobiographical sketches. He is best known for his novels Kokoro, Botchan, I Am a Cat and his unfinished work Light and Darkness. 

Major themes in Sōseki’s works include ordinary people fighting against economic hardship, the conflict between duty and desire, loyalty and group mentality versus freedom and individuality, personal isolation and estrangement, the rapid industrialization of Japan and its social consequences, contempt of Japan’s aping of Western culture, and a pessimistic view of human nature.