Abstract
This chapter examines how the lyricism of Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) transformed the literati (bunjin) tradition in the Meiji period (1867–1912). It argues that Sōseki forged new poetic forms that, through irony, mourned the immanent death of literati culture; he combined traditional poetic genres—haiku and Chinese poetry (kanshi)—with modern vernacular prose in his novel Pillow of Grass (1906) and in his memoir Recollecting and Such (1910), representing feelings of anxiety and grief. The chapter proposes that these works are prose poems that lament the loss of the literati tradition: the oscillation between prose and poetry in both narratives creates an organic rhythm between stasis and movement that evokes the alternation between loss and restoration in the grieving process. The chapter contends that the ironic open-endedness of both works allows grief to continue beyond the moment of literary closure and into our own through the act of reading.
How beautiful, if sorrow had not made
Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self.
—John Keats, Hyperion, Book I (1856)
In this hither and back of mutual and manifold influence,
the interior of the picture vibrates, rises and falls back into itself,
and does not have a single unmoving part.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne (1907)
The end is immanent, rather than imminent.
—Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (1967)
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16 March 2023
The book was inadvertently published with missing references in Chapter 5.
Notes
- 1.
Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 101.
- 2.
In this way, I follow the path of other scholars who have examined narrative form in Sōseki: Austead, Rereading Sōseki, Sakaki, Recontextualizing Texts, Vincent, Two-Timing Modernity, Austead, “Reading Sōseki Now,” and Bourdaghs, A Fictional Commons.
- 3.
Grief psychotherapist Julia Samuel observes that “grief is the emotional reaction to a loss,” and the process of grief is “in the movement—the back and forth—between the loss and restoration.” She also describes grief as a paradox: “The paradox of grief is that finding a way to live with the pain is what enables us to heal. Coping with grief doesn’t involve immersion theory; rather, it is enduring the pain as it hits us (this often feels like a storm crashing over us), and then having a break from it through distraction, busyness, and doing the things that comfort and soothe us. Every time we alternate between two poles, we adjust to the reality that we don’t want to face: that the person we love has died.” Samuel, Grief Works, xvii–xviii.
- 4.
Colebrook, Irony, 49. Colebrook on the idea of the “ironic fall” and Romantic irony in the writings of Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829): “An ironic ‘fall’ realizes…that there was no paradise before the sense of loss. The idea of an original plenitude is an image created from life. ‘All life is in its ultimate origins not natural, but divine and human.’ The idea of a fall is, however, essential to irony and life as irony. It is in creating images of a lost paradise that we create ourselves as fallen, and thereby create ourselves at all. For to be selves or personalities we must be limited or delimited from some grander whole.” Colebrook, 49–50. Pillow of Grass and Recollecting in Such both emerge from loss: the former aims to reconstruct an idyllic space; the latter attempts to restore lost experience.
- 5.
Sōseki wrote in an essay from November, 1906: “Once this ‘haiku-style novel’—odd as the name may be—is complete, it will break new ground in the literary world. In Japan, let alone the West, there has never been a novel like this. When it makes its appearance in Japan, the first thing one could say is that a new movement in the world of fiction started in Japan.” Natsume Sōseki, Sōseki zenshū, 25: 209–212. From here on SZ. Translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
- 6.
For more on how haikai informed Late Edo kanshi, see Sugimoto, Edo kanshi, 155–171.
- 7.
Backus, “What Goes Into a Haiku,” 736.
- 8.
Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, 65.
- 9.
Freedman, The Lyrical Novel, 3.
- 10.
Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 159.
- 11.
SZ, 3: 3. I have consulted the two English translations by Alan Turney and Meredith McKinney.
- 12.
“Kusamakura” is a poetic epithet (makurakotoba, or “pillow word”) for travel from Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves (ca. 759 CE; Man’yōshū):Verse
Verse Grass for a pillow— The traveler on his journey Along the way May don the colors Of the bush clovers in bloom. 草枕旅行く人も行き触ればにほひぬべくも咲ける萩かも
Man’yōshū, 333.
- 13.
The meaning behind these terms has been the subject of debate. Scholars have read Pillow of Grass alongside Sōseki’s own literary theory, expressing contrasting views about the relationship between hininjō and the genres of writing that constitute the novel. Anette Thorsen Vilslev has suggested that both the prose and the poetry in Pillow of Grass mediate the narrator’s detached stance, what the novel calls hininjō, enabling him to describe the natural landscape and human emotion with objectivity. Daniel Poch has examined Pillow of Grass in the context of Sōseki’s experiments with shaseibun, a new genre of prose writing inspired by Masaoka Shiki’s haiku reforms that called for realism and immediacy in poetry. Poch argues that the detached stance of the narrator enables him to deconstruct the emotion-packed lyric genres that appear in the narrative. These poetic genres link Pillow of Grass to the ninjō tradition in premodern literature, in which poetry was featured prominently to mediate romantic feelings between characters. Vilslev, “Questioning western universality”; Poch, “Kanjō hyōgen”; Poch, Licentious Fictions, 179–208.
- 14.
As Miyoshi wrote, “Paradox is the narrator’s modus operandi in argument.” Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, 65.
- 15.
Karatani, Sōseki ronshūsei, 421–428.
- 16.
The word ninjō also references the sentimental fiction (ninjōbon) in vogue during the early nineteenth century. If we take hininjō at its literal meaning, “that which is not ninjō,” then we might understand the polarity between ninjō and hininjō as analogous to the polarity between “genre” and “anti-genre.” In Chapter 9, the narrator has a conversation with Nami about a cherry tree’s “variation” (henka) of motion in a stream. Nami wishes that humans could move with such variation, to which the narrator replies, “You have to be hininjō to move like that.” SZ, 3: 114. What constitutes hininjō is the ability to change, to diverge from an established form, or a literary institution.
- 17.
Although the narrator tries to maintain a clear distinction between Eastern and Western aesthetics, and wants to favor the former, he fails because they often overlap in his examples. This failure fuels the irony of the novel, while also revealing the fusion of multiple literary traditions in Sōseki’s writing. The influence of Shakespeare, Milton, Romanticism, and nineteenth-century English novels can be found in his oeuvre—from his critical writings to his novels to his traditional poetry.
- 18.
SZ, 3: 6.
- 19.
SZ, 3: 7.
- 20.
Sōseki’s literary translation of Shelley’s stanza also stands on its own as a “new-style poem” (shintaishi)—a genre that emerged after the importation of Romanticism in the late nineteenth century: “mae o mite wa, shirie o mite wa / monohoshi to, akogaruru kana, ware. / hara kara no warai to iedo / kurushimi no, soko ni aru beshi. / utsukushiki kiwami no uta ni, kanashimi no kiwami no omoi, komoru to zo shire.”
- 21.
Sandy, Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning, 97.
- 22.
SZ, 3: 10–11.
- 23.
Nakajima, Kindai bungaku ni miru kanjusei, 640.
- 24.
SZ, 3: 14.
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
SZ, 3: 14–15.
- 27.
Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 189.
- 28.
O’Neill, Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem.
- 29.
SZ, 3: 36. Translation is a modified version of McKinney.
- 30.
SZ, 3: 37. Translation is a modified version of McKinney.
- 31.
SZ, 3: 74. Translation is a modified version of McKinney.
- 32.
SZ, 3: 74.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Ibid.
- 35.
The narrator writes that the power of his elation is not commensurate with the image of a boundless blue sea: “My state lacks the power that this image suggests, but I find joy in that. In the manifestation of great power, lurks the concern that that power will eventually be exhausted. In its everyday form, no such worries attend it. But in my present state of mind, more ‘bland’ than usual, I am not only far away from woes about whether my vigorous strength will whittle away, I have also transcended the quotidian realm where the mind discerns what is permissible and what is not.” SZ, 3: 74. Such observations about the relationship between power (katsuryoku) and the subject tempt us to consider the conceit of Pillow of Grass as allegory for the power of imperialism (and later fascism) during the early twentieth century. The narrator succumbs to a trance that frees him of the ability or necessity to judge right from wrong. Such language may just be Sōseki’s effusive paean to aesthetics, poetry, and painting; but the language also forebodes a potentially frightening scenario in which such language is used to mobilize subjects of the empire. For a study on aesthetics and fascism, see Tansman, The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism.
- 36.
