Ito Writing Time in Soseki's Kokoro

Ito, Ken

Writing Time in Soseki's Kokoro

Ito, Ken., (1997) Writing Time in Soseki's Kokoro. FROM: Washburn, D, Studies in modern Japanese

literature : essays and translations in honor of Edwin McClellan . pp.3-21. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese

Studies, University of Michigan. [19]

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Writing Time in Soseki's Kokoro KEN K. IT0

"Sasei" is what I always called him. And so I will simply m i t e "Sensei" here and not reveal his name. I do this not so much out of any reticence, but because it is more natural for me. Whenever I call forth my memories of him, I always want to say "Sensei." My feelings remain the same even when I take up my brush. I cannot bring myself to refer to him using something as impersonal as an initial. (5, italics mine)'

Kokoro begins by calling attention to the dynamics of writing. The narrator points out that w&ting involves arbitrary and willful choices, starting with something as basic as how a writer chooses to refer to the people in his text. Rejected at the outset is the notion of unmediated representation. Everything here has been first recon- structed through the act of memory and then shaped through the use of language. Although this is not immediately apparent, the narrator also bears witness to the ineluctable intertextuality of writing. His re- fusal to engage in the literary convention of using initials to identify people clearly alludes to the use of this very convention in Sensei's letter.2 His response to an earlier text is inscribed in his own writing.

This dramatization of the choices implicit in writing takes note of the temporal stratification achieved through narration. The narrator begins with a recollection of the past: "Sensei is what I always called him." But he immediately shifts to choices being made in the present: "And so I simply write 'Sensei' here, and do not reveal his name." The inclusion of "always" in the first sentence already points to the place of the present in this narration of the past, for it is only from a subse- quent present that an action can be said to have "always" occurred. However, the shift in verb tenses between the first and the second sen- tences signals a more explicitjuxtaposition of the written past and the writing present.

WRITING TIME IN S ~ S E K I ' S KOKORO 5

The following discussion of Kokoro attempts to remain atten- tive to the self-consciousness about writing evident at the novel's opening. Deliberately ordered and told in an uncommon way, Kokoro forces consideration of its rhetoricity. I will initially focus on the temporal transpositions effected by the two narratives that constitute the work and upon the circularity of the narrating situations established within the time structure of the novel. My conclusion will suggest how Kokoro's thematic treatment of inheritance is embedded in the novel's writing of time.

Time in Kokoro, as it is in any text, is a function of narrative. It does not exist apart from its representation in language and narration. To examine how time is structured in Kokoro, it is useful to take into account the frequently made narratological distinction between story and d i scour~e .~

The "story" in a text is its content, the answer to the question what happens? Within the story events occur chronologically. The story of Kokoro, stripped to its bare essentials, might be summarized as follows: An upright but naive young man is cheated out of his inheritance by his uncle. Embittered but still confident that he himself can live by principle, he flees to Tokyo where he rents a room from a widow, who lives with her daughter. The young man finds himself falling in love with the daughter, but his situation becomes complicated when a childhood friend, whom he has invited to live with him, confesses his love for the same young woman. Instead of telling his friend of his own emotions, the young man goes directly to the widow and arranges to marry her daughter. A few days after learning of these arrangements, the friend commits suicide. This death makes the young man recog- nize his own capacity for treachery-he must accept that the evil he had witnessed in others exists within himself. Some years later, when the man is no longer young, he meets a student who becomes fasci- nated with every detail of his life. The older man initially resists the youth's curiosity, but he eventually agrees to disclose his past when the time is right. When the youth has gone back to his home in the country to be with his dying father, the older man sends him a long letter in which he reveals not only his past but his intention to commit suicide.

If this summary bears little resemblance to the text known as Kokoro, it is because discourse, all the elements of language and narration that are employed to tell a story, conspicuously transforms the story's contours. The most obvious aspect of Kokoro's discourse is that the novel has two narrators. Of the three sections of the novel, the first two, "Sensei and I" and "My Parents and I," are memoirs narrated

by the younger man. The third section, "Sensei and His Te~tament ,"~ takes the form of a letter written by Sensei shortly before his death. The first two sections, which are chronologically consecutive, take up exactly one-half of the novel, and thus it is useful to think of Kokoro as

two first-person narratives of equal length. These juxta- posed narratives significantly reorder the events in the story. The narrative that comes first, the younger man's account of his relationship with Sensei, describes the initial meeting of the two narrators, their developing relationship, and the effects this has on the younger man's attitudes toward his parents. It concludes with the arrival of Sensei's letter at the younger man's home in the country. In effect then, Kokoro begins in the chronological middle of its story and first conveys events that occurred toward the end of Sensei's life. Internal evidence indi- cates that this narrative covers approximately four years starting in the summer before the younger man's last year in higher school. Nu- merous references to the funeral of the Meiji emperor and General Nogi's suicide clearly locate the concluding events in this narrative in September of 1912. Thus, the story time of the first two sections can be established as running from 1908 to September 1912.

