Kusamakura

Preface

Kinnosuke Natsume, better known by his pen-name “Sōseki,” was one of, if not, greatest fiction writers, modern Japan has produced. A man of solid university education unlike many another of the fraternity, he established a school of his own, in point of originality in style, and what is more important, in the angle from which he observed human affairs. More points of difference about him from others were the complete absence in his case of romantic elements and adversities, almost always inseparable from the early life of literary geniuses, and the sudden blazing into fame from obscurity, except as a popular school teacher and then a university professor, with some partiality for the hokku school of poetry.

Sōseki Natsume was born in January, 1867, a third son of an old family in Kikui-cho, Tokyo. His education after a primary school course took a deviation, for some years, into the old-fashioned study of Chinese classics. It was probably then that he laid foundation, perhaps unknown to himself, of the development of his literary talent, that later blossomed out so picturesquely; and he was different, also, in this respect from the later Meiji era writers, who went, many of them, through a Christian mission school, and were all under the influence of Western literature.

In 1884, our future novelist entered the Yobimon College, intending to become an architect; but later changing his mind he took a course in the Literature Department of Tokyo Imperial University, from which he graduated in 1892. While in the university, Sōseki formed a close friendship with Shiki Masaoka, which lasted until the latter’s death separated them in 1904. Shiki Masaoka was the greatest figure in the revival of hokku poetry in rejuvenated Japan, and Sōseki’s association with him accounts for the novelist’s mastery of that branch of literature.

After finishing his postgraduate course in the university in 1895, Kinnosuke Natsume taught successively in Matsuyama Middle School in Iyo, and the Fifth High School in Kumamoto, making no name particularly for himself except as a bright, promising scholar. He took a wife unto himself in 1896, and was four years later sent by the Government to England to study English literature. In three years he returned home to be appointed Lecturer in Tokyo Imperial University. About this time his “London Letters” in Shiki Masaoka’s Hokku magazine, the Hototogisu, began to attract attention; but it was not till the publication of the first book of maiden work I Am a Cat, that he suddenly entered the temple of fame. That was in 1905.

The Cat with its perfect novelty of conception, style, study of human nature, etc., made him, at once, a star of first magnitude in the literary firmament, and from that time on, for the next five years, his productions, long and short, followed in a constant stream, including Botchan (Innocent in Life); Kusamakura (Unhuman Tour); Sanshiro; Kofu (The Miner); Hinageshi (The Corn-Poppy) and many others, some, perhaps many, of which are assured an immortal life.

Soon after his debut as a fiction writer with meteoric brilliance, Sōseki resigned his post at Tokyo Imperial University and also First High School, and accepted a position in the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun (newspaper) Office as its literary editor. Five years later he was seized with ulceration of the stomach, from which he never really recovered, and he died in December, 1916.

If Sōseki’s rise to fame was meteoric, his retention of it was also meteoric, it lasting only five years, before he bowed to an illness that sent him to the grave in another five years.

All of Sōseki’s writings have a ring distinctly his own and are pervaded by a vein of thought, which is the happiest combination of humour born of poetical acumen and well meaning cynicism of the human heart. Especially is this true of Kusamakura or “The Pillow of Grass,” which is a poetical way in Japanese of speaking of a journey or tour, and is rendered into “Unhuman Tour” in the present translation, from its contents rather than its literal meaning.

In Kusamakura, Sōseki is at his best in giving free play to his artistic fancies and contempt for conventional worldliness, to visualise a refined Bohemianism, if there be such a thing, by summoning all his literary skill. How his dissertations on his own dreamy fancies, occurring frequently in the story, will take with the Western readers is problematical; but they most fascinatingly appeal to the Japanese mind, which always takes the highest delight in things that are presented with philoso-poetical humour. Kusamakura was the most successful of Sōseki’s work, second only to I Am a Cat.

It should be added that the present translator is not conceited enough to think that his English version, which nearly covers the whole original text of Kusamakura, is doing anything like justice to the master strokes of its creator. He considers himself well repaid for his labor, if he succeeds in giving an idea of the trend of thought and atmosphere which Sōseki loved to produce and for which he is so ardently liked by his countrymen.

