Soseki's Kokoro - Some Thoughts
Thank you, Soseki Natsume-sensei for reminding me of what it's like to get lost in a really well-written book--and it feels like it's been a very long time. Kokoro, written in 1914, is a collection of three connected novellas, detailing the lives of a university student and a melancholy older man he assumes as a mentor. The translator's (Edwin McClellan) preface tells us that the dominant theme is loneliness, and I guess I wouldn't disagree. All three stories read as very real, very human, and fascinating depictions of the interplay between traditional Japanese culture and emerging western values in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Kokoro is a lesson in why I like Mirage of Blaze. I'm tending toward a broad, literary argument here, but let me begin with a concrete example. In the first novella of Kokoro, our young student strikes up a friendship a withdrawn man, perhaps 15 or 20 years older, whom he refers to throughout the book as Sensei. Sensei is clearly a good person but also cynical, secretive, restrained, and sad. He lives not lavishly but comfortably with a wife he is ostensibly happily married to, yet he seems incapable of deriving more than fleeting moments of enjoyment from life.
Early on, I find it absurdly easy to read Sensei as Naoe. Think about it. He appears almost exactly as Naoe would if set upon by a benign young man he rather likes and who is intent on befriending him. God knows Naoe needs a friend who is not entangled in the Naoetora ship or enmeshed in the politics of the Yami-Sengoku: someone fresh and innocent, who hasn't already formed hundreds of years of assumptions. At the same time, Naoe could hardly invite such a lad into his parlor and say, "Now look, the reason I seem so secretive and reserved and also often bruised and in the hospital is that there are these vengeful spirits, see, and also there's this guy...." No indeed: he would invite the lad in, and they'd sit down to dinner with his equally clueless wife, and he'd inexplicably reserved and melancholy and prone to dashing off across the country at a moment's notice for no plausible reason.
Now, Sensei doesn't spring from a fantasy story. He inhabits a psychological-realist narrative of the old school (oriented around mundane, everyday life). Thus, his problems do not concern vengeful spirits and four hundred years of thwarted love. They concern (no heavy spoilers) a failed friendship and bad relations with his family.
But it's the same thing.
This is why a story like Mirage or Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Please Save My Earth works. Most of us don't fight vengeful spirits or slay vampires or have dreams telling we're reincarnations of psychologically troubled aliens. Yet we relate to characters who do these things because we feel about our daily lives the way they feel about their vampire slayage. Having a failed friendship is four hundred years of thwarted love. Having bad relations with your family is waking up one day to find you're alien among humans. Fantasy is just a metaphor to help us talk about it.
But why don't we just literally talk about it? We do, of course. In the third novella of Kokoro, Sensei pens many pages doing just that. Yet brilliant as it is, that third novella loses me a little. That friendship just doesn't seem as meaningful as four hundred years of thwarted love. Those nasty relations don't sound especially traumatic. That's the problem, and perhaps the truest reason that Sensei (or any of us) is so reluctant to explain his sorrows. When we talk about the hurdles we lunge over every day, we run the risk of sounding whiny, weak, mundane. We will almost certainly be misunderstood. If I started complaining about how I have to get out of bed at 6:15 five days a week and drag myself to my 8-5 job, where I spend all day doing work while all my personal projects and interests and relationships languish from being squished into my weary evening hours and those weekend moments when I'm not too fatigued to move about, you would likely say, "So what? Everybody else does it, except those who aren't lucky enough to have a job, so what are you whining about?" Yet this is my vampire slaying (well, part it). This is the mountain up which I spend most of my time rolling Sisyphus's stone. Thing is, yes, everybody else does it too. We're all vampire slayers; that's why shows like Buffy are popular. They give us a means--perhaps our only means--for articulating the enormity of burdens we all carry in terms that will win more respect than scorn. They are one of our only escapes from the loneliness of inarticulable troubles.
