A look at the Foreword to Equinox, which appeared in the Asahi in 1912, as well as at the immediately previous occurrences in Soseki's life, is revealing as background to the novel itself, both in terms of the writer's state of mind and the possible change in attitude toward the world that these momentous experiences wrought in him. In the Foreword, Soseki first refers to his stay at a Shuzenji spa. He had finished The Gate in June 1910 and immediately thereafter was hospitalized for a gastric ulcer for over a month. In August, he went to Shuzenji to try to recover, but on August 24, he vomited an enormous quantity of blood and was in a syncopal state for about half an hour. Even the doctors attending him thought the case hopeless. Miraculously, though, he mended, but had to remain in Shuzenji until October, whereupon he returned to Tokyo and was again hospitalized for further treatment until February 1911. A series of lectures in the Kansai district sponsored by the Osaka Asahi during the summer of the same year further affected his health, and he required additional hospitalization. Home in Tokyo in September, he had to be operated on again, for hemorrhoids this time, the treatment for which lasted about six months. The greatest trauma of the year, however, was the shock of the sudden illness in November of the Sosekis' fifth child, a daughter named Hinako, whose equally sudden death from an unknown cause brought Soseki to the brink of collapse. It is no wonder that no novel appeared in 1911.
What went through Soseki's mind during this period is revealed in his essays and diary entries. In "Things Recollected," a series of essays written during his hospitalization in 1910, he wrote, "Lying on my back and looking at the ceiling, I thought that other people in the world were kinder than I was. There came suddenly a warm breeze into this world I had thought too hard to live in, I who had so little dreamt of the busy world expending so much time and trouble upon a man over forty, a man going to be combed out by Nature, a man having few merits in his past returned to life not only in body but in mind as well. I thanked Heaven for this illness and I thanked those who had not spared trouble and time over my recovery. Would that I were a good man! That was my wish. And I swore within myself that one who would destroy this blissful thought would be my eternal foe!"
In a diary entry for September 26, 1910, Soseki noted, "As I become convalescent, I have all the more a hankering after illness. After complete recovery, my life of enjoying generosity without any stress and having my mind go wherever it will from morning to night, being indulged by all people, men in society, acquaintances and friends, and my employers who do me good turns and take every care while waiting on me day and night — all of these will vanish like a brief dream, leaving behind a world hard as iron, a will to be sharpened, and a society to be fought through. I don't at all like relinquishing the bliss I'm now having." And in a further diary entry for October 31, 1910, he commented, "The friends I want now are men of taste, not those who want to argue about life and art and other things of that sort. In my present state I prefer a bird's voice to that of a human, the color of the sky rather than the faces of women, flowers more than visitors and guests, meditation more than familiar talk, and reading more than playing games. What I wish to have is agreeable leisure; what I dislike is worldly business."
It seems Soseki wished to remain, if possible, in a world of complete peace and freedom aloof from the real world. This was the kind of Utopia he had had a longing for ever since his younger days. As a boy who had once gazed at the India-ink landscape of a nanga painting, he had wanted to dwell in such an idealistic, romantic place even if only once in his lifetime. In Grass Pillow (1906) (published in English under the title The Three-Cornered World), Soseki had cited lines from two Chinese poems and talked about the virtues of oriental poetry; his experience with Zen, equally related to the arts, made him aware of the life of meditation. Yet in his diary entry of December 3, 1911, he wrote, "My stomach has cracked. My mind, too, it seems, for I feel an incurable sorrow each time I recall [the loss of my child]." The poignant fourth section in Equinox depicts the death and funeral of Matsumoto's youngest child.
Soseki notes in the Foreword to Equinox that it was on New Year's Day, 1912, that he began what he felt was a disburdening of a duty he had long delayed, yet he wondered if he could bring the novel off successfully. He hoped to produce an interesting work, since he had satisfied neither his friends nor his readers for a long time. Nevertheless, he felt that it was in the nature of creative writing itself that an author might be unable to predict if the work would turn out as he himself wished. Soseki did not see any need, as he had in the announcement to Sanshiro, to state anything about the subject matter or his own view of the work or even what the work claimed to be attempting. He pointed out that he was neither a writer of naturalism nor symbolism, "still less one of those neo-Romanticists we often hear of recently. I am one lacking in confidence that his work will be dyed sufficiently in any definite color to attract the attention of passers-by. . Only I have a faith that I am working on my own. So long as I follow my own instincts, I don't care a bit whether I'm a naturalist or a romanticist wearing 'neo' on his head." He continued by expressing his fear that he might disappoint his readers by falling below the standards he had set for himself. He had no interest in trying to create something novel or unique or "brand new." Yet he equally feared that vanity might make him try something beyond his skills.
The title of Equinox is intriguing. Soseki seems to claim it was chosen because he intended to start the novel on the first day of the New Year of 1912 and to continue it until some day past the spring equinox. He writes in the Foreword, "It is indeed a meaningless title. But I have long entertained an idea that if individual short stories are piled one over another and these so interlaced as to compose themselves into one long story, it may be that such a story will, as a newspaper novel, be read with more interest than is expected from the usual long story."
That Soseki is again experimenting is obvious in spite of his earlier indication that he was not trying anything unique or new. Yet he seems to qualify even this approach to the content and structure of his work: "However, since a novel, no matter how unskillful the writer may be, must, unlike an architect's plan, have in it activity and development of its own, it does not progress as he had planned it beforehand." He concludes, ". . going well or not, it may at least be anticipated that we are to have a series of short stories that will be difficult to classify definitely as short stories or as ones having a link between them. It now seems to me that such a form will be all right."
That Soseki, then, was attempting in Equinox a form of linked stories that somehow did double duty as individual story, yet as story forming part of a larger world of the novel, accounts for the division of the work into six books plus a conclusion. A glance, say, at the third section indicates that the novel superseded the individual story. What might have become purely picaresque adventures involving Keitaro did not take that less artistic shape; instead, Equinox assumes the form of a novel of education, the young university graduate Keitaro somehow stumbling through the world beyond academia eventually to experience, however directly or indirectly, the romantic, the practical, the philosophical, and the existential. The first choice Keitaro makes, that of becoming a detective, if even temporarily, he must in the end realize is a choice inferior to the kind of choices his friend Sunaga has available to him. It is through indirection that Keitaro proceeds and ultimately gets closer to the very core of life itself.