Karatani Kōjin has speculated that Sōseki likely read Lyrics of Chu before writing Pillow of Grass. Karatani, Sōseki ronshūsei, 427. In 1972, Furukawa Hisashi discussed the similarities between the two texts, arguing that Pillow of Grass may be an inversion of Lyrics of Chu. When Japanese readers think of Lyrics of Chu, they are generally thinking of Qu Yuan’s long poem “Encountering Sorrow,” which has been read in traditional commentary as political allegory for a court official—Qu Yuan—who has fallen out of favor with his ruler. In late Qing criticism, Qu Yuan was celebrated as the “lyrical poet” par excellence, a sentiment that continued in early twentieth-century Japanese literary criticism. In Qu’s poem, the lyric subject, feeling distraught and misunderstood, has a fantasy wherein he encounters a goddess with whom he fails at consummating a relationship. Although temporality in the poem is out of whack, the imagery and sorrow overall evoke late autumn. Pillow of Grass, however, is an ode to spring. In this way, Furukawa has argued that Sōseki turns lament into paean. While this interpretation is simplistic, as Pillow of Grass also brims with grief, Furukawa’s point that Lyrics of Chu and Pillow of Grass share common diction is well taken. Furukawa, Natsume Sōseki, 114–125.
- 37.
SZ, 3: 74.
- 38.
Saitō Mareshi has argued that such diction exemplifies how Sōseki drew from classical Chinese poetry, while also affording him the means to construct a new “separate world” (betsu kenkon) in the modern Japanese novel. Saitō, “Sōseki no kanshibun—shūji to hihyō.”
- 39.
Burke: “It is the nature of grief to keep its object perpetually in its eye, to present it in its most pleasurable views, to repeat all the circumstances that attend it, even to the last minuteness; to go back to every particular enjoyment, to dwell upon each, and to find a thousand new perfections in all, that were not sufficiently understood before; in grief, the pleasure is still uppermost; and the affliction we suffer has no resemblance to absolute pain, which is always odious, and which we endeavor to shake off as soon as possible.” Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 34–35 (original emphasis). Sōseki did not own this work, but he did own a collection of Burke essays and Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
- 40.
Rebecca Comay on Freud’s idea that melancholia is an attachment to an unknown loss: “Melancholia would thus be a way of staging a dispossession of that which was never one’s own to lose in the first places—and thus, precisely by occluding structural lack as determinate loss, would exemplify the strictly perverse effort to assert a relation with the non-relational.… Trauma would itself in this way be mobilized as a defence against an impossible enjoyment: the melancholic derealization of the real here functions, as Giorgio Agamben has compelling argued, not only to aggrandize the subject of fantasy, but in so doing ultimately to hypostatize what is unreal (or phantasmatic) as a new reality.” Comay, “The Sickness of Tradition,” 89; Agamben, Stanzas.
- 41.
Another word that comes to mind is saudade from Portuguese: “longing, melancholy, nostalgia, as a supposed characteristic of the Portuguese or Brazilian temperament.” (OED)
- 42.
Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 16.
- 43.
Matsuoka, Sōseki no kanshi, 80.
- 44.
SZ, 3:152. For kundoku and annotations, see SZ, 18: 194–198.
- 45.
SZ, 18: 198.
- 46.
Ikkai Tomoyoshi—editor of vol. 18 of SZ—observes that the opening line evokes the Yuefu tradition, known for its many songs on longing. He also cites early Tang poet Song Zhiwen’s (656?–712 CE) “Song of Descending the Mountain” (Xia shan ge), a poem that deploys diction from Lyrics of Chu:Verse
Verse Descending Song Mountain—much on the mind; 下嵩山兮多所思 Accompanied by the fair one—we plod along slowly. 携佳人兮步遲遲 The bright moon between the pines, it will be like this forever; 松間明月長如此 But to roam again with you—when will the next time come? 君再游兮復何時
- 47.
Stephen Dodd has examined nostalgia in the context of Japanese literature about the furusato, or “native place.” Such works feature a protagonist from the city who returns to his native place, where he reflects on the evils of urbanization and reminisces about the idyllic past of his childhood. In this kind of literature, furusato can be literal or figurative: either referring to the writer’s actual native place or what Dodd describes as a metaphorical “other” that allows the writer to “articulate both a criticism for society and an idealized alternative.” Dodd, Writing Home, 1. Dodd argues that the furusato “emerged in Meiji as a newly invigorated symbol of desire and discontent,” a place to which writers wished to return but also one that was falling to ruin and, hence, required restoration. Pillow of Grass can be read alongside furusato literature because it longs for a home that is disappearing or already gone.
