Rendering the minute psychological observation at the heart of Light and Dark required Sōseki to forge a new language. The natural genius of Japanese is a proclivity for ambiguity, vagueness, and even obfuscation; Sōseki needed a scalpel capable of dissecting a feeling, a convoluted moment, and even, as here, a glance:
The glance [O-Nobu] cast in O-Hide’s12 direction at that moment was lightly touched with panic. It wasn’t a look of regret about what had happened or anything of the kind. It was awkwardness that followed hard on the self-satisfaction of having triumphed in yesterday’s battle. It was mild fear about the revenge that might be exacted against her. It was the turmoil of deliberation about how to get through the situation.
Even as she bent her gaze on O-Hide, O-Nobu sensed that she was being read by her antagonist. Too late, the revealing glance had arced suddenly as a bolt of lightning from some high source beyond the reach of her artifice. Lacking the authority to constrain this emergence from an unexpected darkness, she had little choice but to content herself with awaiting its effect. (124:273–74)
“We don’t analyze a glance this way,” a Sōseki specialist at Waseda University assured me, “we direct a glance, aim a glance, and that’s as far as we go!” The sensei was suggesting that the focus of this passage was anomalous; Light and Dark abounds in similar passages, unfamiliar realism expressed in radically unfamiliar ways.
The effect Sōseki achieves, subsuming not only the minute registration of his observation but also the mode of expression he developed to convey what he revealed, is in its way unmistakably Western.13 More particularly, it is informed by an understanding of irony as a device for revealing character that is not to be found elsewhere in Japanese fiction. Certainly Jane Austen was one of his teachers. In Theory of Literature (1903–1905), Sōseki declares Austen “the leading authority in the world of realism. Her ability to score points while putting the most commonplace situations to paper far outstrips any of her male rivals.” He demonstrates with an excerpt from chapter 1 of Pride and Prejudice, in which Mrs. Bennet effuses about the wealthy bachelor about to move into Netherfield Park to her husband, whose affectionate skepticism escapes her entirely. Sōseki comments:
This really is the domain of our daily life, its customs and manners. By spreading this unaffected domestic scene out before our eyes, Austen permits us to take pleasure in the minute detail that lies behind objective appearances…. Austen does not simply portray the innocuous conversation between an ordinary married couple…. Anyone who can read will see that it is a matter of the character of the husband and wife in this passage, which is so vivid that it flies off the page.14
The ironic revelation of character embedded in the “unembellished” details of quotidian life and manners that Sōseki admires in Austen is evident throughout Light and Dark. Even so, the novel’s narrative strategy recalls Austen’s exquisite deftness less distinctly than it does Sōseki’s contemporary Henry James’s tenacious (and somber) exactitude, a quality that Ezra Pound characterized, describing The Odyssey, as “Jamesian precisions.” In his 1907 preface to Portrait of a Lady, James wrote, about Turgenev, that “it began for him always with some person or persons, who hovered before him, soliciting him… interesting him and appealing to him just as they were.”15 The challenge, he continued, speaking now for himself no less than for “that beautiful genius,” was to find for his characters “the right relations, those that would bring them most out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the situations most useful and favorable to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to produce and to feel.”16
Sōseki doubtless began reading Henry James during the two dismal years he spent studying English literature in London. At the time of his death, his library contained Partial Portraits, French Poets and Novelists, Notes on Novelists, and the 1905 Methuen edition of The Golden Bowl heavily annotated in classical Japanese.17 In a fragment entered in a notebook in 1908, he writes, “James is a writer who succeeds at revealing character without resorting to dialogue.”18 On another page he adds, “Henry James devotes more than a thousand words to describing a single instant in Charlotte Stant’s thinking,” and continues, “George Meredith takes an entire chapter to dissect the psychological interior of a character standing at London Bridge in the instant before he throws himself offit.”19 His remarks suggest that Sōseki’s attention was on the revelation of interior consciousness, a microscopic inquiry he achieved in Light and Dark.
There is no basis for asserting that Sōseki was consciously emulating Henry James. But clearly he was resolved to reveal his characters in their however contradictory entirety, and clearly he was less concerned with a story—“plot, nefarious name!” James declared — than with surrounding the protagonists with “satellite characters” likely to draw them to the surface in the manner of an astringent.
The plot of Light and Dark is a paltry matter: its 700 languorous pages proceed in an atmosphere of insistently quotidian, if highly charged, stasis. Tsuda undergoes surgery for what may or may not be hemorrhoids (I shall return to this ambiguity). During the week he spends recovering in bed, he is visited by a procession of intimates: O-Nobu; his younger sister, O-Hide, antipathetic to O-Nobu, whose extravagance she blames for her brother’s financial difficulties; his importunate, self-lacerating friend, Kobayashi, a ne’er-do-well who might have stepped from the pages of a Dostoevsky novel; and his employer’s wife, Madam Yoshikawa, plump, conniving, a meddler with a connection to Tsuda that is unknown to the others. In the longest scene in the novel, Madam manipulates Tsuda into acknowledging that he still thinks about Kiyoko, the woman who left him abruptly for another man shortly before his marriage to O-Nobu. For reasons of her own, which are left unclear,20 the lady reveals to Tsuda that Kiyoko is recuperating from a miscarriage at a hot-springs resort south of Tokyo and urges him to visit her there, volunteering to pay his travel expenses. In the final 100 pages, Tsuda journeys to the spa for an encounter with Kiyoko. Light and Dark terminates with a scene in her room at the inn, during which Tsuda probes unavailingly for some indication that she retains feelings for him.
In place of a compelling plot, Sōseki created an environment, a web of interrelated characters designed to exert maximum social pressure on the two principal objects of his inquiry.21 While Tsuda’s and O-Nobu’s parents reside in Kyoto and do not figure directly in the action, the three Tokyo families with whom the protagonists are involved are well known to one another. Tsuda’s uncle Fujii, his father’s younger brother, raised him “more like a son than a nephew” while Tsuda’s father was posted to western Japan as a civil servant. The Okamoto family, O-Nobu’s aunt and uncle, looked after her in a similar way while she was growing up and sharing a room in their house with her younger niece Tsugiko, developing her sharp tongue at her uncle’s knee. Okamoto and Fujii graduated from the same college and are old acquaintances.
Tsuda’s employer, Yoshikawa, is a crony of Tsuda’s father, who has asked him to keep an eye on his son while he is in Tokyo. Yoshikawa has provided Tsuda with a nondescript job in his unspecified business and, while he treats him no less perfunctorily than he would any subordinate, lets him know that he is watching him and will alert his father to any irregular behavior. Yoshikawa and Okamoto, in London together at the coronation of Edward VII in 1901, are “close as brothers.”