Tsuda’s sister and her husband, Hori, the eccentric scion of a once wealthy merchant family, are also factors in the interpersonal equation in which obligation and deference determine the power to impinge. Hori has interceded with Tsuda’s father on Tsuda’s behalf, persuading him to lend his son money, and is being held responsible for Tsuda’s failure to keep his end of the bargain. O-Hide feels compromised by this burden on her husband and transfers responsibility to Tsuda, who feels constrained to save face with his brother-in-law.
Tsuda’s friend Kobayashi is connected to the others in two ways: he works as an editor on Uncle Fujii’s coterie magazine and considers him his mentor, and he knows about Tsuda’s love affair with Kiyoko. Even so, he is an outsider, indeed an outcast, and it is precisely his otherness that enables him to unhinge Tsuda and O-Nobu. A failed writer on his way to self-imposed exile in the Japanese colony of Korea, Kobayashi is brined in self-pity and takes his bitterness out on Tsuda. He is a rebarbative figure, and the reader grows impatient with his tirades. But Sōseki has written him with passion and invested him with conviction and fluency that make him hard to dismiss; moreover, the substance of his attacks on Tsuda’s self-indulgent life of “latitude” have the ring of truth. Kobayashi may be the only moralist in the novel. Even as he torments O-Nobu with his knowledge of Kiyoko, he tells her, “It may surprise you to know that I consider myself a perfectly ingenuous person, a natural man. Compared with you, Mrs. T, I believe I’m guileless” (86:192), and we are tempted to believe him. It seems likely that Sōseki intended him to function as a beacon of integrity in the murkiness of dissimulation and self-interest.
It is no accident, for example, that, among Tsuda’s critics, only Kobayashi succeeds in puncturing his complacency. At their farewell dinner, he insists that Tsuda read a letter from someone he does not know. A cry for help from its author, suffering in the isolating darkness of his despair, the letter enables Tsuda to see something about himself to which he has been blind and creates the possibility of a step forward, but for only an instant:
Something had startled him. Until now he had been wont to assume that the world was what he beheld in front of him, but just now he had been obliged abruptly to turn and look behind. He had halted in that attitude, his gaze fixed upon an existence opposite to himself. As he stared at that ghostly presence he was encountering for the first time ever, he cried out to himself Ah, this is a person, too!…
Here he stopped and circled. But he didn’t advance a single step. He went no further than understanding the meaning of the repellant letter in a manner that befitted him. (165:364)
It is in their self-conscious interactions with Kobayashi and the others that Sōseki discovers and illuminates his protagonists’ innermost feelings: relationship becomes the key to unlocking characterization in depth. Here, for example, is Tsuda, “a man who prided himself on his unfaltering perspicacity where his own interests were concerned,” revealing the cynicism he is at pains to conceal as he calculates the dynamics of the extended family:
The truth was, he didn’t care for O-Nobu to the extent people assumed he did….
Tsuda had a particular reason for allowing this misunderstanding to obtain. Kobayashi had disinterred the reason. It was in the soil of this misunderstanding that the Okamotos’ good intentions toward him grew, and it was in his interest to preserve those feelings as best he could. Treating O-Nobu solicitously, in other words, was the same as currying favor with the Okamotos, and inasmuch as Okamoto and Yoshikawa were as close as brothers, it stood to reason that the better care he took of O-Nobu, the more assured his future became. (133–134:293)
In long, successive scenes we observe O-Nobu dueling with Kobayashi, with her husband, and with her sister-in-law, O-Hide. Tsuda engages in his own fraught dialogues with O-Hide, Kobayashi, and the manipulative Madam Yoshikawa. These strategic engagements now and then explode into moments of intense emotion — jealousy, rancor, recrimination — that will surprise English readers conditioned to expect indirectness and delicacy, not to mention reticence, of Japanese social behavior.
IN SEARCH OF an overarching theme, Japanese and Western critics have leaped at the doctor’s diagnosis in the opening installment: that curing Tsuda’s condition will require “a more fundamental treatment.” This has been read to mean that the crises he encounters in the course of the novel will affect him in the nature of a cure, healing in some basic way his social, emotional, and moral infirmity. Yet the text offers no corroboration of such a reading. Tsuda suffers, often the result of wounds to his vanity, but, as with many another narcissist, his pain afflicts him but generally fails to move him toward a deepened understanding of himself. By the time they reach the end of the novel, readers are likely to feel certain that Tsuda’s focus on himself has destined him to remain, as it were, in the dark.
If there is a central theme in Light and Dark, it is precisely the impossibility of recovery from the suffering in isolation caused, in Sōseki’s view, by attachment to the self. This was by no means a new idea. Daisuke, the hero of his novel And Then (1909), has stepped aside selflessly to allow his best friend to marry a girl he himself covets, but when the couple returns to Tokyo in financial straits he declares his love for Michiyo and wrests her from her husband. The novel ends with Daisuke confronting madness as he contemplates the social implications of his actions. The married couple in The Gate (1910) has transgressed in a similar way and lives a lonely life in the shadow of an overhanging cliff, seeking refuge in each other from the ostracism they have brought upon themselves. The hero, roughly Tsuda’s age, tries meditation at a Zen temple but finds that the gates of enlightenment are closed to him and returns in resignation to his tedious, haunted life. The sensei in Kokoro (1914), Sōseki’s best-known novel in the West, torments himself with responsibility for driving his friend “K” to suicide by stealing the woman he loves before “K” can find the courage to propose to her. He warns the student narrator that nothing he tells him will allow him to change the way he leads his own life, and the novel demonstrates that he is right: the student remains trapped in his own selfishness. The sensei’s wife asks poignantly, “Can two hearts ever beat as one?” and the answer the novel implicitly provides is a resounding no. On the evidence of his work, Sōseki surveyed the world around him and concluded that his fellow man could not improve. Nor was he tempted by the possibility of redemption as an article of Christian faith that led to the pardons, marriages, and babies that end many a Victorian novel happily.
Like the hero in The Gate, Tsuda is in quest of self-knowledge as an alleviation of the uneasiness he carries inside himself. And the novel lofts the possibility that the mystery woman Kiyoko may hold the key to what he seeks. But the prelude to the actual meeting with Kiyoko suggests that enlightenment for Tsuda was not Sōseki’s intention. His journey to the spa where Kiyoko is staying deep in the mountains is long and fraught with obstacles, the most overtly symbolic of which is the dark boulder lying athwart the road in front of his carriage. His experience on arrival at the inn augurs badly: the building is dark, mostly underground, and labyrinthine. Shortly after arriving, he loses his way back to his room in the endless corridors, and his encounter with himself in a mirror just before Kiyoko’s first appearance at the head of the stairs above him is not encouraging: