Kokoro

by Natsume Sōseki

For both, the Meiji period’s embrace of Western individualism provoked irreconcilable inner conflicts that haunted them through life.

Family difficulties and alienation, a recurrent theme in many of Sōseki’s novels,

Adoption, which plays an important part in the story of Sensei’s friend K in Kokoro, was common at the time—continuing the family name was more important than maintaining blood ties. Sōseki’s own adoption was a sorry failure on every level, leaving him feeling unloved, isolated, and bitter.

Like Kokoro’s Sensei, he was an essentially introverted and retiring person; his nervous sensibility shrank from exposure to the everyday world, and the strain of teaching told badly on his nerves.

Partly to soothe and entertain himself, he decided to try his hand at a light, humorous novel (I Am a Cat, 1905). To his surprise, upon publication it achieved instant fame. A year later came two more novels: the immensely popular Botchan (1906) as well as the beautiful haiku-style Kusamakura. At the age of forty, encouraged by the Asahi newspaper’s guarantee to serialize any future work, Sōseki took the audacious step of resigning from his teaching posts and devoting himself to his writing.

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. Nevertheless, as the concept of kokoro is a pervasive motif throughout the novel, I have chosen to express it with the single word “heart” and to preserve its presence in the translation wherever possible. For the title, it seemed best to retain the original word.

He had never disliked me, and the occasional curt greetings and aloofness were not expressions of displeasure intended to keep me at bay. 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.

The scrutiny of an analytical eye was something Sensei always particularly dreaded.

“No time is as lonely as youth.

Sensei had every reason to

be happy, but was he in fact? I wondered.

He chose to destroy his life before her happiness could be destroyed.

“I apologize. I was trying to speak truthfully, but I’ve only succeeded in irritating you. It was wrong of me.”

“I don’t even trust myself. It’s because I can’t trust myself that I can’t trust others. I can only curse myself for it.”

“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.”

“Personally, I think he’s come to dislike the rest of the world because of his love for you.” “You have a fine scholar’s way with words, I must say. You’re good at empty reasoning. Surely you could equally say that because he dislikes the world, he’s come to dislike me as well. That’s using precisely the same argument.” “You could say both, true, but in this case I’m the one who’s right.”

I’m always amazed at how men can go on and on, happily passing around the empty cup of some futile discussion.”

“I don’t think he dislikes me personally. He has no reason to. But he dislikes the world in general, you see. In fact, these days perhaps he dislikes the human race. In that sense, given that I’m human, he must feel the same way about me.”

But tell me, can someone change so much with the loss of a single friend?

Thus were comforter and comforted equally at sea, adrift on shifting waves. Lost as she was, she clung to what frail judgment I could offer.

These days, furthermore, each time I came home from the city, I brought a new aspect of myself that was strange and incomprehensible to my parents.

“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’ve come to feel that there’s nothing particularly shameful about not knowing, so I don’t any longer have the urge to push myself to read. I’ve grown old, in a word.”

But it’s in the nature of things for people to die, you know.

You said just now that you didn’t think there was anyone among your relatives you’d call bad. But 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.”

“Money, my friend. The most moral of men will turn bad when they see money.”

But I guess 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. This is sufficient revenge for me, I think.”

“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.”

Holding the tightly rolled diploma up to my eye like a telescope, I gazed through it, out over the world. Then I tossed it onto my desk and flung myself down spread-eagle in the middle of the floor. Lying there, I reviewed my past and imagined my future. This diploma stood like a boundary marker between the one and the other. It was a strange document

indeed, I decided, both significant and meaningless.

I soon began to see myself as superficial and emotionally irresponsible.

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

All my father said was “It’s a shame that an education just gives people the means to chop logic.”

His view of life was firmly confined to the little world where he’d spent his life. Inquisitive locals had been asking him how much salary a graduate could expect to earn, guessing at princely sums of around a hundred yen a month. That made him uncomfortable, and he very much wanted to get me settled into a position that would save his face.

To his way of thinking, useful people must be out in the world, engaged in something suitably impressive.

You really should not have to rely on anyone from the day you graduate. Young people these days seem just to know how to spend money and never think of how to make it.”

He had various other things to say on the subject as well, including, “In the

old days children fed their parents, but these days t...

“Who knows when you’ll die? You have to do all the things you want while you’re alive to do them.”

Each night the family would go to sleep feeling that tomorrow might well be the day of reckoning.

Faced with the expectations of my father, so close to death, my mother with her urgent desire that he should be somehow reassured, and my brother and his statements that a man wasn’t fully human unless he worked, and indeed all the other relatives, I found myself tormented by an issue that I privately cared nothing about.

I am an inconsistent creature.

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.

But I would rather that my experience be buried with me than be passed to someone incapable of receiving it.

You are serious in your desire to learn real lessons from life.

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.

Now I will wrench open my heart and pour its blood over you. I will be satisfied if, when my own heart has ceased to beat, your breast houses new life.