It is to be added that no attempt has been made at versification in translating poems of all kind, but to barely transliterate the original.

I

Climbing the mountain, I was caught up into a train of thought.

Work with your brains, and you are liable to be harsh. Punt in the stream of sentiment, and you may be carried away. Pride stiffens you to discomfort. Heigh-ho, this is a disagreeable world to live in. When the disagreeableness deepens, you wish to move to a world where life is less uneasy. It is precisely when you awake to the truth, that move where you will, it will be hard to live, that poetry is born and art creates.

This human world of ours is the making neither of God nor of the Devil; but of common mortals; your neighbors on your right; your neighbors on your left, and your neighbors across the street. Hate you may this world of common mortals, but where else can you go? If anywhere else, it must be an unhuman world, but you will find an unhuman world a worse place to live in than this of humanity. Things being disagreeable in the world you cannot depart from it, but you must resign yourself to making the best of disagreeableness, by rubbing off its sharp corners and relaxing its pinches, to what degree you may, to pass pleasantly, even for a brief while, this life of so short a span. Here arises the heaven-ordained mission of the poet and the painter, and blessed are they, who with their art, make life in this world more rich and more cheerful.

Picture your hard-to-live-in-world, turned into one of bliss and thankfulness, with all its disagreeableness taken away, and you have poetry, a painting, or music, or sculpture. Nor need you produce it actually; when you fancy you see it before your eyes, poetry springs into life and songs arise. You hear the ringing of a silver bell within you, even though you have not written a line of your verse on paper, and your mind’s eye drinks of the beauties of the rainbow without paint on the canvas. You attain your end as soon as you soar to the height of taking this view of the human life you live in and see the soiled and turbid latter-day world purified and beautified in your soul’s camera obscura. Thus a poet may not have a single uttered verse and a painter not a solitary sweep of the brush; but they are happier than a social lion; than the most fondled child; nay, than a great prince, in that they can have their own cleansed view of life; in that they can rise above lust and passions, and live in a world of etherial purity; in that they can build up a universe where differences all disappear, and can break away free from the bondage of greed and selfishness.

Twenty years of life taught me that this is a world worth living in; at twenty-five I saw that light and darkness are but the face and back of a thing, there being a shadow where the sun shines. My thoughts, today, at thirty, are these: When full of joys sorrows are as deep, and the more pain the greater pleasure. Cut sorrows asunder from joys and I won’t be able to get along. Shall I fling them away? that will make an end of the world. Money is precious; but anxiety will eat you up, even in sleep, when it accumulates. Love is sweet; but you will yearn after the days when you knew it not, so soon as its very sweetness begins to weigh heavy on you. The shoulders of His Majesty’s Ministers are supporting the feet of millions and the whole country is weighing heavily on their backs. You miss nice things when you part with them without tasting; but you want more of them when you take only a little of them, while you get sick if you overload yourself. …

Here my train of thought broke, as I found myself sitting involuntarily on a good-sized boulder, my left foot having, in its effort to avert a peril, caused by a slip of my right foot, landed me in that posture. Fortunately I was none the worse for the accident, except that my color-box jerked itself forward from under my arm, which was not much.

As I rose from my forced rest, I saw at a distance, to my right, a peak of mountain, the very shape of a bucket with its bottom up, covered from foot to summit by thick dark greens, studded with blossoming cherries in a dreamy relief, behind a screen of haze. A little nearer there rose a bare mountain, rising shoulders above the others, with its flank cut straight down as by a giant’s axe. The foot of its craggy side sank into a dark abyss. A figure of man wrapped in a red blanket was coming down from the height and I thought my climb would have to take me up there. The road was very exasperating. If clay only, it would not have required such very great labor to negotiate, but there were boulders, which refused to be smoothed. Clay may be broken, but not rocks and there they lay determined not to give way. If unyielding on their part, then they must be passed by going round or else by surmounting them. The place was not easy to go up even without rocks; but to make it worse, it made a sharp angle in the centre, the sides of which rose sharply, so that it was more like walking the bed of a river than going up a road. However, not being in a particular hurry, I took time and slowly came up to the “Seven Bends.”