The third section, Sensei's letter to the younger man, returns to the past to tell the portion of the story that occurred before their meeting. It starts by recounting the events of Sensei's youth: the death of his parents, his betrayal by his uncle, and his decision to leave his homeland and live in Tokyo. It goes on to relate the circumstances by which Sensei came to live in the household of his future wife and describes his own eventual betrayal of his friend, K. The letter concludes with a description of Sensei's life after K's suicide. At the end, it briefly reenters the story time of the initial narrative when it mentions Sensei's meeting with the younger man and his decision to commit ~ u i c i d e . ~

The chronological span of Sensei's narrative is somewhat more ambiguous than that of the younger man's account. Sensei tells us that he was not yet twenty when his parents died, and that he was on the verge of entering higher school when this happened. Since higher school and university together took six years to complete at the time, and since K dies shortly before graduation, the period covered by the years leading to the great tragedy in Sensei's life can be ascertained with some clarity. At this point, however, the chronology of the story becomes hazy. Some years pass as Sensei marries Ojosan and attempts

-

to escape his sense of guilt, first by losing himself in his studies and then by drowning his sorrows in drink. The text does not specify how long Sensei struggles in this manner before he reaches the conclusion that he must "live as though dead" (283), nor does it tell us how much

WRITING TIME IN S~SEKT'S KOKORO 9

sort of brutish behavior to those of you who have grown up in the more civil atmosphere of the present, surely you cannot but be struck by the stupidity of it alln (158). Similarly, Sensei attributes his inability to tell K about his love for Oj6san to the atmosphere of the times:

Thinking back on it now, everyone around me then was a little strange. Not a one would talk in any detail about his relationships with women. Among them, there were prob- ably some who had nothing to talk about. But it seems to have been usual that they kept quiet even if they had something to reveal. This must seem odd to those of you who breathe the freer air of the present. Whether our behavior had something to do with the remnants of Confucianism or a kind of embarrassment I will leave to yourjudgment. (219)

Sensei's awareness of the gulf separating past and present is influenced by his consciousness that he is writing at the historical terminus of September 1912. Among the most frequently quoted passages in Kokoro is the one in which Sensei poignantly voices his identifica- tion with the Meiji era: "And then the emperor died at the height of summer. I felt then that the spirit of Meiji, which had begun with the emperor, had ended with him. In my heart, I was struck by the force- ful realization that for those of us who had been most strongly affected by Meiji to go on living meant being left behind by the times" (285). Sensei is a representative of a past rapidly growing distant telling his story in a present where little can be assumed.

The retrospective nature of the narratives combined with the distinct reordering of events effected by the discourseamake Kokoro a work rich in the particular- kind of temporal shifts that Genette calls "prolepses," references to a future beyond the point of a story cur- rently being narrated. Although both narrators make such references, it is the initial narrator who employs prolepses prolifically and in problematical ways.I0 Knowing precisely how things turn out, the initial narrator drops hints about events or revelations that lie in the future. Very early on in the novel we learn that Sensei is dead, that a tragedy in his past will be uncovered, and even that a letter will play an important part in the unfolding of the story. Yet, for all that he intimates, the narrator is surprisingly coy about what he reveals. A case in point occurs when the narrator describes how Sensei sometimes seemed less than welcoming toward him:

I was often disappointed by Sensei in this way. He seemed aware of my disappointment at times, and at othh times

'2 oblivious. Although these setbacks were repeated, th y did

not make me pull back from him. Rather, the more frus- trated I felt, the more I wanted to move forward. If I did so, I believed, something would be laid bare to my satisfaction. I was young. But I did not think that my young blood would flow in so direct a manner for just anyone. I did not understand why only Sensei evoked such feelings in me. I have finally begun to understand now, after Sensei's death. From the very beginning, Sensei had not disliked me. The occasional curt greeting or cold behavior had not been an expression of displeasure. How sad it is that Sensei had been warning those that drew near him to stay away because he was not worth approaching. Sensei, who did not respond to the affection of others, felt contempt for himself long before he felt contempt for others. (12-13, italics mine)

Passages like this hold the key to the suspense that the first half of Kokoro generates. The narrator creates an air of mystery, suggesting depths to Sensei that cannot be revealed just yet. This air of mystery is heightened by the narrator's dramatization of his younger self as a searcher in quest of the truth about Sensei. The narrator understands this truth "now," that is, at the moment of the narration, but he ex- pects the reader to tread his path to understanding before being al- lowed to inherit his knowledge.

