PART TWO
A couple of harsh comments by the narrator about his father:
I had greater admiration for Sensei than I had for my father (81)
I began to dislike my father's naive provincialism. (82)
Questions:
1. Why do you think "I" admires Sensei more than he does his Father?
2. What do you think he means by his "father's naive provincialism"? How might he have developed such a view?
The Narrator continues:
I pictured to myself the large, old country house without my father, and with only my mother living in it....Would I be able to leave home, and live without worry in Tokyo? (85)
What does this reflection reveal about "I's" thinking?
A darkness overtakes the text as Emperor Meiji is taken ill (88); and later dies (91). Soon, General Nogi Maresuke, commits ritual suicide, by samurai style disembowelment. He thought he was committing "junsshi," or following his lord in death, a real throwback to earlier times.
From his perspective in the countryside, the Narrator states:
"I thought of far off Tokyo...immersed in gloom..There was but one light shining and that came from Sensei's house. (92)
Quite a powerful image. What do you think?
But also, I's father says,
"There are advantages and disadvantages in having one's children educated...education is a means of separating children from their parents." (95)
"I" could not think of his father without thinking of Sensei. The contrast between them was so sharp. (99)
"There was little that I did not know about my father...On the other hand, there was much that I did not know about Sensei...[He]still remained for me a figure half-hidden." (99)
-- Is this part of the allure of Sensei?
I was in such an unsettled frame of mind. (101)
Perhaps in my anxiety to please my father I chattered more than I should. (104)
...I could not be the good son my mother wished me to be. (107)
"My father was the first to see the news of General Nogi's death in the paper." (108)
"My father began to lose his power of speech." Around the same time, a long, bulky letter arrives from Sensei. (119) As his father falls into a coma, "I" starts to peek at the letter: "I am free of the bonds that prevernted me from telling you the truth about myself....I shall never again have the opportunity of passing on to you what I have learned from my own experience. " (121)
He is stunned. His restless heart freezes, he has a desperate desire to act so he leaves his father and boards the train for Tokyo.
"At last I was able to read Sensei's letter from beginning to end." (124)
This means that he is sitting on this Tokyo-bound train when he reads Sensei's "Testament," which constitutes Part III of Kokoro.
But the letter also proclaims that Sensei will in all likelihood already be dead by the time his letter is received. In fact, Sensei's death has already been alluded to as far back as on p. 8 where he says, "But now, when Sensei is dead, I am beginning to understand."
(Of course, orginal readers following the serialized version in the newspaper, knew because they had read the final section of the bound version of the novel first!)
Let'a think about it.
This is the end of the novel's narrative present. It's like a freeze-frame ending in film.
"I" is sitting there, on a train, bound for Tokyo and his beloved Sensei--who may already be dead--while his father and all the other patriarchs are also either dead or dying. Oh, my. This is quite a moment!
Is this a picture, a snapshot, of where Japan is at this particular point in time?
Caught in the middle, suspended between an old world and a new one which is still unfolding?
Old ways are dead or dying...but what is the shape of the new one?
Remember this picture: I, seated on the train, in motion, while he is reading Part III, "Sensei and His Testament." It is a kind of avant-garde, provocative, sophisticated way to go--a very bold and innovative narrative strategy. This is a clear indication that Sôseki was willing to experiment and innovate with the very form of the novel even though it was not native to his country.
Good on, ya, Mr. Sôseki!!
Additional Thoughts: Language of the Text
After K and Sensei's summer trip together to Boshu, from page 200ff on, the language of the text starts to become riddled with phrases like:
I was like a sick person…overcome by a feeling…beset by the same kind of fear (201)
I felt as if I had been turned into stone…Perhaps it was fear, perhaps it was terrible pain…made me feel rigid for head to toe…cold sweat seeping though my clothes…The pain within me was almost unbearable…My heart seemed to be crying out, "What shall I do?" (204)
I was simply unable to speak…(205)
My head seemed to throb with despair and regret…The silence in K's room seemed eternal. (206)
I felt inside me a strange fear…dread…a kind of devil…would haunt me the rest of my life. (207)
The house now was completely dark. I felt suddenly the silence around me….Once more, I was stricken with fear. (209)
I am a weak man, I am ashamed…I cannot bear the pain…I was not my usual self then…There was not one part of me that was not on guard…(213)
Now is the time, I thought, to destroy my opponent….I said cruelly, “Anyone who has no spiritual aspirations is an idiot.” (214)
K seemed to shrivel before my eyes. (217)
A voice whispered in my ear, “It is up to you to make the final move.” (220)
And especially:
“Through cunning I have won. But as a man, I have lost.” (228)
When he discovers K's body he says, "But even in such moment, I could not forget my own welfare." (229) He understands full well that he has put his own interests above those of his friend!
And when he reads through K's suicide note, what is his first thought?
