Go Back to Old Japan
In Soseki’s plotless, haiku-style earlier novel Kusamakura (1906), the narrator is an artist who sojourns in a near-empty hot springs village in the mountains of rural Kumamoto Prefecture. He is intent on being “nonemotional” and to live in search and in adoration of beauty. He meets a woman, named Beauty (Nami), who stuns him in spellbinding encounters. He maintains his stance of artistic distance, but though he wishes to stay in this aesthetic experience, as if he were a poet in a previous period, the outside world makes its way in.
At the end of the novel, the author and Nami say goodbye to her cousin who boards a train. The cousin’s ultimate destination is Manchuria in mainland China where he will be a soldier in the bloody Russo-Japanese War.
Turn against Materialism
The train is Soseki’s symbol of the industrialization and war machine that he felt was against the old aesthetic and moral values. Kusamakura is translated as “grass pillow” and is shorthand for the journey of self-discovery, especially tied to Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Soseki abandoned making novels like Kusamakura again and turned back to the solitary, isolated, urban consciousness of the day as if conceding that the interior, Japanese space was being confined further by the new values of the late Meiji and early Taisho periods.
For purists, of which Soseki is ultimately one, Japanese literature and traditional culture remained as a bulwark for the “pure” interior space against this rapidly changing external Japan.