In other prolepses, the narrator is far more direct about his unwillingness to disclose all. At one point, when he is describing his younger self's conjectures about the "romance" in the love between Sensei and his wife, the narrator flatly draws a line beyond which he will not cross:

My conjectures turned out not to be wrong. But I had only managed to picture in my imagination one half of love. There was a frightening tragedy behind the beauty of Sensei's love. And his wife knew absolutely nothing about the torment Sensei experienced because of this tragedy. Even now, she knows nothing. Sensei died still hiding his secret from his wife. He destroyed his own life rather than destroy her happiness.

I will say nothing now about this tragedy. (34-35)

This passage illustrates the numerous planes of time that intersect in the initial narrator's discourse. Within the space of a paragraph, the narrator refers to the knowledge that he had at this point in the story, the increased understanding that he possesses (and which Sensei's wife does not) in the present of the discourse, and, by implication, to a point in between when he became privy to Sensei's secret. This temporal structure that juxtaposes the time of narration and story time,

WRITING TIME IN S~SEKI 'S KOKORO 11

with a moment of revelation sandwiched in between, is one that re- curs throughout the first part of the novel. Yet, despite his current understanding, the narrator arbitrarily refuses to disclose the information that is most crucial: "I will say nothing now about this tragedy." The foreshadowing in Kokoro is of a deliberately shadowy variety.

There is another kind of reference to the future that, for want of a better term, might be called "false" foreshadowings. These allu- sions, which intimate future outcomes that prove not to be so, are contained principally in the dialogue spoken by Sensei within the initial narrative. More than once, Sensei mentions his inability to ease the narrator's loneliness and predicts that the younger man will soon move away from him. For example, in a passage which holds rich im- plications for understanding the text's attitudes toward gender relations, Sensei says to his young protege, 'You have made your move toward me, a member of the same sex, as an initial step in your eventual embrace of the opposite sex" (37). Whatever such a passage may have to say about the connection of homosocial relations to hetero- sexual ones, it is patently inaccurate as a foreshadowing of the future, for the entire text of the novel is a testimony to the persistent weight of Sensei in the narrator's life and memory.

Even more pointed is the interchange that occurs between the two men after Sensei has revealed that he trusts no one, most of all himself.

"In any case, you shouldn't trust me too much. You'll regret soon enough. And in return for having been fooled, men have been known to engage in brutal revenge." [The speaker is Sensei]

"What do you mean?" "The memory of having knelt before another, makes

one later try to step on his head. I want to decline any admi- ration in the present in order to prevent insult in the future. I want to endure my present loneliness instead of having to confront even greater future loneliness. We must all partake of this loneliness as a payment for being born in this modern world, so full of freedom and independence and our own wills." (41)

The last lines of this passage are often cited to illustrate SGseki's attitudes toward modernity. But what I want to stress are the contexts in which the lines occur. Sensei's warning given in the present of the story is based upon a certain vision of the future, a future beyond a moment of revelation, when the younger man will turn away in revul- sion from what he once admired. The import of the inclusion of such

a statement is, of course, that the younger man narrates from a temporal standpoint on the other side of the moment of revelation. Yet he has hardly rejected Sensei. In fact, his entire narration is a testimony to the continuing presence of Sensei in his life, even after the latter's death. AS he tells his story, the narrator's voice rings not with disappointment or contempt, but with affection and sympathy, and even pride.

I thought from the beginning that there was some secret behind Sensei that made him unapproachable. But some- where within me there was a strong sense that I had to ap- proach him, no matter what. Perhaps I was the only one who harbored such feelings toward Sensei. Yet I am also the only one whose intuition was later supported by reality. And so men if1 am called callow or foolish, I continue to be proud and pleased by an intuition that let me see into the future. A man who was capable of loving others, a man who could not keep from loving, yet a man who could not hold his arms wide and embrace someone who sought to draw near him-such a man was Sensei. (18, italics mine)

paradoxically, then, it is the narrator's younger self, ignorant and ea- ger, who proves a better prophet than Sensei, armed with the knowledge of his past. By including Sensei's false prophecies in his narration, the initial narrator celebrates the passions and the perspicacity of his younger self.

The prolepses and the false foreshadowings that fill Kokoro are reminders of the text's many self-references, its internal resonances and circularity. Nowhere are these qualities more evident than in a consideration of the facet of the text that Genette calls "narrating," which he defines as "the producing narrative action, and by exten- sion, the whole of the real or fictional situation in which that action takes place."" When the two narratives of Kokoro are examined in this regard, it becomes quickly obvious that each deals prominently with the production of the other. Nearly all of the initial narrative can be read as a gloss on how and why the second narrative came to be written. For its part, Sensei's testament is not only a response to the younger man's voracious need to know detailed in the first half of the novel. It also serves, in turn, to motivate the writing of the younger man's memories of the relationship; the production of the initial narrative is in- conceivable without the prior existence of the second.