"I'm safe." (230)
"I felt only frightened. The fear I experienced then was not caused merely by the proximity of a bloodstained body. What truly frightened me was my own destiny." (231)
Important Note:
While Joseph Conrad's very influential novella, The Heart of Darkness, had originally been serialized in a journal back in 1899, it was repackaged in a story collection that was published in 1902 and that is when it became more widely read and had its greatest impact. We need to remember that this occurred right near the end of Sôseki's stay in Great Britain, so it is like that he was aware of this powerful modern work with the human heart as its main subject.
Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that he himself later would write his own, innovative novel called The Heart or Kokoro.
Now, the two texts are hardly the same. And it is said that Sôseki was more influenced by Shakespeare's The Tempest when writing Kokoro!
Conrad's work is an allegory about a Belgian merchant who travels up river deep into the heart of Africa and it is considered to be the most thorough and powerful condemnation of western imperialism ever written.
In Sôseki's hands, the subject matter is quite different. It is a more subdued, a more quiet text...though it does have its share of blood ("Now I myself am about to cut open my heart, and drench your face with my blood.").
In fact, Kokoro may just be about the whole idea of "subjectivity" itself, or the interior world of modern individuals. In Kokoro, the voyage is pointed inward, straight into the "heart" of modern Japan. Interiority is its domain. And that is quite a lot to take on!
I think of Bob Dylan's song, "Up to Me" in this context where he says:
We heard the Sermon on the Mount and I knew it was too complex
It didn’t amount to anything more than what the broken glass reflects
When you bite off more than you can chew you've got to pay the penalty
Somebody has to tell the tale, I guess it must be up to me.
So, we have two things here, both germane. Sometimes, there are penalties in life. We make our choices and sometimes, there are consequences; bills come due and we have to pay the price. Sensei gets this and he saw that the price he had to pay for all the new freedoms and independence that come with modern life was alienation and loneliness. Tough deal.
But, the second thing has to do with legacy, with passing things on to other people. Those of us who are able to, have to "tell the tale," so to speak. We have to tell the truth and tell it like it is. That is precisely what Sôseki does. I believe that is how he perceives the role of the writer. It's the writer's job to tell the truth as they see it, as best they can. And so will you when it comes time to write your papers!
I also appreciate the sentiments expressed by Linda Flores in a recent interview when she also comes around to this idea that the choices we make in life do exact their price from us, and that legacies matter:
Natsume Sōseki was a wonderful writer and his prose is incredibly beautiful.
I find the novel fascinating because it is about a nation on the verge of dramatic change. Sōseki’s life (1867–1916) overlapped almost entirely with the Meiji period (1868–1912), and the novel articulates the sensibilities of the late Meiji era and the tensions of a modernizing nation. There is a scene in the beginning of the novel where the student is watching people bobbing about in the sea, suggesting that we are all somehow adrift in a sea of modernity. At the end of the Meiji era, people were struggling to make sense of the implications of living in the modern world. In the novel, the student leaves behind his family and his hometown to pursue the life of a modern intellectual in Tokyo, but he comes to realise that there is always a price to be paid for one’s choices in life.
When you read Kokoro, there is a palpable tension that is sustained throughout – from the first pages to the last. It is a riveting read, a novel that grips you on an almost visceral level; it draws you in and refuses to let you go, even at the end of the narrative.
[One] of the key motifs of the novel [is] the question of legacy – of things being handed down from one generation to the next. Sensei passes on his secrets to the student, and we, as readers of the novel, also become purveyors of that knowledge. As the novel demonstrates, knowledge is never without its costs. I would describe Kokoro as a sublime piece of literature, but it is also a very sombre novel.
And, from another source:
Kokoro—meaning “heart”—is the story of a subtle and poignant friendship between two unnamed characters, a young man and an enigmatic elder whom he calls “Sensei.”
Haunted by tragic secrets that have cast a long shadow over his life, Sensei slowly opens up to his young disciple, confessing indiscretions from his own student days that have left him reeling with guilt, and revealing, in the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between his moral anguish and his student’s struggle to understand it, the profound cultural shift from one generation to the next that characterized Japan in the early twentieth century. . .
Kokoro, Soseki’s last completed novel, is widely considered to be his best, the book in which the themes he had developed in previous works were fully realized. Yet whether Kokoro represents Soseki’s apex or not, experiencing it can only whet your thirst for more.
And also:
In Sensei’s testament Sôseki vividly describes the process of baring oneself:
Now I myself am about to cut open my heart, and drench your face with my blood. And I shall be satisfied if, when my heart stops beating, a new life lodges itself in your breast. (129)
By the end of Kokoro, neither the narrator nor the reader can doubt that this is precisely what has happened. Sôseki executes his exploration of humanity’s intricate psychological condition with an intensity and sophistication that is hard to ignore. He is an author who deserves to be read widely outside a Japan that has recognized him as one of its best.