In 1915, having just finished writing "The Heart" ("Kokoro") and about to begin "Grass on the Wayside" ("Michigusa"), two of his finest works, Soseki Natsume put together "Inside My Glass Doors" ("Garasudo no Uchi"), a collection of biographical fragments.
These were zuihitsu (loosely translated as "the wanderings of the brush"), a genre which describes the writer's perceptions and reflections. In these, as Donald Keene has observed, "one reveals one's character and attitudes not with grand gestures . . . but by a sensitivity to the seemingly trivial events of daily life."
Soseki's "Spring Miscellany" ("Eijitsu Shohin") of 1909 had been just such a collection. It had chronicled the author's thoughts and feelings and his more than occasional miseries. These were considerable since Soseki suffered from stomach ulcers (a complaint that would eventually kill him) and was in discomfort for much of his adult life.
Convalescing after a particular painful attack, he sat on his glassed-in porch, remembered and cogitated. Some of the material in "Spring Miscellany" is elsewhere duplicated (one of the anecdotes is again told at leisure in "Three Cornered World") but most of it consists of memories and thoughts sketched in as they occurred to the house-bound author.
He remembers his sisters going all the way up to Sumida by boat to see the kabuki; he recollects the day the robbers got into his family's house; he recalls his mother, a person with whom he did not get on. He begins this particular zuihitsu with: "I should like to write something here in memory of my mother; she has not, alas, left me much material with which to do so."
He writes about the family cat -- the second one. "The first animal, although originally an alley cat, became in one sense quite famous." It was this beast that inspired Soseki's first success, the jocose and enormously popular "I Am a Cat." And he remembers tender little episodes from his childhood.
Shunted to and fro between his own family and a foster home as a boy, he ended up thinking that his parents were his grandparents. Then late one night the family maid woke him up to say: "The people you think are your grandfather and grandmother are your real father and mother. I heard them say so just now. But don't let anyone know I've told you." He remembers that he was very happy. "It was not because the truth had been revealed to me but because the maid had been nice to me."
There is little in these essays of the "popular" writer, the jocular novelist of the three-volume cat novel, the facetious author of the interminable "Botchan." He is to be found in full, however, in "The 210th Day" ("Nihyaku Toka"), a dialogue between two friends (characters who first appeared in "Botchan") as they toil up Mount Aso. Full of forced humor and lots of easy laughs, it is -- I suppose -- a homage to the light-hearted banter and relentless badinage of the burlesques of the late Tokugawa Period, a genre of which Soseki was fond.
The zuihitsu of "Inside My Glass Doors" (which in his recent partial translation Lawrence Rogers called "From Behind the Study Door") reveal a more pensive man, and a more mature writer preparing to pen his first I-novel (shishosetsu) and using these sketches about himself as practice.
"Up to now I have been writing at random on other people and on myself," Soseki wrote. He felt constrained about the former but "when referring to myself I was able to breathe freely." Though he is aware of the dangers of first-person narrative ("a certain complacency, revealing the worst and pettiest aspects") he will shortly begin "Grass by the Wayside."
The cat is basking in the sun, half asleep, the children who were a while ago noisily playing with their ball have all gone to the movies. Now that tranquillity has returned "to the house and to my heart" he will open the window, "and then I intend to have a nap on the veranda, my cheek resting on my hand."
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