While it may seem that this circular relationship exists prima- rily on the story level of the novel, it is difficult to separate story and discourse when it comes to this issue. The peculiar discursive features

WRITING TIME IN s~!~EK.I's KOKORO 13

of the first narrative, its ordering (particularly its prolepses) and its selection of what to tell, are keyed to the existence of Sensei's testament and its later revelation. The initial narrator nowhere says that he plans to append Sensei's testament to his own, but it is difficult to think of any other reason for the many discursive choices he makes. Why the dance of veils, if not to withhold a fuller view until the proper moment? Why conclude the initial narrative with the reception of the letter in September 1912 if not to set the stage for the letter itself? This argument that the initial narrator fully intends for his own narrative to be completed by Sensei's is strengthened by the editorial stance revealed in the titles of the three parts of the novel. The titles of the first two sections are written in the first person from the initial narrator's point of view-"Sensei and I," "My Parents and In-while the title to the final part is in the third person-"Sensei and His Testa- ment." Can we not conclude from this that the narrator of the first two parts also serves in an editorial capacity, appending Sensei's letter to his own narrative and furnishing a title? Why does the title of the third part contain the form of address that only the initial narrator uses for the older man? It is also worth noting that each chapter in the second half of the novel is set off at its beginning and end with kagi kakko, Japanese punctuation marks that are the equivalent of our quotation marks. The implication is that Sensei's testament is, in effect, a long quotation appended to the initial narrative.

One way to further emphasize the convergence of story and discourse in the circularity of narration in this text is to return to the issue of dramatized writing, which we briefly examined in relation to the opening of the novel. The acts of writing and of reading repre- sented in the text are, of course, key elements in the depiction of the narrating situation. As we have seen, the initial narrator opens his account by calling attention to the choices involved in putting words down upon the page. His account closes with a vivid description of an act of reading that will change his life.

A short review of the portion of the novel concerned with the youth's first encounter with Sensei's letter will illustrate the weight assigned to the act of reading in the novel. The letter reaches the youth's hands through his brother, who brings it into the room where he sits caring for his dying father. Sensei's missive is much heavier than a regular letter. So large that it will not fit into a normal enve- lope, it has been wrapped with a piece of paper carefully glued together. When he takes it into his hands, the youth realizes that the letter has been sent by registered mail and that it is from Sensei. De- spite his eagerness to look at the letter's contents, he cannot open it

right then and there. He must wait until his father relapses into a coma and he is able to leave the room briefly:

I left the sickroom, where at any moment there might be a change in my father's condition and tried to read the letter. But I could not calm myself at all. I could not help feeling that my brother would shout for me as soon as I was seated at the desk. And my hands trembled from the fear that the next time I was called it would be my father's death. I turned the pages of Sensei's letter uncomprehendingly. My eyes registered the characters precisely framed between the lines. But I did not have the means to read them. I could not even be sure I had the capacity to skim. I flipped through the pages one by one until I reached the last page, and then I started to fold the letter as before and place it upon the desk. Suddenly, at that moment, my eyes caught a line near the end:

"By the time this letter reaches your hands, I will no longer be of this world. I will have died long ago."

I was stunned. My chest, which had been filled with movement until a moment ago, felt as though it had suddenly frozen. I began to flip through the pages again, this time backwards. I went through the letter in reverse, reading on average about a line on each page. I tried to learn what I needed to learn as quickly as possible. I tried to pierce with my eyes the characters that flickered before me. All I wanted to know, at that moment, was Sensei's present state. Sensei's past, the past that he had once promised to disclose, was utterly useless to me. As I flipped backward through the pages, I restlessly refolded this letter, which would not yield to me the knowledge I needed. (147-48)

Unable to gain the knowledge he craves, the youth rushes out of the house and jumps on a train that will take him to Tokyo and Sensei. It is amid the roar of the train, taking him away from his dying father, his family, and his home, that the young man finally reads the letter from Sensei.

All of this strength of detail turns reading into a major event in the story, bound up with the narrator's climactic decision. Yet there is a major discursive thrust to this dramatization of reading, for it es- tablishes the original conditions of reception for Sensei's narrative. In many important ways, the discourse is inseparable from the story.

