To the Spring Equinox and Beyond (45 page)

Certainly Keitaro is far more active in the beginning of the novel. The later stories find him in the role of listener, drawing out the narratives from the other characters. If the reader, however, sees Keitaro merely as a narrative device for the more dramatic story of his friend Sunaga, this would limit Keitaro's appeal, which he certainly has, for he is affected by the contradictory aspirations of life, not merely those in the realm of love. Death, family relationships, existential choice, multiple motives of human conduct and aspiration, and suicide, all these are whirling around him, and not to be affected by them would make him not even worthy of being a point-of-view-strategy.

While Keitaro is struggling to find a position in the world, Sunaga, like his uncle Matsumoto, refuses to look for work. Sunaga has also graduated recently but, able to live comfortably enough in the economic security inherited from his father, makes no effort in the direction of the utilitarian life in spite of the offers that have come his way. Unlike his other uncle, Taguchi, Sunaga refuses to take part in any kind of mundane world, even that of the practical joker.

Sunaga, we discover, is a sharp thinker whose mental activity knows no rest as he is sometimes driven even to the brink of madness. It is not an exaggeration to say that all of Sunaga's energy is directed toward finding those home-truths that elude one in the world of modernity: who am I? what am I to become? how is one to live facing the ambiguities of self-identity, faith, and love? The journey Sunaga takes at the end of the novel is his own search in attempting to answer these questions. For Keitaro, these pursuits are equally important, for he is the tuned-in listener to whom all these probings are eventually directed, first by Chiyoko, then by Sunaga, and finally by Matsumoto.

To be active in the world as Sunaga's uncle Taguchi is and as the romantic in Keitaro himself wishes to be is one choice open to all young men; on the other hand, there is the possibility of being a dilettante like Matsumoto, whose philosophy has highly motivated and equally disturbed the young Sunaga. Both Sunaga and Matsumoto refuse to be bound by work. They are allowed to be "high-class idlers"—the way of life Soseki himself desired, especially after the Shuzenji crisis. Sunaga, we might say, is the Soseki of his younger years, Matsumoto the mature Soseki. Sunaga attempts a thorough analysis of himself and his problems in order to reach self-realization. The attempt, however, leads to an impasse, and this is the Soseki who often fell into nervous disorder verging on breakdown. Extremely important to the West has been this sort of analytical approach to the world, yet Soseki as an Oriental was unable to absorb the analytical approach so seemingly valuable to the West as a source of salvation. It is Matsumoto, the mature Soseki, who realizes the contradictions inherent in this approach to life and who tries to turn his nephew from the introvert's eternal problem of self-identification through logic to the outward observation of things as they are without thinking about them.

The positive note on which
Equinox
ends despite the remaining complexities of Sunaga's relationship with the beautiful and individualistic Chiyoko seems to point to Soseki's faith in those humane values so often connected to his life and work.

K
INGO
O
CHIAI
Tokyo, Japan
S
ANFORD
G
OLDSTEIN
West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S.A.

Footnote

*
 That Soseki was not meant to follow the usual paths was perhaps foreshadowed by his stay for a few weeks at a Zen temple in Kamakura in 1894, a stay that he imposed on himself by a crisis in his literary, social, and personal life. He had been suffering from a great deal of restlessness, having changed his living quarters three times during half a year and having "wandered about" in three different places away from Tokyo, all the while quite distressed about what may be taken as the fundamental problems of life and being. On the one hand he was expected, and imposed the duty on himself, to be useful and to distinguish himself in the scholarly world; on the other, he had a strong distaste for worldly ways to success, which his inherent and highly sensitive moral sense would not allow him to yield to. In addition, he was suffering from other internal contradictions—between the imperative demand of doing what he should in his own way and the awareness of lacking the boldness to forge ahead without caring either for praise or censure from the world around him. This state of mind led him to extreme pessimism and misanthropy and to those morbid symptoms of insanity in his later years—he was even thought to have gone "mad" in London. We see such a tendency in such heroes as Ichiro in
The Wayfarer
(1914), Kenzo in
Grass on the Wayside
(1915), and, to some extent, Sunaga in
Equinox.
Soseki's trip to the Zen temple was an attempt to rescue himself from his agonizing restlessness. This experience is represented in
The Gate
(1910). It was probably his own resolution to abandon everything and cut off all relationships that made him choose to go to Matsuyama.

Glossary

bushukan:
an irregularly shaped orange with finger-like extensions (hence the name
bushukan,
lit., Buddha's hand citrus)

fire fighter's standard: the banner of a company of firemen held up by their leader until the fire is extinguished

geta:
wooden clogs

go:
a game for two players using a board and small round white and black checker-like pieces

hakama:
a pleated skirt worn over the lower half of a kimono

haori:
a loose, knee-length coat

janome:
(lit., serpent's eye) an umbrella made with a thin, lacquered bamboo frame and a dark-colored oil paper with a region of light color which looks like a bull's-eye

kana:
the Japanese syllabaries as opposed to the Chinese characters

Kannon: in Buddhism, the bodhisattva of mercy

lower town: a literal translation of the word
shitamachi,
an appellation referring to Tokyo's low-lying areas, the home of the artisan and merchant

Meiji: the era lasting from 1868 to 1912; "the forties of Meiji" would thus be about the 1910s

miso:
fermented soybean paste; used most commonly in making soup

Namu Amida Butsu: a prayer to Buddha meaning something like "Hail, merciful Buddha"

negake:
a piece of jewelry for adorning a woman's top-knot

roman:
a shortened form of "romance," "romantic," or "romanticism"

sabi:
a term used of poetry, art, etc., often translated as "elegant simplicity"

sanjin:
the pronunciation derived from Chinese of the characters usually pronounced
yama-no-kami,
literally "mountain god," but meaning a nagging wife

shimada:
a bouffant hairstyle, worn by unmarried women

shoji:
a sliding wood-framed door paneled with white paper; in a boardinghouse of the type Keitaro lived in, smaller
shoji
served as the window to a room, glass windows not being standard at the time

sushi:
rice seasoned with vinegar, usually flavored with a kind of horseradish, and most often topped with a slice of raw fish or rolled with various ingredients in dried laver

tabi:
a sock-like covering for the foot, having a separate section for the big toe

talami:
thick rectangular rice-straw mats of set dimensions (about 1 x 2 m.) covered with woven rush, placed into and serving as the floor in most rooms of a Japanese house

tomobiki:
(lit., friend-pull) one of six days used in divination based on ancient Chinese philosophy; as a day for a funeral it is thought to be inauspicious because a relative of the dead person might be pulled into death as well

yukata:
an unlined cotton kimono for summer wear or night-wear