Kokoro

by Natsume Sōseki

Japan’s Meiji period (which ended with the emperor Meiji’s death in 1912) began in 1868 with the tumultuous overthrow of the old Tokugawa shogunate, which had ruled Japan unopposed for 250 years. The shift signaled far more than a change of power. Japan under the Tokugawas had been rigidly feudal and isolationist, a Confucian society cut off from the changes that were rapidly overtaking much of the rest of the world. Pressure from Western nations eager to expand their sphere of trade finally proved irresistible in 1853, when the commander of a U.S. squadron, Matthew Perry, anchored his “black ships” threateningly offshore and sent an ultimatum to Japan’s ruling powers. The subsequent internal upheaval resulted in a new government that opened Japan’s doors to the West and embraced the introduction of Western culture and technology. In the next four decades Japan was utterly transformed. The Meiji period is synonymous with the fundamental transformation that set Japan on the road to becoming all that it is today.

Kokoro’s central character, the man referred to as Sensei, is of an age with Sōseki, and his references to the importance of his old-fashioned moral education clearly reflect Sōseki’s own experience. For both, the Meiji period’s embrace of Western individualism provoked irreconcilable inner conflicts that haunted them through life.

Sōseki became increasingly focused on his contemporaries’ quintessential experience, one that he himself felt acutely: the necessity to evolve a modern, individual sense of self and to cope with the new Meiji self’s resultant problems: isolation, alienation, egotism, and profound dislocation from its cultural and moral inheritance. Sōseki increasingly sought to portray for his readers not only the upheavals of their rapidly changing world but the dilemmas and suffering of the contemporary psyche.

The man called K, the young Sensei’s friend, who precipitates the crisis with which the novel culminates, in many ways embodies the old world’s strict code of values and ethics, which was coming into such painful conflict with the new Western concepts of individual rights and the primacy of the ego. K’s self-elected death foreshadows the ultimate death of that old world, a world Sōseki himself had inherited and whose unattainable and rapidly vanishing certainties preoccupied him. K’s death by his own hand, shocking and pointless from the perspective of the new values, is nevertheless a crucial moral victory that haunts Sensei’s life.

Kokoro, the novel’s title, is a complex and important word that can perhaps best be explained as “the thinking and feeling heart,” as distinguished from the workings of the pure intellect, devoid of human feeling. Because one’s kokoro thinks as well as feels, “heart” is at times an inadequate translation.

I pity him now, for I realize that he was in fact sending a warning, to someone who was attempting to grow close to him, signaling that he was unworthy of such intimacy. For all his unresponsiveness to others’ affection, I now see, it was not them he despised but himself.

Sensei was a man who could, indeed must love, yet he was unable to open his arms and accept into his heart another who sought to enter.

“I’m a lonely man,” he repeated that evening. “I’m lonely, but I’m guessing you may be a lonely man yourself. I’m older, so I can withstand loneliness without needing to take action, but for you it’s different—you’re young. I sense that you have the urge to do, to act. You want to pit yourself against something . . .” “I’m not at all lonely.” “No time is as lonely as youth. Why else should you visit me so often?”

A man who knows the satisfactions of love would speak of them more warmly.

Your heart is already restless with love, isn’t it?” I briefly searched within myself to see if this might be true, but all I could find was a blank. Nothing inside me seemed to answer his description. “There’s no object of love in my heart, Sensei. Believe me, I’m being perfectly honest with you.” “Ah, but you’re restless precisely because there’s no object, you see? You’re driven by the feeling that if only you could find that object, you’d be at peace.” “I don’t feel too restless right now.” “You came to me because of some lack you sensed, didn’t you?” “That may be so. But that isn’t love.” “It’s a step in the direction of love. You had the impulse to find someone of the same sex as the first step toward embracing someone of the opposite sex.”

Just remember that love is a sin. And it is also sacred.”

conversing with him seemed to me more beneficial than attending classes. His ideas inspired me more than the opinions of my professors. All in all Sensei, who spoke little and kept to himself, seemed a greater man than those great men who sought to guide me from behind the lectern.

“The memory of having sat at someone’s feet will later make you want to trample him underfoot. I’m trying to fend off your admiration for me, you see, in order to save myself from your future contempt. I prefer to put up with my present state of loneliness rather than suffer more loneliness later.

We who are born into this age of freedom and independence and the self must undergo this loneliness. It’s the price we pay for these times of ours.”

His conviction struck me as more than just a lifeless theory, or the cold ruins from some long-dead fire. Sensei was indeed a philosopher, it seemed to me, but a potent reality seemed woven into the fabric of his philosophy. Nor was his thinking grounded in anything remote from himself, observed only in others. No, behind his convictions lay some keenly felt personal experience, something great enough to heat his blood, and to halt his heart.

She was not one of those modern women who takes a certain pride in calling attention to the fact that she is intelligent. She seemed to value far more the heart that lies deep within us.

“But sick or well, humans are fragile creatures, you know. There’s no anticipating how and when they might die, or for what reason.”

I believe you don’t really become a finer person just by reading lots of books.

do you imagine there’s a certain type of person in the world who conforms to the idea of a ‘bad person’? You’ll never find someone who fits that mold neatly, you know. On the whole, all people are good, or at least they’re normal. The frightening thing is that they can suddenly turn bad when it comes to the crunch. That’s why you have to be careful.”

I’m doing something far more powerful than taking personal revenge—I not only hate them, I’ve come to hate the whole human race they typify.

