Psychic Toll
In his letter, Sensei confesses that he had betrayed a close friend during college. The friend had looked to Sensei as his only bond of trust after his family abandoned him. But Sensei as a young man broke that trust to claim a shared love as his wife. This psychological break caused the friend’s suicide condemning Sensei’s life to guilt.
The friend represented the values of the old world: work, religion, and discipline. Sensei’s breach of trust is symbolic of Sensei, Soseki, and Meiji Japan attempting to live in two worlds, but ultimately denying the old. But, like Sensei, denying the old, yields to an end of psychic wholeness, paralysis, and death.
Different Goal in Mind
Sensei’s lesson seems to be that individuation and the new way of thinking about man’s place in the world and his personal happiness was a delusion. Sensei’s death is pronounced as the absence of the kind of reconciliation with nature and the traditions of society praised in Japanese aesthetics.
However, when viewed through the eyes of the old culture of Japan, Sensei’s suicide may not be viewed as a failure. Upon the death of Emperor Meiji, General Nogi committed suicide to atone for a battlefield error during the Satsuma Rebellion. Soon after this event in the novel’s timeline, Sensei writes in his letter that he also wished to die with his lord.
On face value his death in this manner is not comprehensible to the narrator and most readers. But that simply confirms the schism between periods and cultures. The character wanted to follow his lord in death and not be an anachronism, and like General Nogi, he sought public ritual purification for his sin in the old way.
Unchecked Material Growth
Soseki locates a flaw in the assertion that Japan could use foreign technology to safeguard its Japanese character, a creed promulgated by Fukuzawa Yukichi and others. Soseki’s goal in England was to find a key to the Western mind through literature. If Japan knew how Europeans and Americans thought, then they could replicate that to their own benefit.
But the Western modernist novel had individuation, or becoming who you think you truly are, as the goal. When divorced from spirituality or human relations, this merely becomes ego edification and self-congratulation. Ultimately, this quest to assemble things and power to build up the ego and its supposed superiority to others was the driving force for Europeans and Americans.
However, a traditional Japanese culture based on spiritual traditions would say the erosion and dissolution of the ego is the goal of literature. This is in contradiction to the European or American goal. Could Japan simply separate that out though? For example, let the goal of literature be individuation, let technologies be geared towards domination and material accumulation, but use it all for purposes of self-preservation of a non-materialist culture?