As I trudged upward, my ears suddenly caught a lark, his song coming up, as it were, from just below my feet. The carol was giddily busy and incessant, but my eyes saw nothing. That bird never stops and must, it appears, sing out the whole Spring day and every second of it till night. I looked down the valley left and right into the air, and up into the sky, but all in vain, as the unseen singer was heard to rise higher and higher. I thought the lark must have died in the clouds and his song only was floating in space. The road made a sharp turn here by an angular rock. A blind man might have plunged head first down the crag. But I managed to turn safely. Down in the valley the golden blossoms of the rape were in full bloom.

But the lark! It was Spring—Spring, when the whole creation feels blasé to drowsiness; cheerful to ecstasy. The cat forgets to pounce on the mice. Men become oblivious of being in debt; so oblivious, indeed, that they even fail to locate their own souls. But they come back to themselves, when they see a distant field waving with a golden sea of flowers, such as I was looking down upon in the valley. And they may locate their souls when they hear the lark. The lark does not sing with his throat; but it is his whole soul that sings. Of all creatures, of which you hear their soul’s activity in their songs, none is as lively as the lark. It was, indeed, joy itself, and as I thus thought, I became joyful, and thus, was Poetry.

Yes, poetry! Soon I was trying to repeat Shelley’s song of the lark; but I could recite only these lines:

“We look before and after
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of
saddest thought.”

I once more lost myself in a reverie of thought. Happy as the poet may be, he may not go heart and soul into singing of his joys, forgetting everything, like the lark. The Chinese poets, to say nothing of their brothers of the West, sing of “immeasurable bushels of sorrow.” It may be, with common mortals, that their sorrows are measured only by the pint not by the bushel. Who can say nay, then, if the poet soars to the height of joys unreachable by his vulgar brothers, he has also unfathomable griefs? It is perhaps, well, that one thinks twice before one decides to become a poet.

My eyes captivated by the golden rape on the left, a coppice hill on the right and the road under foot running on a smooth level, I stepped now and again on humble dandelions, crushing them, as I thought, under my heels; but on looking back regretfully, I found the lowly beauty nestling, none the worse, in their double-toothed leaves. Easy is the life of some of God’s creations.

I continued my climb, returning again to my thoughts of reverie.

Sorrow may be inseparable from the poet. But once in an humour, in which you forget yourself, listening to a lark or gazing at a bed of golden rape, all gloom and pain disappear. Going along a mountain path so entranced, dandelions make your heart leap with joy. So do the blossoming cherries—the cherries had now gone out of sight, by the way. Up in the mountain, in the bosom of nature, everything that greets you fills your heart with joy, with not a shadow of misery. If any misery, it would be no more than that of feeling tired in your feet and of not having good things to eat.

But how can this be? Nature unrolls herself before you as a piece of poetry, as a scroll of a picture. Since poetry and a picture, no thought occurs to you of getting possession of this home of nature, nor a desire to make a scoup of money by making it accessible by building a railway. Nothing darkens this scenery, to rob it of its charms, which help neither to fill your belly, nor add something to your salary, as long as it gladdens your heart merely as scenery, so long shall you feel no pain, no weight on you. So great is the power of nature that it intoxicates you, transports you, in an instant, to the world of poetry.

Love may be beautiful, and so also filial devotion, and noble and edifying may be loyalty and patriotism. But it will be different when you are yourself a figure on the stage, a cyclone of conflicting interests making you too dizzy to appreciate the beautiful or the noble, but to become entirely lost to the poetry of the thing.

You have to make an onlooker of yourself with room for a sense to understand, in order that you may see the poetry. Placed in that position, you will enjoy dramas, and novels will interest you; because you have got your personal interests packed and put away on the rack. You are a poet the while you enjoy reading or seeing.

Even at that, common dramas and novels are not free from humanities of afflictions, anger, quarrels, and weeping, that carry you into corresponding moods. The only saving feature may be that no sense of gain and selfishness is acting on your part; but this absence of personal interest will make your heartstrings the more tense and active in other respects, and that is what I hate to bear.

I have come through my thirty years enough, indeed more than enough, of wallowing in the mud of troubles, of fuming in anger; of being in rows; or of sinking in sorrows; all which are indivorcible from human life. I want poetry that lifts me above the dust and noise of the world. I know, of course, there can be no drama, however great a masterpiece, that is absolutely transcendental of human sentiment, or scarcely a novel that can rise completely above all sense of right and wrong, this being especially the case with Western poetry of which the stock paraphernalia are Sympathy, Love, Justice, Freedom, and so forth, the staple goods in the bazaar of human life. It is no wonder that the lark made Shelly heave a deep sigh. To my joy, poets of the Orient can, some of them, soar above this earthly atmosphere. Let Tao Yuan-ming of ancient China recite his lines:

“Chrysanthemum I pick from the Eastern hedge,
On the Southern hill leisurely I cast my eyes.”

Not that there is a charming one on the other side of the hedge, nor a dear friend on the hill; but the two lines take you with Tao into a sphere beyond the reach of the worries and cares of the world. Or listen to Wang Wei of the same land:

“Softly I harp and sing alone,
In the quietude of wooded bamboo;
Not a soul into deep solitude, but the
Telltale moon comes, and speaks its heart.”

A world looms up from the four verses, the charm of which is not that of popular novels, but a good you feel from a sound and all-forgetting sleep you have had, after being thoroughly tired of steamers, railways, rights and duties, morals and formalities. Sleep? Yes, and if sleep be necessary even in the Twentieth century, equally indispensable to the Twentieth century is this super-earthly poetical sentiment. Unfortunately poetry makers and poetry readers are nowadays all enamoured of the Westerners, and none seem to care to take a boat and float to the land of the immortals. I am not a poet by profession, and am interested in no way whatever in spreading propaganda for the kind of life led by Wang Wei and Tao Yuan-ming, in the present world. Only to me it appears that such inspired feelings as are sung by the Chinese poets are more powerful in remedying the ills and evils of the day than theatricals and dancing parties. They are, at all events far more agreeable to me than Faust or Hamlet. I come into the mountain with a colour-box and a tripod for my sole companions, all because I yearn to drink direct from nature of the poetical wine of Tao Yuan-ming and Wang Wei; to be away from the world-smelling and world-sounding world, nay, to breathe and live in an unhuman atmosphere, even for a brief while. It is a weakness of mine if you like to call it so.

I am at any rate, a living block of humanity, and however fond I may be of unhumanity, my love of it cannot go so very far. I do not suppose that even Tao Yuan-ming had his eye on the Southern hill, year in and year out; nor is it imaginable that Wang Wei slept in his bamboo jungle without a mosquito net. In all likelihood Tao sold his chrysanthemums to a florist after keeping what he wanted, and Wang his bamboo sprouts to a greengrocer. I myself am not unhuman enough to live under the blue sky in the mountain, just because the lark and golden rape captivate my fancy. Such as the place is, human beings are not a rarity—men with their heads wrapped in a towel and their kimono tucked up at the back; country lasses in red skirts and so on, and sometimes also even long faced horses. Breathing the mountain air, hundreds of feet above the sea level, surrounded by a million cypresses, I could not still be rid of human smell. Nay, I was crossing the mountain to reach the hot spring hotel of Nakoi as my destination for the night.

However, things assume shapes or colour as you will, according to the way you look at them. In the words of Leonardo Da Vinci to a pupil of his “the bell is one; but listen, and its sound may be heard in all sorts of ways.” Opinions may differ in a man or a woman, all depending upon how you look at him or her. I had come out in my present tour to indulge in unhumanity and people would appear different from what they did when I was living round the corner in the crowded Mud-and-Dust Lane, if I looked at them now, I thought, bearing in mind my unhumanity idea. Impossible as entirely getting away from humanity may be, I should be able to bring myself up or down to suit the frame of mind, in which one finds oneself at a Noh1 play. The Noh has its humanity or sentimental side. Who can be sure not to be moved to tears by the Shichikiochi or by the Sumidagawa? But the Noh performance is seven-tenth art and three-tenth sentiment. The attractions of Noh do not come from the lifelike presentation of things human in this mundane world; because the lifelike in it appears only from under many, many layers of art, which give it an air of extreme tranquility and halcyon serenity, never to be met in the world of reality.

How would it do to interpret all the events and people I came across in the present tour as part of performances on the Noh stage? I could not cast aside humanity altogether. To be poetical at the bottom of my whole venture, I should like to let unhumanity carry me into a Noh atmosphere, by doing away with humanity as much as possible. Different in nature from the “Southern hill” or the “bamboo grove,” nor identifiable with the lark or blossoming rapes, I still would see people from a point of view as near those objects as possible. The man Basho2 saw something poetical and made a hokku3 even of a horse stalling near his head! I would deal with everybody I was going to meet—farmers, tradesmen, the village office clerk, old men, old women—seeing in them only objects, complementing a picture. However unlike figures on the canvas, they would move as they please. It would be grossly common, however, to enquire, as does an ordinary novelist, into the cause of each of them going his own way, to dig into their mental state, or to try to solve the tangle of their human affairs. I shall not care, move as they will. They won’t trouble me, as I shall regard them as characters in a picture in motion. Painted figures cannot get out of the plane of the picture, no matter how they may move. Troubles would arise of conflicting views and clash of interests, the moment you think, the characters might jump out of the plane and act cubically. The more troublesome the matter grew, the more impossible it would become to look at it aesthetically. Wherever I might go and whomever I might meet, I should look at them as from a transcendental height, so that human-magnetism might not easily pass between us, and I shall, then, be not easily affected, however animatedly they might act. In short I am to assume the position of one standing before a picture, and looking at the figures in it, running hither and thither on its plane. With three feet between, you can calmly look on, without any sense of danger. In other words, you run no risk of anybody snatching away your weapon and you may give yourself up altogether to studying their doings from an artistic point of view. With undivided attention you may see and judge the objects before you as beautiful or as not beautiful.

By the time I had come to this decision, the sky began to assume a doubtful aspect. A bank of clouds of indistinct foreboding had no sooner mounted overhead than it went tumbling and overspreading until the whole space seemed to turn into a hanging expanse of dark sea. From the sea soft Spring rain began to fall. I had long since gone past the golden rape blossoms and was now toiling along between two mountains; but the threads of rain being so fine as to appear as mist, I could not tell how distant they were. Now and again, as the gusts of wind blew asunder the high drapery of cloud, a grey ridge of mountain showed itself to the right as clearly as within reach of a hand: probably the range ran on the other side of the valley. The left side seemed to be the foot of another mountain. Back of the semitransparent screen of rain, trees—they might be pines—appeared and then disappeared, with an endless frequency. Was it the rain that was moving? Or was it the trees in motion? Could it be that I was dreaming a floating dream? I trudged on, feeling strange.

The road became wider than I had imagined, and quite level also. Walking was no longer a task; but being not prepared for rain, I had to hurry.

About the time the rainwater began to fall in drops from my hat, I heard a jingle, jingle of a bell some yards away, and there appeared a packhorse driver leading an animal behind him.

“Hello, any place to stop around here, man?”

“A mile more or so, you will come upon a tea stall. Getting pretty wet, eh?”

A mile more! The figure of the rustic dissolved into rain like a magic lantern view, as I looked back.

The misty rain had now become thick and long until each drop could be seen distinctly like a pencil flying in the wind. It had long since soaked through my outer garment, and then penetrated to the skin. The heat of my body made lukewarm the water in my underwear and the feeling produced was by no means the most pleasant. I pulled my hat to one side and quickened my pace.

The drenching figure of myself, running through a grey expanse of space, with innumerable silver shafts beating at it slantingly will make poetry, an ode, when I look at it as not my own. I make a beautiful harmony with a natural scenery, as a figure in a picture, when I forget my material self completely and take a purely objective view of myself. Only, I cease to be a figure in poetry, or in a picture, the moment I feel vexed with the falling rain and take to heart the tiredness of the stamp, stamp of my feet. I then find myself only an indifferent individual of the street, blind to the changing humour of the flying clouds; untouched by the falling flowers, and the carols of birds; nay, a perfect stranger to the beauty of my own self going alone and quietly through a mountain in Spring. I walked first with my hat pulled to one side; but later I kept my eyes pivoted on the back of my feet. Finally I went gingerly, shrugging my shoulders. The rain shook the tree tops all round, and closed in from all sides upon a lonely traveller. I felt I was having rather too strong a dose of unhumanity.