11. SZ 24:589–90.
12. O-Hide is pronounced O-HE-day.
13. Yoshimoto Takaaki characterized Sōseki’s style in later years as “consciously motivated by his wish to experiment with narrowing the gap between an English prose style and that of Japanese” (quoted in Reikō Abe Auestad, Rereading Sōseki: Three Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Novels [Wiesbaden: Herassowitz, 1998], 149).
14. Sōseki, “Interrelations Between Literary Substances,” in Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, 107–11.
15. Henry James, The Art of Criticism, ed. William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 288.
16. Ibid.
17. In the margin of page 103 he notes: “This writer’s prose style aims to express things easily understood in language that is hard to understand” (SZ 27:159).
18. SZ 19:359.
19. SZ 14:239.
20. Madam Yoshikawa suggests that a trip to visit Kiyoko will be “the best possible treatment for O-Nobu” and explains ambiguously, “Just watch, I’ll teach O-Nobu-san how to be a better wife to you, a more wifely wife” (142:311). Some Japanese critics have interpreted this to mean that O-Nobu must be taught, however painfully for her, that her emphasis on the nature of the love she receives from Tsuda is an unseemly attitude for a wife, who should be focused on helping her husband maintain favor with his relatives. See Ōe Kenzaburō, Saigo no shōsetsu (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1988), 161. Perhaps. Or perhaps she is simply jealous. Or possibly this is just characteristic perversity: “With no limits on her time, [Madam] needed no invitation, given the opportunity, to meddle in the private affairs of others, and she enjoyed looking after people beneath her, particularly those she was fond of, all the while making clear unabashedly that she was acting principally in the interests of her own amusement” (132:289).
21. In his preface to the Iwanami paperback edition of the novel, Ōe Kenzaburō reminded “contemporary and particularly young readers” that the influence exerted by relatives in Japanese social life and personal relationships was “decisively more powerful in the Meiji and Taisho periods than it is today” (Natsume Sōseki, Meian [Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2010], 599).
22. Japanese readers tend to object heatedly to this interpretation. As evidence that Sōseki did not intend any particle of doubt about Tsuda’s condition, they cite two lines of text (emphasis mine in both): “About to explain that his doctor’s specialty was in an area somewhat tangential to his particular illness and that as such his offices were not the sort of place that ladies would find inviting” (12:46); and “Supposing that Tsuda was afflicted with the same sort of illness as his own, [his friend] had spoken up without any hesitation or reserve, as if to do so were perfectly natural” (17:54). In fact, the second sentence contains its own ambiguity. The verb I have translated as “supposing” (omoikomu) means “to assume something, sometimes — but not always — mistakenly.” To be sure, both lines may be read as negating the possibility that Tsuda suffers from a venereal disease. At the same time, it seems obvious that at the very least Sōseki is playing them contrapuntally against seeds of doubt that he has intentionally planted.
23. Ōe, Saigo no shōsetsu, 170–71.
24. Ōoka Shōhei, Shōsetsuka Natsume Sōseki (Tokyo: Chikuma Shōbō, 1988), 425–29.
25. Kumegawa Mitsuki, Meian Aru Shūshō (Tokyo: Ronsōsha, 2009); Tanaka Fumiko, Natsume Sōseki Meian no Dabi (Tokyo: Tōhōshuppan, 1991); Mizumura Minae, Zoku Meian (Tokyo: Chikuma Shōbō, 1990); Nagai Ai, Shin Meian (Tokyo: Jiritsu Shobō, 2002).
26. Mizumura, Zoku Meian, 260, 261.
A Note on the Translation
IN HIS first response to a list of questions that I had sent him, a Sōseki scholar in Tokyo wrote: “Rereading the passages you have marked, I find they contain difficult problems that cannot be answered simply. Your questions have led me to the realization that the text of Light and Dark, read closely, is even for me a universe of complex language not easily fathomed.” I was surprised by this but also reassured to think that the difficulty I was having as a reader was not altogether due to inadequate command. Over time I consulted others, observed them shaking their heads, and began to feel comfortable with the conclusion that Sōseki’s language in Light and Dark is after all a challenge to understand even for literate native readers. To be sure, there are moments when the interior landscape emerges in lucid focus as though bathed in early morning light; at other times, the reader must hold on for dear life as Sōseki descends through the murkiness toward the depths he is seeking.
This is particularly the case in the narrative passages that the Japanese call “psychological description.” Sōseki assigns to words idiosyncratic, deeply personal connotations, and his syntax can be not so much tortuous as indeterminate: sentences aggregate into passages that point toward meaning without ever quite arriving. In this final novel, Sōseki appears to be experimenting, taxing his language with a mode of description unfamiliar to him, intentionally deranging his masterly prose, and the result must be deemed uneven, now brilliantly exact and now opaque.
I should interject that the dialogue, so copious that this novel sometimes reads like a play, is even more compelling than his usuaclass="underline" ironically witty, pitch-perfect, richly revealing character. The superlative aliveness of the book’s conversations — an aliveness that throbs beneath the surface of a maddening placidity — is in itself enough to make them difficult to translate acceptably. There is, moreover, the challenge of creating the patina of age that a novel written 100 years ago will have acquired for the native reader, a coloration that rarely survives in a translation. The extended family in Light and Dark, lambasting one another and revealing themselves in the process, converses in the language of the haute bourgeoisie of 1916. Formulating a notion, however vague, of how this sounded to Japanese readers at the time and how it strikes the ear of the native reader today was critical, and that left me with the struggle to create this subtle verdigris in my English dialogue. I should mention that I had recourse to Henry James in my attempt to “cure” the translation, harvesting from his pages words and turns of phrase that struck me as redolent of the period in which Light and Dark occurs.
To return to the narrative that prefaces and reflects on the dialogue, Light and Dark confronts the translator with a twofold challenge. I have suggested the difficulty I experienced comprehending passages in the text. But arriving with some certainty at what Sōseki intended to say was only the beginning. Should I translate the language I had managed to decipher paraphrastically, taming it for the benefit of the English reader? Or must I labor to render it in English as resistant to easy comprehension as the Japanese original? The latter course was dictated by my fundamental view of the translator’s task: to provide the reader in English with an experience equivalent to what the native reader experiences in Japanese. But that far more difficult approach, even assuming I possessed the craft to achieve it, would require the courage to fly in the face of the reader’s expectation that translations should proceed “smoothly.”