In short, all the knowledge and feeling Keitaro had recently received about life came by way of his eardrum. A series of long tales beginning with Morimoto and ending with Matsumoto had moved him at first widely and superficially and then, by degrees, deeply and subtly until the series of tales ceased abruptly. But, after all, Keitaro himself could not enter their world. And that was the point where he felt something unsatisfactory and at the same time something felicitous. In one sense he cursed the snakehead for his dissatisfaction and in another blessed it for his happiness. And then looking up at the great firmament, he thought of how this drama, which seemed to have come to a sudden halt, would hereafter flow and turn forever.
Translator's Afterword
A great deal has been written about the life of Soseki Natsume (1867–1916), so there is perhaps no need to recount a detailed biography here. It may be sufficient to remind readers that his boyhood was psychologically though not materially painful; that he seriously began to study English at the famous First Higher School in Tokyo; that he majored in English at Tokyo University; that he studied for almost two years in London as a government scholar; that he succeeded Lafcadio Hearn as lecturer at Tokyo University; and that he jolted academic and literary circles in 1907 by resigning from the University and other institutions at which he was employed as a teacher and by accepting an offer from the Asahi Shimbun, the largest daily newspaper in Japan at the time, to begin serializing his novels in its columns. His nine major novels were written for the Asahi.
Not enough has been written in English, however, about Soseki's newspaper career. That a prestigious member of a prestigious university could take the "inferior" role of a newspaper novelist did indeed jolt the intellectuals of the Meiji era, a time when a journalist's status was quite lower than it is today, but the move seems typical of Soseki. Early in his career, in 1895, he had taken an "inferior" position as a high school teacher of English in Matsuyama, a town on the island of Shikoku — a relatively remote part of Japan — removing himself by choice from the active literary and intellectual scene in Tokyo. It would seem that life in Matsuyama would be a total decline for one with Soseki's brilliant academic record and artistic, philosophical, and creative bent. Yet because of his own belief in self-assertion and independence and because of his own insistent questioning of life and its perpetual opposites, what seems startling to us had begun in the early Soseki and persisted until his death. Soseki continues to fascinate us because of the tensions between what a public expects and what the writer's own inner world makes immediate and imperative.*
Soseki's life as a lecturer at Tokyo University and a full-time professor at the First Higher School, he discovered, lessened the time that he could devote to writing, despite the fact that he had been able to create his satiric work I Am a Cat (1905-6) and several stories, in addition to poems and scholarly articles. He revealed in letters that teaching brought him less and less satisfaction. On May 9, 1905, he wrote, "I am a teacher, but it seems more agreeable to my nature to establish myself as a hack writer than to be a successful teacher. So henceforth I intend to make an effort to cut a figure in the literary world." And on September 17, 1905: "My time is wasted every day over visitors. On reflection, I've come to remember that I ought not to be doing this until my death. It is going against nature unreasonably to try to do so many things at once — teaching at three different schools, receiving so many guests and visitors, studying freely for myself, and doing creative work as well. I'm essentially a man of few wants who will be content if I am able to write during my whole life two or three works that will seem satisfactory to myself; if this is possible, I don't care in the least about other things. But to do that I've got to eat beef and eggs, and because of such a requisite, it has come about that I have been forgetting my own nature in that I am following, to my infinite regret, a profession against my will. (This sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?) Anyway, what I want to quit is teaching, and what I desire to do is creative work."
It was not until the spring of 1907 that Soseki actually undertook the move to the Asahi. Overtures had been made by the Yomiuri, another influential Tokyo daily, to take charge of its literary columns, and by the Hochi and Kokumin newspapers. In addition, Tokyo University offered Soseki a professorship in March 1907. His rejection of all these had been immediate, for to enter the new profession meant to be plagued by various political aspects of literary partisanship and rivalry that would not allow him the personal freedom he wanted, and to continue in the other meant extending the burden of teaching. Furthermore, he was of course concerned about the welfare of his family if he were to leave teaching, so he was cautious and would not give his consent to any proposal from the newspapers unless they would guarantee following through on all his conditions, namely, that his remuneration (at a level at least equivalent to what he was receiving from teaching) was guaranteed and that there would be no dismissal without cause by the editors or the owner of the newpaper. Evidently, the Yomiuri, Hochi, and Kokumin were not prepared to fully meet these requirements.
Despite these refusals, the wide and great favor of the novels Soseki had published in rapid succession in 1906 must have made him feel confident of his powers in maintaining his life as a novelist. Thus, when the Asahi approached him in February 1907 with greater earnestness than its competitors had, he was satisfied that his conditions had been met and additionally that his novels would be published whether they were suitable for newspaper readers or not, whether he was fashionable or not. His monthly salary would be two hundred yen (equivalent then to about one hundred dollars; equivalent today to about one million yen, or four thousand dollars), and he would receive various fringe benefits. Apparently Soseki had agreed to write two novels a year, each in perhaps one hundred installments; if the novels were short, they might number three a year.
To the Spring Equinox and Beyond (1912) was the sixth novel Soseki serialized in the Asahi. The five novels which appeared before this were The Poppy (1907), The Miner (1908), and the famous trilogy of Sanshiro (1908), And Then (1909), and The Gate (1910) (published in English under its original Japanese title, Mon). What seems clear is that Soseki in these novels was finding his way, experimenting, changing his emphasis. The first two show more experimentation and less staying power, whereas the latter three before Equinox reveal Soseki's evolutionary maturation as an artist, concentrating as he does on a kind of general though not strictly adhered to time span in which the lives of his main characters focus on the university world, the world outside the university, and the world of middle age. Equinox possibly relates more to Sanshiro than to the other two of the trilogy in that the hero, Keitaro, like Sanshiro himself, is on a journey through life. Nothing much seems to happen to him, yet everything he experiences is part of the maturation process of a young man.