Book Impressions: Kokoro

Kokoro, by Natsume Soseki, is not an easy book to read.

The basic plot of the book is as follows: young man meets middle-aged man, strikes up a pedagogical friendship. Realises that the older man is deeply depressed; asks his wife; she doesn't know why. Goes home, acts like a jerk to his dying father. Gets a letter from the 'sensei'; reads it; realises why he's depressed; helplessly waits for his train to get to Tokyo so he can deal with the aftermath of Sensei's suicide.

Sensei killed himself out of guilt for causing the death of another friend through his selfish and callous behaviour (which did not, of course, in the end lead to his own happiness at all), and he chose the time to coincide with the end of the historical era that his generation defined itself in relation to. The traditions he cannot escape fail him. The modernity that he tries to escape into fails him. Family is fatally compromised by his secret guilt. Faith brings back horrible memories associated with that guilt. This is a book about deracination: it seems lovely if you just look at the word qua word ('de-race'-ing the world, right? Or something like that?--but); no. It's just the word in the study of history and culture for what Marx called alienation.

There are, by my count, exactly two hope spots in this entire book. One is the narrator's family, which is hopeful in that it maintains a traditionally meaningful existence out in the boonies (though the narrator disparages this and considers himself, a bit superciliously, 'of Tokyo'). The other is Shizu, Sensei's wife, who is a competent, intelligent, sensitive modern person. The people caught up in the flowing change from 'non-modern' to 'modern', from periphery to metropole, are the ones whose lives are broken against history in this book--and that is indeed the main theme of the book. As Meiji passes into Taisho, the characters realise that they have to scrap the idea of progressive modernisation for something different. The optimism of the Taisho Democracy takes hold, but it wrenches out the heart first; Dai-Nihon becomes Japan, but the wars have to be fought again. Kokoro is the greatest fictional chronicle of the history of the human feelings that dashed against, and broke, the dreams that justified modernity; it is the tragic epilogue to the story that something like Rurouni Kenshin or Yojimbo purported to begin. It tells of the melancholy that overtakes you when you have modernised and have to figure out what to do with yourself as a nation once modern; the sins that are bred into the bone of people living in interesting times; yet the fundamental loneliness that sets in during a time with no change or driving purpose. Progress is a mad dance that breaks the dancers to mourning pieces, yet tradition is nightmarish in its lack of beginnings or ends.

The only hope comes from individual persons living together as communities of people who actually care and are honest. It's not a magic formula of marriage or family or nation or progress. It's a marriage with care and integrity; a family with care and integrity; a nation with spirit and vigour; progress into spirit and vigour.

Sensei's broken heart and waves of crushing guilt and melancholy say: Good luck.