With Sensei's letter, there continues to be an emphasis upon the narrating situation. Sensei explains in great detail the circumstances, the motives, and the logistics of his writing. He is writing, he says, in order to fulfil1 his promise to reveal his past and in place of


meeting the younger man face to face to relate his story. Although his act of writing is initially motivated by a sense of obligation, Sensei also makes it clear that he feels a fascination with the writing process itself: "I was very close to abandoning my duty to you. But when I sought to stop and put down my brush, it was useless. Within an hour, I would want to start writing again" (152). Sensei is possessed with the desire to write his past, to make sure that it is passed on to at least one person. He shows his awareness of the seriousness of his undertaking and at one point even provides a lyrical portrait of himself engrossed in the act of writing:

The sound of the streetcars, which become audible once the world goes to sleep, has already ceased. Outside the shut- ters, there is the sad, faint cry of crickets, which gently re- minds one of the coming autumn dew. My wife, who knows nothing, sleeps innocently in the next room. When I take my pen in hand, I can hear the point against the paper on every character, every stroke. More than anything, I feel calm as I face the page. Because I am not accustomed to writing, my pen may run in unwarranted directions, but this is not a sign, I believe, of a disordered mind making a pen meander across a page. (157)

Although Sensei's insistence on the meditative nature of his writing is belied by the increasingly anguished tone of the later parts of his letter, his evocation of the physical act of writing confirms his awareness that he is engaged in a relationship with words and pen and paper as much as with his young friend.

It is near the end of his testament that Sensei again devotes extended comment to the act of writing:''

Over ten days have passed since I made the decision to die. Please understand that I have used most of this time to write and leave for you this long, autobiographical piece. I had initially intended to meet and speak with you, but now that I have written this out I feel that I have been able to picture myself more clearly this way, and this makes me glad. I have not written this letter on a whim. There is no one else who can relate that portion of the human experience which is the past that gave birth to me. My efforts to accurately write down my past will not be useless, I feel, to you and others who seek to know humanity. I have heard it said that the artist, Watanabe Kazan, delayed his death for a week in order to paint the picture called Kantan. In the eyes of some, this might seem a superfluous gesture, but each of us must meet the demands of our own hearts, and so perhaps it wasjust meant to be. My efforts, too, are notjust a way to

fulfil1 my promise to you; they are motivated mostly by my own inner demands.

But, now I have met those demands. There is nothing left for me to do. I will no longer be of this world by the time this letter reaches your hands. I will have died long ago. (287-88)

Sensei repeats more emphatically than before his assertion that he writes out of personal need. This time, however, this assertion is linked to the issue of death. Writing is here portrayed as an act of closure- something that one does on the verge of death. The inner desire to write the past is powerful enough to prolong Sensei's life, but his writing is predicated on the knowledge that he will end his life when he is finished. Writing, then, is an act bathed in finality, the final bit of living left to do. In a sense Sensei is a Scheherazade in reverse. Instead of narrating in order to live, he tells his story in order to die.Is

If Sensei's writing is tied to death, however, it also embraces continuity. It is not merely that the writing hand cannot record its own death or that narration encapsulates in the amber of presentness the moment of its own telling. Sensei's writing actively seeks to outlive its writer's extinction. It participates in the circularity of narration in Kokoro by gesturing insistently toward a younger man who will go on living (and eventually begin writing). As can be seen in the passage above, Sensei's revelations and explanations are repeatedly addressed to a specific "you." In point of fact, this is the one way in which Sensei's testament resembles more conventional forms of epistolary fiction. I-Iis narrative does not display the usual temporal structure of such writing, where correspondents write at periodic intervals about events or thoughts that have occurred in the recent past, without knowing how everything will end. But it does follow the epistolary pattern in addressing its rhetoric toward a fictive addressee.I4 Because Sensei's testament is much more a narration than a missive, perhaps it is more accurate to refer to the younger man's role in Sensei's narration as that of a narratee. Even a cursory examination of Sensei's narrative must lead to the conclusion that he assumes a great deal of his narratee; his narration is aimed at someone already knowledgeable about his current way of life and deeply committed to learning more, someone whose sympathy is beyond question, someone young who can stand to benefit from the experiences being related.

Perhaps it is too obvious to point out that the delineation of the unique narratee who fulfills these qualifications dictates the discursive and temporal structure of Kokoro. If Sensei's testament had come first or if it had stood alone, much of its current rhetoric would

WRITING TIME IN S ~ S E K J ' S KOKORO 17

have been incomprehensible. The narrative circle of Kokoro requires that the initial narrative establish a narratee for the second, which in turn motivates its narratee to become himself a narrator. Gerald Prince, an astute evaluator of the role of the narratee in literary texts, notes that "without desire on the part of the receiver and without the fulfillment of this desire, there can be no point to narrative."15 Few texts dramatize the arousal and the fulfillment of the narratee's desire the way that Kokoro does.