- 48.
Goodman, “Uncertain Disease,” 199–201.
- 49.
Ibid.; Dodman, What Nostalgia Was.
- 50.
Goodman, “Uncertain Disease,” 204.
- 51.
Sōseki’s representation of sense perception speaks to the kinds of nostalgia that Boym identifies in her study: restorative and reflective, the former being a “transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home,” and the latter, “the longing itself,” which “has the capacity to awaken multiple planes of consciousness.” Boym writes: “Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt.” Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 49–50, xviii.
- 52.
Sigmund Freud in Mourning and Melancholia (1917) distinguishes “mourning” from “melancholy,” writing that the former refers to a feeling of loss when a person has died, whereas the latter refers to a feeling of loss whose object is lost in the mourner’s consciousness.
- 53.
Földényi, Melancholy, 255.
- 54.
Ibid., 252.
- 55.
Ibid., 215.
- 56.
In the “Mastering Life” (Da sheng) and “The World” (Tian xia) chapters, Zhuangzi critiques the epistemological basis on which such ethical judgments are formed, arguing that forgetting of right and wrong renders the mind at ease, freeing the subject from the entanglements of knowledge. Judgment about what is “right” vis-à-vis what is “wrong” is based on received and institutionalized knowledge. Watson, The Complete Works, 206–207, 370. Sōseki’s poem seems to be arguing that freedom from such categories and distinctions is both to be free of ideological containment and to consider non-teleological and more open-ended conclusions.
- 57.
François, Open Secrets, xvi.
- 58.
SZ, 3: 171.
- 59.
Recollecting and Such was serialized in the Tokyo Asahi newspaper from October 29, 1910 to February 20, 1911, and in the Osaka Asahi newspaper from October 29, 1910 to March 5, 1911. In March through June of 1910, Sōseki’s novel The Gate (Mon) was serialized in the same newspaper. Not long thereafter, Sōseki came down with severe abdominal pain, admitted himself to the hospital and was diagnosed with a stomach ulcer. After receiving treatment, in August of that year Sōseki vacationed at Shuzenji on the Izu Peninsula. He suffered a relapse of the ulcer, which hemorrhaged, resulting in blood loss and a coma. He survived and convalesced at Shuzenji until he was able to return to the hospital in October. It was at the hospital where he began writing Recollecting and Such.
- 60.
In her introduction to the translation, Flutsch describes the multitude of forms contained within the work: “In its form, unique among Sōseki’s works, Recollections could be said to present a microcosm of his whole oeuvre. This is because it contains miniature versions of every literary form Sōseki ever used, moulded together into a new genre.” Natsume, Recollections, 6.
- 61.
Marcus, Reflections in a Glass Door, 12.
- 62.
SZ, 12: 416.
- 63.
SZ, 12: 400.
- 64.
Here one thinks of the relationship between cold and numbness in John Keats’s The Fall of Hyperion:Verse
Verse …the leaves were yet Burning, when suddenly a palsied chill Struck from the paved level up my limbs, And was ascending quick to put cold grasp Upon those streams that pulse beside the throat. I shriek’d, and the sharp anguish of my shriek Stung my own ears; I strove hard to escape The numbness, strove to gain the lowest step. Slow, heavy, deadly was my pace: the cold Grew stifling, suffocating, at the heart; And when I clasp’d my hands I felt them not.
Keats, Complete Poems, 376.
- 65.
SZ, 12: 357–451.
- 66.
Ibid., 357.
- 67.
Ibid., 358.
- 68.
I mean “vital” in the poetic sense that describes the life force contingent on breath, like in Wordsworth’s Vernal Ode, “And though to every draught of vital breath, / Renewed throughout the bounds of earth or ocean,” and in Shelley’s Adonais, “Dream not that the amorous Deep / Will yet restore him to the vital air.”
- 69.