“You’re mixing up my ideas with my past. I’m hardly a good thinker, but I assure you I wouldn’t purposely conceal any ideas I’d arrived at. What would be the point? But if you’re asking me to tell you everything about my past, well, that’s a different matter.” “It doesn’t seem different to me. Your ideas are important to me precisely because they’re a product of your past. If the two things are separated, they become virtually worthless as far as I can see. I can’t be satisfied with being offered some lifeless doll that has no breath of soul in it.”

A sense of human fragility swept over me, of the hopeless frailty of our innately superficial nature.

“It’s a shame that an education just gives people the means to chop logic.” But in this simple comment I read all my father’s dissatisfaction with me.

Since Sensei and my father seemed exactly opposite types, they easily came to mind as a pair, through both association and comparison. I knew almost everything about my father. When we parted, the emotional bond between parent and child would be all that remained. Of Sensei, on the other hand, I still knew very little. I had had no chance to hear from him the promised story of his past. Sensei was, in a word, still opaque to me. I could not rest until I had moved beyond this state and entered a place of clarity. Any break in relations with him would cause me anguish.

My brother was assuming that since I so evidently respected this man I honored with the name Sensei, he must be someone of distinction in the world, at the very least a professor at the university. What could be impressive about someone who had made no name for himself and did nothing?

My past is my own experience—one might call it my personal property. And perhaps, being property, it could be thought a pity not to pass it on to someone else before I die.

I will not hesitate to cast upon you the shadow thrown by the darkness of human life. But do not be afraid. Gaze steadfastly into this darkness, and find there the things that will be of use to you. The darkness of which I speak is a moral darkness.

it seems to me that between any male and female who have been close and in continual contact, such great intimacy rules out the fresh response necessary to stimulate feelings of romantic love. Just as you can only really smell incense in the first moments after it is lit, or taste wine in that instant of the first sip, the impulse of love springs from a single, perilous moment in time, I feel. If this moment slips casually by unnoticed, intimacy may grow as the two become accustomed to each other, but the impulse to romantic love will be numbed.

Then it occurred to me that perhaps my dead parents had suddenly cleansed my dulled eyes and given me a clear vision of the world. Deep inside, you see, I felt that my parents continued to love me as in life. Even though I was already well acquainted with the real world by then, the strong superstitious beliefs of my ancestors coursed deep in my blood. No doubt they still do.

I believe that a commonplace idea stated with passionate conviction carries more living truth than some novel observation expressed with cool indifference. It is the force of blood that drives the body, after all. Words are not just vibrations in the air, they work more powerfully than that, and on more powerful objects.

Bear in mind that the Sensei you know is a man who has been sullied by the world. If we define our betters as those who have spent more years being tarnished by the dirt of the world, then I can certainly claim to be your better.

Faced with her, my theorizing lost its power. I felt for her a love that was close to pious faith. You may find it odd that I use a specifically religious word to describe my feelings for a young woman, but real love, I firmly believe, is not so different from the religious impulse. Whenever I saw her face, I felt that I myself had become beautiful. At the mere thought of her, I felt elevated by contact with her nobility. If this strange phenomenon we call Love can be said to have two poles, the higher of which is a sense of holiness and the baser the impulse of sexual desire, this love of mine was undoubtedly in the grip of Love’s higher realm.

All our capacities, both physical and mental, require external stimuli for both their development and their destruction, and in either case these stimuli must be increased by slow degrees in order to be effective. But this gradual increase creates a very real danger that not only you yourself but those around you may fail to notice any problems that might develop.

He had decided that if he accustomed himself to hardship, then pain would sooner or later cease to register. The simple virtue of repetition of pain, he was sure, would bring him to a point where pain no longer affected him.

His sights were fixed on far higher things than mine, I’ll not deny it. But it is surely crippling to limp along, so out of step with the lofty gaze you insist on maintaining. My most important task, I felt, was somehow to make him more human.

it seems to me that this kind of jealousy is perhaps a necessary part of love. Since my marriage, I have been aware that my jealous impulses have slowly faded; at the same time, I no longer feel that early fierce passion of love.

Could that delicate and complex instrument that lies in the human breast ever really produce a reading that was absolutely clear and truthful, like a clock’s hands pointing to numbers on its dial?

These were the days before “the new awakening” or “the new way of life,” as modern slogans have it. But if K failed to toss away his old self and throw himself into becoming a new man, it was not for want of such concepts. Rather, it was because he could not bear to reject a self and a past that had been so noble and exalted. One might even say that it had been his reason for living.

I had had no thought of tears until that moment, but now at last I was able to let a sensation of sorrow pervade me. Words cannot express what a comfort that was. Thanks to this grief, a touch of balm momentarily soothed my poor heart, which had been clenched tight around its fear and pain.

True enough, my uncle’s betrayal had made me fiercely determined never to be beholden to anyone again—but back then my distrust of others had only reinforced my sense of self. The world might be rotten, I felt, but I at least am a man of integrity. But this faith in myself had been shattered on account of K. I suddenly understood that I was no different from my uncle, and the knowledge made me reel. What could I do? Others were already repulsive to me, and now I was repulsive even to myself.

I felt then that as the spirit of the Meiji era had begun with him, so it had ended with his death. I was struck with an overwhelming sense that my generation, we who had felt Meiji’s influence most deeply, were doomed to linger on simply as anachronisms as long as we remained alive.

My past, which made me what I am, is an aspect of human experience that only I can describe. My effort to write as honestly as possible will not be in vain, I feel, since it will help both you and others who read it to understand humanity better.