Tori Amos writes of the little earthquakes that it "doesn't take much to rip us into pieces." This is true, from a certain point of view. But in fact, the earthquakes aren't really little. They just look little from the perspective of everyday life's everyday expectations. The epic fantasy acknowledges the earthquake's power, and we'd be as sorely bereft without it as without Soseki's nuanced realism.
Kokoro is a lesson in why I like Mirage of Blaze. I'm tending toward a broad, literary argument here, but let me begin with a concrete example. In the first novella of Kokoro, our young student strikes up a friendship a withdrawn man, perhaps 15 or 20 years older, whom he refers to throughout the book as Sensei. Sensei is clearly a good person but also cynical, secretive, restrained, and sad. He lives not lavishly but comfortably with a wife he is ostensibly happily married to, yet he seems incapable of deriving more than fleeting moments of enjoyment from life.
Early on, I find it absurdly easy to read Sensei as Naoe. Think about it. He appears almost exactly as Naoe would if set upon by a benign young man he rather likes and who is intent on befriending him. God knows Naoe needs a friend who is not entangled in the Naoetora ship or enmeshed in the politics of the Yami-Sengoku: someone fresh and innocent, who hasn't already formed hundreds of years of assumptions. At the same time, Naoe could hardly invite such a lad into his parlor and say, "Now look, the reason I seem so secretive and reserved and also often bruised and in the hospital is that there are these vengeful spirits, see, and also there's this guy...." No indeed: he would invite the lad in, and they'd sit down to dinner with his equally clueless wife, and he'd inexplicably reserved and melancholy and prone to dashing off across the country at a moment's notice for no plausible reason.
Now, Sensei doesn't spring from a fantasy story. He inhabits a psychological-realist narrative of the old school (oriented around mundane, everyday life). Thus, his problems do not concern vengeful spirits and four hundred years of thwarted love. They concern (no heavy spoilers) a failed friendship and bad relations with his family.
But it's the same thing.
This is why a story like Mirage or Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Please Save My Earth works. Most of us don't fight vengeful spirits or slay vampires or have dreams telling we're reincarnations of psychologically troubled aliens. Yet we relate to characters who do these things because we feel about our daily lives the way they feel about their vampire slayage. Having a failed friendship is four hundred years of thwarted love. Having bad relations with your family is waking up one day to find you're alien among humans. Fantasy is just a metaphor to help us talk about it.
But why don't we just literally talk about it? We do, of course. In the third novella of Kokoro, Sensei pens many pages doing just that. Yet brilliant as it is, that third novella loses me a little. That friendship just doesn't seem as meaningful as four hundred years of thwarted love. Those nasty relations don't sound especially traumatic. That's the problem, and perhaps the truest reason that Sensei (or any of us) is so reluctant to explain his sorrows. When we talk about the hurdles we lunge over every day, we run the risk of sounding whiny, weak, mundane. We will almost certainly be misunderstood. If I started complaining about how I have to get out of bed at 6:15 five days a week and drag myself to my 8-5 job, where I spend all day doing work while all my personal projects and interests and relationships languish from being squished into my weary evening hours and those weekend moments when I'm not too fatigued to move about, you would likely say, "So what? Everybody else does it, except those who aren't lucky enough to have a job, so what are you whining about?" Yet this is my vampire slaying (well, part it). This is the mountain up which I spend most of my time rolling Sisyphus's stone. Thing is, yes, everybody else does it too. We're all vampire slayers; that's why shows like Buffy are popular. They give us a means--perhaps our only means--for articulating the enormity of burdens we all carry in terms that will win more respect than scorn. They are one of our only escapes from the loneliness of inarticulable troubles.
Tori Amos writes of the little earthquakes that it "doesn't take much to rip us into pieces." This is true, from a certain point of view. But in fact, the earthquakes aren't really little. They just look little from the perspective of everyday life's everyday expectations. The epic fantasy acknowledges the earthquake's power, and we'd be as sorely bereft without it as without Soseki's nuanced realism.