The narrator describes the reason for writing Recollecting and Such: “Omoidasu koto nado is nothing more than quotidian and dull reminiscences and descriptions of my own illness, but among them you should find many rare pleasures, albeit old-fashioned. I recollect things quickly, and write them down in haste, so that I can savor these old fragrances in the company of those who embrace the present and those who are suffering in it.” SZ, 12: 368.
- 70.
William Waters has examined the value of poetry as lyric address in the way that lyric poems mediate contact between poet and reader: “When poems address their readers, the topic of the pronoun you and the topic of reading (what it is like to be a person reading a poem) become two sides of a single coin. This, then, is the end to which my investigation of lyric address leads: the claim that we as readers may feel in second-person poems, in a poem’s touch, an intimation of why poetry is valuable, why it matters to us, and how we might come to feel answerable to it.” Waters, Poetry’s Touch, 2. Helen Vendler has described lyric address as intimacy between the poet and his future, unseen, reader. Vendler, Invisible Listeners.
- 71.
SZ, 12: 371.
- 72.
SZ, 12: 371.
- 73.
SZ, 12: 395.
- 74.
The bush clover is one of the seven flowers of autumn (aki no nanakusa) that poets have written about since ancient times. Sōseki featured the “white bush clover” (shirohagi) in another haiku from 1910:Verse
Verse Since becoming ill Dew on the white bush clover Has been falling heavily! 病んでより白萩に露の繁く降る事よ
SZ, 17: 408.
- 75.
Yiu, Chaos and Order, 188.
- 76.
SZ, 12: 397. For annotations, see SZ, 18: 248–249.
- 77.
Bachelard, Air and Dreams, 185.
- 78.
SZ, 12: 421.
- 79.
SZ, 12: 422.
- 80.
SZ, 12: 423. For annotations, see SZ, 18: 237–239.
- 81.
The conclusion of the poem speaks to Comay’s discussion of how fetishism defers loss to the future, exemplified in a passage by Lessing on Laocoön: “the sculptor has captured the pregnant moment just before the full horror strikes—the father’s mouth open but not yet screaming, the serpent’s venom not quite completely penetrated, the agony not quite yet at its climax: the gaze fixes on the penultimate moment so as to block the revelation of the monstrous void. Penultimacy—incompletion as such—becomes a defence against a mortifying conclusion.” Comay, “The Sickness of Tradition,” 95–96.
- 82.
SZ, 12: 401.
- 83.
Ibid.
- 84.
Fletcher, Colors of the Mind, 167.
- 85.
Here I refer to what Sharon Cameron has called “lyric time” or “apocalyptic time” in Emily Dickinson’s poetry. For Cameron, lyric is unmediated by narrative and operates in a time of its own: “Unlike the story, novel, or drama, the lyric enjoys an independence from authorial interruption (those breaks in the action that remind us all action inevitably ends), and it is free as well from the speech and thought of other characters. As pure unmediated speech it lies furthest of all the mimetic arts from the way we really talk. Lyric speech might be described as the way we would talk in dreams if we could convert the phantasmagoria there into words. But as the present is neither the past nor the future, as desire is not equivalent to the object of its longing, as there is a space predicated between the landscape and the human subject who regards it, between language and what it hopes to word into being, so the same radical inequality is manifested between lyric speech and the voice or voices it represents.” Cameron, Lyric Time, 207.
- 86.
SZ, 12: 403.
- 87.
This is my interpretation, as the structure of Sōseki’s poem resembles that of a Shakespearean sonnet. Sōseki was a careful reader of Shakespeare and English poetry, so it is likely that English poetics informed his kanshi.
- 88.
SZ, 12: 403. For annotations, see SZ, 18: 263–272.
- 89.
This is also the same word that the narrator uses later in installment 20 to describe the sublime state of “boundlessness” he feels after having merged with the sky. In this poem from installment 15 and in the prose from installment 20 are the sole two places where the word hyōbyō appears in the narrative. The vast darkness of hyōbyō conjures the dark and strange space in between in Coleridge’s “Limbo”:Verse
Verse ’Tis a strange place, this Limbo!—not a Place, Yet name it so;—where Time and weary Space Fettered from flight, with night-mare sense of fleeing, Strive for their last crepuscular half-being;— Lank Space, and scytheless Time with branny hands Barren and soundless as the measuring sands, