He looked away from the water and encountered abruptly the figure of another person. Startled, he narrowed his gaze and peered. But it was only an image of himself, reflected in a large mirror hanging alongside the sinks….
He was inveterately confident about his looks. He couldn’t remember ever glancing in a mirror and failing to confirm his confidence. He was therefore a little surprised to observe something in this reflection that struck him as less than satisfying. Before he had determined that the image was himself, he was assailed by the feeling that he was looking at his own ghost. (175:387–88)
The meeting he finally arranges with Kiyoko, the last scene Sōseki was able to write before he collapsed, is a masterpiece of indirection and provocative hints that lead nowhere. One senses that Kiyoko’s apparent serenity may be counterfeit, that she is not so indifferent to Tsuda as she seems; one senses as well her contained anger. But Tsuda’s confusion when he ponders the meaning of her smile on the way back to his room is understandable. Choosing not to reveal her, Sōseki has managed to install Kiyoko as a mystery generating tension at the heart of the novel.
Light and Dark is also in the shadow of a second, not unrelated, mystery, or at least ambiguity: the nature of Tsuda’s illness. Ostensibly, he is suffering from hemorrhoids (although the word for “hemorrhoid” never appears). Why, in that case, is he seeing a doctor whose specialty seems to be venereal disease? This fact is revealed implicitly in a scene in the waiting room at the clinic:
The members of this gloomy band shared, almost without exception, a largely identical past. As they sat waiting their turn in this somber waiting room, a fragment of that past that was if anything brilliantly colored cast its shadow abruptly over each of them. Lacking the courage to turn toward the light, they had halted inside the darkness of the shadow and locked themselves in. (17:54)
Waiting his turn, Tsuda recalls unexpected encounters at the doctor’s office with two men within the past year. One is his brother-in-law, Hori, a playboy, who seemed uncharacteristically “nonplussed” to see him. The other is an “acquaintance” with whom he engaged over dinner after leaving the doctor’s office together in a “complex debate about sex and love,” which had subsequently resulted in a rift between them.
These passages, coupled with the fact that the medical details Sōseki provides are inconclusive, lead the reader by indirection to the speculation that the undisclosed “friend” may have been Seki, the acquaintance for whom Kiyoko had left Tsuda. Was Seki infected? Might his illness have been responsible for Kiyoko’s miscarriage? And what of Tsuda himself: Was he immune to the allure of Tokyo’s pleasure quarter? The following exchange with O-Nobu is an invitation to wonder:
“You stopped off somewhere again today?”
It was a question O-Nobu could be counted on to ask if Tsuda failed to return at the expected hour. He was obliged accordingly to offer something in reply. Since it wasn’t necessarily the case that he had been delayed by an errand, there were times when his response was oddly vague. At such times he avoided looking at O-Nobu, who would have put on makeup for him.
“Shall I guess?”
“Go ahead.”
This time, Tsuda had nothing to worry about.
“The Yoshikawas.” (14:48)
Entangling Hori and Seki and Tsuda would be structurally satisfying. But there is no hard evidence, only the absence of definitive detail on the one hand and oblique suggestion on the other. In this way, controlling ambiguity, Sōseki keeps observant readers on the edge of their hermeneutic seats.22
If Tsuda is doomed to continue wandering in the fog of his attachment to Kiyoko, O-Nobu also inhabits a world of illusion, choosing to believe that her superior cleverness will enable her to have her way in life. Her formula for happiness, reiterated with the passion of a credo, sounds simple enough: “It doesn’t matter who he is, you must love the man you’ve chosen for yourself with all your heart and soul, and by loving him you must make him love you every bit as deeply no matter what” (78:177).
