210th Day. Natsume Soseki

       Introduction

      Sōseki Natsume (1867-1916) is a Japanese icon. A native of the great shogunal capital of Edo, Sōseki was one year old when the Meiji Restoration established Japan as a modern nation and the city of his birth was renamed Tokyo. His lifetime almost perfectly overlaps the course of Japan's extraordinary modernization in the Meiji era (1868-1912). By the time of Sōseki's death in 1916, Japan had become an Asian empire. Not quite seventy years later, Sōseki's face would adorn the national currency, in the form of the 1000-yen banknote.

      Sōseki Natsume was one of a handful of writer-intellectuals whose lives and work came to epitomize the age in which they lived—an age that resonates powerfully among Japanese and those with an interest in Japan. Like many of his contemporaries, Sōseki lived at a crossroads where his East Asian cultural heritage and taste for "traditional" arts and styles intersected with a passion for modern intellectual inquiry and knowledge of the West. Initially schooled in the Chinese classics, Sōseki was among the first students at the Imperial University to major in English. He went on to specialize in English literature and spent two years in England at the turn of the century, immersed in literary study

      Sōseki Natsume's mastery of English literature and modern literary theory was unsurpassed when he returned to Japan and assumed a prestigious academic position at the Imperial University There was every reason to believe that the young scholar would find a comfortable niche at the university However, the stultifying academic routine proved irksome, and his own literary creations were beginning to earn him a widespread reputation.

      The budding author, who had experienced serious melancholia and depression during his stay overseas, was a man of peevish, dyspeptic temperament—a quality reflected both in his fiction and his assorted personal writings. Indeed, Sōseki's assorted neuroses have long been a fixture of modern Japanese literary lore and the subject of endless biographical study and speculation over the years.

      Gradually souring on academic life, Sōseki took the unprecedented step of accepting a position with the Asahi shinbun, a leading newspaper, as staff writer. By this time, he had already published two remarkable novels—Wagahai wa Neko de aru (I am a Cat, 1905), a brilliantly sardonic portrayal of human pecadilloes, as narrated by the family cat; and Botchan (1906), a loosely autobiographical account of the youthful experiences of its memorable protagonist.

      The Asahi position, which Sōseki assumed in 1907, called for the writing of shinbun shôsetsu— so-called "newspaper fiction"—which entailed daily serialization of ones work. For a decade, this work would be part of the regular reading diet of the nation's readers, and in due course he emerged as Japan's "novelist-laureate". His mature works— most notably Kokoro (1914) and Michikusa (Grass on the Wayside, 1915)—are undisputed masterpieces of modern Japanese fiction.

      Sōseki Natsume's greatest achievement is perhaps his brilliant psychological portrayal. Acutely sensitive to the spiritual and psychic toll of modern urban existence, Sōseki created a narrative means of evoking the loneliness, alienation and confusion of his protagonists. These are ordinary people leading ordinary lives, yet painfully aware of the barriers of ego and selfishness that enclosed them. Underlying the novels also is the author's enduring concern for the ethical and moral tenor of modern life.

      Taken together, the Sōseki novels—serialized at the rate of approximately one per year—possess a Dickensian weight as a collective portrayal of the Meiji era seen through a series of "representative lives".

      In addition to the novels, Sōseki wrote widely in other genres—poetry, literary criticism, personal essays, and assorted shorter fiction. The present work, The 210th Day, belongs to this latter category. This is a relatively minor work, which has long been overshadowed by the novels. As short fiction, it lacks the sustained plot of I am a Cat and the character development of Botchan. Given the enormous promise of what came before, it almost appears to be a retrograde work.