The object of desire in Kokorois knowledge, specifically knowledge about the past. The vital currency in this work is information, and information is viewed here as a possession to be conveyed from one person to another. It is no accident that Sensei speaks of his experience in the language of property rights:

I and no one else experienced my past, and so there should be no objection if I say that my past is my property. To die without giving it to someone else might be cause for regret. I feel this way, to a certain extent. Yet, if my only choice were to give everything to someone without the means to absorb it, then I would rather bury my experience along with my life. Indeed, if a man like you had not ex- isted, my past would have ended as mine alone and would not have become part of someone else's knowledge, even indirectly. Among tens of millions of Japanese, it is to you alone that I want to tell my past. Because you are sincere. Because you said you sincerely wanted to gain a living les- son from life itself. (153)

To Sensei, his experience is a possession, whose disposal he and he alone must decide. With acute emphasis, he designates his young narratee as the sole person qualified to become his inheritor. It is only the younger man who has the requisite sympathy to possess a knowledge of the past.

In his own narrative, the younger man devotes much of his energies to supporting and dramatizing this characterization of himself. As we have seen, he frequently utilizes Sensei's warnings as false foreshadowings that serve to emphasize his own youthful perceptive- ness. The sheer intensity of a desire that disregards such warnings is proof of the younger man's fitness to assume the mantle of the chosen narratee. Yet, if there is something moving about the younger man's yearning for communication, there is something monstrous as well. The strength of the younger man's affection is matched by his igno- rance of propriety, his blithe willingness to invade Sensei's privacy. Driven by his curiosity, the younger man is ready to go to any lengths

to get what he wants. The proximity of desire and violation in the novel is evident in the passage where the younger man finally extracts a promise from Sensei that the latter will eventually tell him of his past:

"I can live with someone being too dull to explain things succinctly, but I become distressed when he won't state things clearly although he knows precisely what's important." [The speaker is the younger man]

"I am not hiding anything." [The speaker is Sensei] 'You certainly are."

"Aren't you perhaps confusing my thinking o r my opin- ions with my past? I may perhaps be a poor thinker, but I do not go about hiding thoughts that I have formulated with my own mind. There simply is no need. But if what you re- quire is that I totally lay out my past for you, then that is a separate problem."

"No, it's not separate. I place weight on your thinking precisely because it's been given birth by your past. If you divide these two things, then they become worthless to me. I can't be satisfied with a Puppetwithout a soul."

Sensei stared at my face, as though taken aback. His hand, in which he held a cigarette, was trembling slightly.

'You're awfully bold," he said. "I'm simply sincere. I sincerely want to learn from life." "Is that so, even if it means exposing my past?" The word "expose" had a frightening ring to it. I felt as

though the man before me was not the Sensei I habitually respected, but a criminal of some kind. Sensei's face was pale.

"Are you really sincere in what you say?" he said, as if to make sure. "I distrust others as a consequence of my past. To be honest, I distrust you too. But, I don't want to suspect you. You seem too straightforward to suspect. I want to go to my death having trusted at least one person. Can you become that one person? Will you? Are you sincere from the bottom of soul?

My voice trembling, I said: "If my life is sincere, then what I've just said is sincere."

"I understand," Sensei said. "I will tell you. I will tell you everything about my past." (86)

With its emphasis on sincerity and life's lessons and the younger man's status as the singular recipient of Sensei's past, this conversation du- plicates the key terms and concerns of the passage in Sensei's letter where he talks about his ownership of his own past. Either Sensei has this conversation very much in mind as he writes his missive or the younger man has let the diction of Sensei's letter affect his memory.


Whichever is the case, the circular resonances created by the inter- penetration of the two narratives serve to illustrate the ferocity of the young man's desire for knowledge. The demands of "sincerity" recog- nize neither kindness nor dignity.

Sensei's comprehension of the consequences of meeting the younger man's demands is clearly set forth in a passage whose imag- ery is both striking and repulsive:

You pressed me to unfurl my past before you as though it were a picture scroll. Within my heart, I respected you then for the very first time. This was because you showed the will to boldly reach within me and take something that was alive. You sought to split open my heart and drink my warm, flowing blood. I was still alive, at that point, and did not want to die. And so I promised to respond to you another day and put off your demands. I am now prepared to rip open my own heart and bathe your face with my blood. I will be satisfied if, when my heart stops, a new life pulses within your breast. (154)

This frenzied evocation of vivisection and cannibalism underscores the association of narrating and death that we have already noted. But what stands out here is Sensei's characterization of the younger man as aspiring vampire. Kokoro veers close to the world of Totem and Taboo, where sons murder and eat their fathers in order to gain the fathers' power. In this variation, however, an older man, recognizing the unre- lenting curiosity of his protege, kills himself in order to engender "new life," to leave behind a living inheritance in the realm of memory.

The young man's narration provides ample evidence that the desired transmission has been completed. What I wish to emphasize here is that the inheritance dramatized in Kokoro must be approached not only on the level of story, but on the level of discourse, as a problem in intertextuality. Many critics have pointed to the pervasiveness of images of blood, as well as those of light and darkness, throughout the novel. The usual thrust of the argument in such cases is to emphasize the imagistic unity of the work or to point out imagistic progres- sions (images of sunlight predominate in the early passages, but give way to shadows and darkness in later parts of the novel). My point is that such images must be read and apprehended within the context of the narrating situations and the temporal transpositions generated in the novel. If the younger man writes that a "strange shadow would sometimes cross Sensei's brow, as though the dark shadow of a bird were passing across a window," or that seeing this "somewhat slowed the

happy flow of blood in my heart" (18-]g), can we not conclude that he has read and absorbed his mentor's rhetoric of blood and darkness?

Nowhere is the presence of discursive inheritance more evident than when the initial narrator addresses the issue of paternity. As the younger man holds his own father up against Sensei, he proposes a radically reconfigured notion of blood relations:'"

I compared my own father and Sensei within my heart. From the point of view of the larger society, both men were so modest in accomplishment that it hardly mattered whether they were dead or alive. In terms of gaining recog- nition, neither had anything to show. Yet my father, with his taste for the game of go, seemed lacking to me, even as a partner for a bit of recreation. Sensei, whom I never visited just for entertainment, had affected my mind far more than anyone I had approached in search of enjoyment. To say that he affected my mind sounds too cold, and so I should correct myself by saying that he touched my heart. At that time, it seemed to me no exaggeration at all to say that Sensei's strength had become part of my flesh, that his lqe ran in my blood. When I deliberately laid out before my eyes the self-evident fact that my father was indeed my real father, and that Sensei was totally unrelated to me, I felt as surprised as if I had discovered some major truth for the first time. (64, italics mine)

When the narrator says that Sensei's life ran in his blood, he demon- strates that Sensei's words flow through his prose. Just as the inheritance of knowledge about Sensei has penetrated to the core of the younger man's being, Sensei's diction has penetrated to the core of the younger man's narration. Knowledge, after all, is language. The looping, interpenetrating discourse of Kokwo, with writing and reading in the foreground, makes us contemplate how much of meaning is form.

NOTES

1. All of the quotations from Kokoro are taken from Natsume SGseki, S6seki zenshii, vol. 6 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1965). In preparing my translations for this essay, I was reminded that I first encountered Kokmo through Edwin McClellan's now clas- sic translation. This encounter was a defining moment in my decision to study Japanese fiction. I offer my own more prosaic and literal translations here recall- ing the spirit o f Professor McClellan's graduate seminars, where we were taught to read for ourselves.

2. Komori Y6ichi points this out in his challenging and incisive study o f the novel. Komori's narratological reading anticipates my argument regarding the circularity of narrating situations in Kokoro. See his "Kokoro ni okeru hanten suru 'shuki,'"


in Kokoro, ed. Tamai Takayuki and Fujii Hidetada, vol. 10 of Soseki sakuhinron shfisei (Tokyo: Offisha, 1991).

3. I have adopted Seymour Chatman's terms from Story and Discourse: Nawative Struc- ture in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). Narratology is a field bedeviled by inconsistent terminology, and the concepts that Chatman de- notes by these terms are variously referred to by other critics as "story" and "narrative" (Genette) and "narrated" and "narrating" (Prince). All of these terms are, of course, translations or derivations from French antecedents. For a gallant and welcome effort to bring some order to the situation, see Gerald Prince, A Dictio- nary of Narratology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987).

4. The title of the third section of Kokoro is usually translated as 'Sensei's Testament." While this rendering accurately reflects the contents of the section, it does not precisely represent the title in Japanese, which is "Sensei to isho." The conjunc- tion to unlike the possessive no does not establish a hierarchy. In the original title, the testament is not subordinate to its writer, but coexistent.

5. In narratological terms, Sensei's letter constitutes what Genette would call a "mixed analepsis." It is both "external" in reaching backward beyond the beginning of the first narrative, and "internal" in chronologically overlapping that narrative. See GCrard Genette, Nawatiue Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca: Cornell Uni- versity Press, 1980), 48-67.

6. A few other temporal features of the novel are worth mentioning. In the matter of duration, the relationship of story time to narrative time, the two narratives ex- hibit significant differences. Parts 1 and 2, which together cover four years, are marked by a regular alternation of summary and scene. The latter can be quite extended and includes lengthy passages of dialogue. Part 3, by contrast, relies heavily on summary. Here dialogue appears rarely and only in very short snip- pets. This type of narrative is perhaps faithful to its epistolary contexts, but it adds mightily to the claustrophobic feel of the latter half of the novel. Instead of the rhythmic alternations of the first narrative, the second narrative presents us with a relentless forward movement toward its tragic conclusion. Moreover, whereas the first half of the novel is filled with voices other than that of the narrator- most prominently that of Sensei but also that of his wife-the second half of the novel traps the reader in the voice and the point of view of the tortured older protagonist.

It is also worth noting that Sensei's narrative follows a more rigid chronological ordering. With the exception of one section of his testament, where he reaches backward in time to fill in information about K's past, Sensei relates the events in his story in the order in which they occurred. The younger man's narrative is more variably organized, despite the more precise demarcation of its total temporal span. After the first seven chapters of his narrative, which relate the early stages of his relationship with Sensei in a generally chronological order, the

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younger narrator adopts a form of organization more dependent upon association than upon chronological progression. For example, the major incidents in chapters 8-10-the conversation where Sensei says that he and Okusan are child- less because of "divine retribution," the evening that the narrator overhears Sensei arguingwith his wife, and the brief snippet of conversation where Sensei says that his wife is the only woman he has known-cannot be located in any clear way. There is no indication that these events occurred in the order in which they are narrated; their placements in time are respectively marked as follows: 'once when I was served some sake at Sensei's house" (24), "one day when I was about to announce myself at Sensei's door as usual," (26) and "once, Sensei even let slip the following observation" (29). The logic of organization here is not chronology, but the connection of all of these incidents to the theme of Sensei's relationship with his wife. Similarly, chapters 12-15 are united by a concern with Sensei's

views on the guilt implicit in love and the impossibility of trust. Although the narrative gradually becomes more chronological again as the narrator begins to discuss his last year in university and the following summer, there are occasional returns to the more thematic pattern.

7. Carol Gluck points out that the funeral of the Meiji emperor was accompanied by a pervasive sense of closure that was felt in every corner of society. See her Japan's ~ ~ & m Myths: Ideology in theLate Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 213-21. Writingjust two years afterward, S6seki deliberately concludes his two narratives at a historical terminus.

8. Masao Miyoshi notes the coinciding deaths of father-figures in Kokoro. See his Accom- plices ofSilence: The Modern Japanese Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). 75.

g. Genette, Narrative Discourse, 216. 10. In some ways, the whole of part 1 can be considered to be one extended prolepsis.

Because the revelation in the future controls selection in the narrative, everything narrated points toward the future.

11. Genette, Narrative Discourse, 27. 12. In this section Sensei relates the process by which he decided to take his life. A

confrontation with language had played a part in his decision, for it was his wife's mention of the word junshi, a term from feudal times denoting following one's lord in death, that had caused certain feelings to coalesce in Sensei's mind:

I had almost totally forgotten about the word junshi. It is not a word one normally needs to use, and so it appeared to have sunk to the bottom of my memory. My wife's joke made me recall this half-moldering word, and I told her that if I were going to commit junshi, I would do so to the spirit of Meiji. My reply, too, was in jest, but at that moment I somehow felt as though I had managed to fill an old, discarded word with new meaning. (286)

It is roughly a month after this encounter with language that Sensei hears of Gen- eral Nogi's junshi, and a few days later he has made his own decision to die.

13. In his challenging reading of the novel, James A. Fujii writes that "Kokoroexplores the relationship between speaking and death, the latter as the precondition for the former. . . . Death engenders the production of Sensei's letter and in turn the student's act of textualization." See his Compticit Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 145.

14. This is something that occurs consistently from the very opening of the testament, where Sensei acknowledges earlier correspondence from his young friend: "This summer, I received two or three letters from you" (150). In keeping with the premise of a communication to a specific intimate, there are passages where Sensei seems to be engaging in a dialogue by anticipating his young friend's questions or objections. "You will no doubt find this strange," he says, apropos of explaining why he still fell in love with Oj6san even after he had been made suspicious of human nature by his uncle's treachery (178). Moreover, Sensei's efforts to explain the differences in social behavior and expectations between the time of his youth and the present of the narration, a phenomenon observed in examining the temporal structure of the novel, stems from the fact that his addressee is a much younger man.

15. Gerald Prince, Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (Berlin: Mouton, 1982). 159.

16. On the construction of 'blood relations' in Kokoro, see Komori's cogent argument in "Kokoro ni okeru hanten sum shuki," 321-28.

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Ito Writing Time in Soseki's Kokoro