In an ironic scene in which she attempts to persuade O-Hide, married to a philanderer, that love must be unconditional, absolute, and exclusive, she exposes her naiveté and, by implication, the sense of entitlement that proceeds from her own egoism. She is of course aware that Tsuda’s love, assuming he loves her at all, is a far cry from what she expects. In the cruelest moment in the novel, tormented by the knowledge that there is, or has been, another woman in her husband’s life, O-Nobu appeals to him to allow her to feel secure:
“I want to lean on you. I want to feel secure. I want immensely to lean, beyond anything you can imagine.”…
“Please! Make me feel secure. As a favor to me. Without you, I’m a woman with nothing to lean against. I’m a wretched woman who’ll collapse the minute you detach from me. So please tell me I can feel secure. Please say it, ‘Feel secure.’”
Tsuda considered.
“You can. You can feel secure.”
“Truly?”
“Truly. You have no reason to worry.” (149:326–27)
Observing that O-Nobu’s tension has eased, Tsuda feels reprieved and turns to placating his wife, “abundantly employing phrases likely to please her.” The reader is stunned to observe that this transparent ploy is effective:
For the first time in a long while, O-Nobu beheld the Tsuda she had known before their marriage. Memories from the time of their engagement revived in her heart.
My husband hasn’t changed after all. He’s always been the man I knew from the old days.
This thought brought O-Nobu a satisfaction more than sufficient to rescue Tsuda from his predicament. The turbulence that was on the verge of becoming a violent storm subsided. (150:328)
One source of animating energy in Light and Dark is the tension between the antipodes of precision and ambiguity. Some scenes feel excessively interpreted. Elsewhere, often at key moments such as this one, the narrator slips out of the room, leaving the reader to interpret the passage on his or her own. And what are we to think? In driving O-Nobu into a gullibility as hopeless as this, as hapless and pathetic, is Sōseki revealing a lack of respect for this inexperienced, passionate young woman? Does he share what amounts to Tsuda’s contempt? Is the reader to pity or condemn her? We are left deliberating in a troubled way, which is perhaps what Sōseki intends. We are obliged to ask ourselves, what is to become of this valiant, vulnerable heroine?
SINCE ITS PUBLICATION in 1917, Light and Dark has inspired conjecture about how Sōseki intended to conclude his novel. He left no outline, and the only oracular reference is O-Nobu’s prediction to Tsuda that “the day was coming when I’d have to summon up my courage at a certain moment all at once… courage for my husband’s sake” (154:339). This has been taken to mean that O-Nobu would travel to the hot — springs resort to do battle with Kiyoko for Tsuda. In his preface to the Shinchō paperback edition, the haiku poet Nakamura Kusatao paints the grimmest picture: Tsuda and Kiyoko fall back in love, and O-Nobu, failing to win Tsuda away from her, commits suicide. In Ōe Kenzaburō’s version, O-Nobu hastens to the hot springs accompanied by Kobayashi and remonstrates with Kiyoko. But in her naiveté she is no match for her rival and, defeated, falls physically ill. Tsuda nurses her back to health and rediscovers his love for her. Together they return from the realm of darkness—Ōe locates the hot springs in a Stygian realm, the “darkness” in Light and Dark—to the world of life and “light.”23 The novelist Ōoka Shōhei (Fires on the Plain) postulates a variety of endings.24 Kiyoko concludes that she has paled on seeing Tsuda at the bottom of the stairs because she still has feelings for him, and her confession rekindles their romance. O-Nobu travels to the hot springs and accuses her rival of violating the sisterhood of women, much as the archetypal wife, O-San, pleads with the archetypal courtesan, Koharu, in Chikamatsu’s eighteenth-century Bunraku play, Love Suicide at Amijima. Unlike Koharu, who sympathizes with O-san, Kiyoko pleads her own grief at miscarrying as a consequence of an infection that her libertine husband has passed to her. (Ōoka is the only Japanese critic I have read who takes Sōseki’s intimation to heart.) Under the stress of this impasse, Tsuda begins to hemorrhage and collapses. O-Nobu nurses him, and Kiyoko, perceiving the bond between them, departs.