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Natsume Sōseki (author), Matt Treyvaud (translator), Ten Nights Dreaming and The Cat’s Grave, Dover Publications, 2015. 96 pgs.
It was the twilight of the Meiji era (1868–1912) when Natsume Sōseki wrote the fantastical vignettes in Ten Nights Dreaming and, a year later, the nonfiction story The Cat’s Grave. The line between the two genres is blurred at best, however, and I thus found the decision to combine both works into a single publication for the 2015 English translation by Matt Treyvaud to be quite inspired.
As a historian of 20th century East Asia, I read Ten Nights Dreaming and The Cat’s Grave with the context of late Meiji and early Taisho-era Japan in my mind’s eye. In 1908, when Ten Nights Dreaming was serialised for the Asahi Shinbun newspaper in Tokyo, Japanese society was in the midst of overwhelming cultural and political transformation. After the 1868 Meiji Restoration, Japan had modernised rapidly to keep up with Western nations and overthrow the “unequal treaties” that had been unceremoniously ushered in after Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s “black ships” introduced gunboat diplomacy to the Tokugawa shogunate in 1853. The West had taken notice of Japan’s transformation—not only had Japanese military might succeeded in humiliating its much bigger neighbour China in 1895, but it had also brought the Russian imperial army to its knees in 1905—the first time in modern history an Asian power had bested a European one (at least according to Western accounts).
At the end of the Russo-Japanese War, the Treaty of Portsmouth was so disappointing to many Japanese that Tokyo civilians from all walks of life instigated the infamous Hibiya Riots, which ushered in an era of greater political involvement and the era of Taisho democracy (1905–1932). The Taisho era was also characterised by rampant consumerism and globalisation that made many Japanese, including Sōseki, fearful for the loss of what was seen as pristine, unchanging Japanese tradition (even if this was arguably a modern construct of the Meiji era). The palpable angst that Sōseki manifests in both Ten Nights Dreaming and in his later works such as Kokoro is directly related to this sense of loss that he experienced as rapid modernisation perpetuated an uneasy sense of instability and unrelenting change in Japanese society.
Sōseki’s Ten Nights Dreaming exhibits a series of dualities that coexist in tension with each other—tradition and modernity, subjectivity and objectivity, fantasy and reality, dreaming and wakefulness, and even life and death. In “The First Night”, we can already see the blurring of the lines between both life and death and fantasy and reality—the woman in question dies, but the narrator lives for a hundred years and buries her with a “fallen fragment of a star” to mark her grave so that she will then come to him again. Subsequent stories veer between the autobiographical and the fantastical.
Although the Showa era’s ero-guro-nansensu (“erotic grotesque nonsense”) movement was still several decades away, I couldn’t help but be struck by certain similarities in Sōseki’s writings to this later cultural trend. I view ero-guro-nansensu, which exaggerated both erotic and violent content, as a purported antidote to the anxieties underlying rapid modernisation. In a world of increasing capitalist consumerism, depicting increasingly graphic content could be viewed as a method of escaping the confines of commodification by attempting to exceed its limits, both in Japan and elsewhere.
For this reason, “The Second Night” was one of the most intriguing dreams for me to read. Here, the narrator is a samurai in a Zen Buddhist temple who arrogantly believes that he can achieve satori (enlightenment) in a mere hour through intense focus. The samurai’s impatience assumes aspects of both the erotic and the grotesque through the obviously sexual metaphor of his nine and a half-inch tanto sword. I was honestly a little scandalised to read vivid descriptions of the samurai’s “sudden urge to drive it deep” paired with his meditation on the 13th century Zen Buddhist koan “Joshu said mu,” but upon further thought I believe that Soseki’s juxtaposition of the religious with the profane was intentional. The samurai is impatient to achieve satori, but this is decidedly mixed up with both his sexual urges and his violent wish to murder the temple’s osho (head priest) after he achieves satori. In this way, it seemed to me that Soseki portrayed his angst regarding modernisation’s potential corruption of the traditional and the sacred by not only distorting, but even arguably disregarding it entirely.
“The Third Night” was also disturbing, albeit not as graphic as the second—the narrator carries a blind child on his back who has surprising knowledge of the surrounding landscape despite being unable to actually see it. The narrator grows more and more frustrated with the boy as they continue to walk through green rice paddies into the forest, and ultimately determines to “dump him” as soon as possible. Ultimately, it is revealed to the narrator through the child’s revelations that he committed a murder 100 years earlier. Although the translator alludes to a potential connection between this dream and Soseki’s own infelicitous childhood, this would have been a difficult conclusion for me to reach without further biographical knowledge. The same is true for “The Ninth Night”, in which a mother takes her young son to a Shinto shrine dedicated to Hachiman, the god of the warriors, as she prays for her samurai husband’s safe return. What she does not realise, however, is that “he was long since dead, slain by a masterless samurai”. For me, both “The Third Night” and “The Ninth Night” have conflicting and ultimately unfulfilled desires and regrets connected to violence—the third as perpetrator and the ninth as victim.
Tensions between tradition and modernity, past and present continue in “The Fourth Night” through “The Sixth Night” with characters such as the old man whose “face positively shone with vitality, without even a wrinkle” and the enemy chieftain from “long, long ago, perhaps almost reaching back to the Age of the Gods”. I continued to be impressed with the blurred lines between reality and fantasy in “The Fourth Night”, particularly with the line “the old man’s breath went through the shoji, passed under the willow, and continued straight on towards the riverbed”. The old man’s breath seems to have a life of its own here, but the narration relates this fact as if it is not out of the ordinary at all. I have also observed this trend with other Japanese authors such as Haruki Murakami in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore.
In addition, certain parallels can be drawn with magical realism in Latin American fiction, however different the historical background might be. In particular, what came to my mind when reading about the old man’s breath was the poignant description in Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude that traces the seemingly purposeful path of José Arcadio’s blood across town:
A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued in a straight line across the uneven terraces…turned a corner to the right and another to the left…went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs…
It is plausible that both Márquez, writing in mid-20th century Colombia, and Sōseki, writing at the end of the Meiji era, address the blurred lines between the fantastical, the real, and the dreamlike in order to confront their own anxieties as their societies experienced rapid and often violent sociopolitical vicissitudes.
In “The Six Night”, the 13th-century Japanese sculptor Unkei is somehow still alive to work on the sculpture of the Benevolent Kings at Goku-ji, which was not built until the 17th century. This vignette particularly struck me with its tone of nostalgic longing for the past that reaches its climax at the conclusion. The narrator for the sixth night observes Unkei’s impressive skill with the chisel at “digging out” human features from the wood and determines to carve his own Benevolent Kings. Yet no matter how many times he tries to unearth them, he is unable to succeed because the past has already disappeared for him:
I chose the largest piece [of wood] and began to carve vigorously, but unfortunately, I did not find the Benevolent Kings inside. Nor, sadly, did I find them in the next piece I chose. Nor the third. One by one, I carved up every piece of firewood in the pile, but the Benevolent Kings were nowhere to be found. Finally I realised that the Benevolent Kings simply were not buried in Meiji trees. With this I more or less understood why Unkei was still alive.
After this haunting conclusion, Sōseki moves on to “The Seventh Night”, which is equally eerie and to me, out of all the stories, most directly conveyed his anxiety about Japan’s modernisation. Certainly, Sōseki was not the only Japanese intellectual to wrestle with the implications of modernisation for Japanese society—Fukuzawa Yukichi had famously argued in Outline of a Theory of Civilisation that although modernization might appear to be equivalent to Westernisation, this would not always be the case. In “The Seventh Night”, the narrator is one of only a few Japanese on board a boat full of Westerners. It is unclear what the destination of the ship is, as “the only certainties were the black smoke the ship belched and the way it cut through the waves”. As a historian, it was impossible for me to read the description of the ship belching black smoke without thinking of Commodore Perry’s “black ships” and how jarring the sight of steamships forcing their way into Edo Harbour must have been in 1868. The narrator feels lonely and bored to the point of throwing himself overboard. However, he immediately regrets it. To me, this is Sōseki coming to terms with the end of the Meiji era by convincing himself that it is better to stay on the current course, uncertain though it may be, than to abandon all hope:
Meanwhile, the ship had moved on, belching the same black smoke as always. I understood for the first time that I would have been better off on board, even if I did not know where it was headed, but I could make no use of that knowledge now and felt infinite fear and regret as I quietly fell toward the black waves.
“The Eighth Night” was the most meta in its intense self-awareness and reflection, and also the most enigmatic for me. The narrator enters a barbershop where there are two walls and six mirrors. After he is seated before a mirror, he sees not only his reflection, but also a window reflected in the mirror, along with the reflections of the people in the street below. Several characters from the other dreams make appearances in the “Eight Night”, including Shotaro and a tofu peddler (which I believe refers to the old man in “The Fourth Night”). Interestingly, the narrator assumes familiarity with Shotaro and his panama hat although we as the readers do not meet him until “The Tenth Night” —here, Sōseki seems to be playing with our conceptions not just of space, but also of chronology and time itself.
Circling back to Latin American literature again, I couldn’t help but draw connections between the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’s style and that of Sōseki in dreams such as “The Eighth Night”. In short stories such as “The Circular Ruins” and “The Zahir”, Borges similarly plays with tensions between dreams and reality. For example, whereas in “The Circular Ruins”, the narrator literally dreams a man into existence, organ by organ, in “The Zahir”, a man becomes increasingly obsessed with a lost coin to the point of losing track of reality. As the narrator asks at the end of that story, “When all the men on earth think, day and night, of the Zahir, which will be a dream and which a reality—the earth or the Zahir?”
At the end of Sōseki’s Ten Nights Dreaming,“The Tenth Night” left me very uneasy.Similar to “The Second Night”, the erotic and the grotesque also appear in full force in this disturbing dreamscape, which as the translator notes is never actually admitted to be a dream. The subject, Shotaro, is “impeccably honest and upright to boot” with only one vice—that in the evenings, he would “gaze at the faces of the women passing by”. The largest fruit basket that he buys for a particularly beautiful woman who passes by has potential sexual undertones as well. The sexual violence comes later in the story, when the woman leads Shotaro to the edge of a cliff in the mountains and warns him that “if you don’t jump…you will be licked by a pig”. Shotaro refuses to jump and is subsequently accosted by a whole herd of pigs, which would “mysteriously…roll over the edge of the cliff as soon as the stick touched their snouts”. After six nights and seven days of this, Shotaro collapses at the cliff’s edge and is ultimately licked by a pig. The moral of the story, according to the narrator’s acquaintance Ken, is that “too much girl-watching can be bad for you”. The phallic symbolism of Shotaro’s “betel wood walking stick” is evident, as are the violent undertones of his sexual desire and its relation to the deviant and the modern, which is represented by Shotaro’s panama hat.
As I mentioned at the beginning of my musings, I think it was an inspired decision by the translator to pair Ten Nights Dreaming with the short nonfiction story The Cat’s Grave following immediately afterwards. While the story about Sōseki’s family cat is purportedly nonfiction, the prose is similar to that of Ten Nights Dreaming in that, simply, the cat is slowly dying and appears to be losing touch with reality in his old age, becoming increasingly unaware of his surroundings as the children simultaneously become increasingly unaware of him:
His gaze was always fixed on the garden, but I doubt he saw the leaves on the bushes, or the shapes in which they grew. That was where his greenish-yellow eyes happened to be resting. Just as the children no longer recognised his existence, he did not seem to clearly register the existence of the world around him either.
This brings to mind Mexican poet and author Pablo Neruda’s poem “Cat’s Dream”. The major difference, though, is that in Neruda’s poem, the cat clearly had a satisfying sleep, “with all the fur of time” and “with a passionate desire to hunt the rats in [its] dreams”. In The Cat’s Grave, in contrast, we do not know whether the cat dreams or not, only that there is an increasingly unclear line between both unconsciousness and consciousness and life and death. While the cat does not die until the end of the story, he can hardly be said to be truly living, either. Arguably, the cat is more alive in death than he was at the end of his life—as Sōseki notes, after the cat’s corpse is buried, both Sōseki’s wife, whose “previous indifference was replaced by industrious concern,” and the children “suddenly found a new fondness for the cat”.
In a way, then, The Cat’s Grave provided a more satisfying ending for me to the collection than “The Tenth Night”. Like “The First Night”, The Cat’s Grave deals with the tension between life and death, dreams and reality. As the woman in “The First Night” comes to the narrator as a pure white lily after a hundred years, Sōseki’s children also place flowers on the cat’s grave daily, albeit clover flowers. Both of these vignettes involve the possibility of life after death—if not resurrection, then at least a sense of continuity. As Sōseki observed the Meiji era’s slow death while writing these short pieces, it is likely that he, too, felt that although a new era was dawning, what had come before could continue to linger in what followed after.
How to cite: Matson, Emily. “Reading Natsume Sōseki as a Historian of Twentieth-Century East Asia.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 21 Jun. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/06/21/natsume-soseki.
Emily Matson is an Assistant Teaching Professor of modern Chinese history at Georgetown University in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Asian Studies Program and the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of History. Her PhD and MA are in History from the University of Virginia, and her BA is in East Asian Studies from the College of William and Mary, where she graduated summa cum laude and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. Dr. Matson’s research interests include Manchuria, museums, historical memory, and World War II, and she is currently working on the manuscript of her first book, which explores the official change to China’s World War II timeline in 2017.
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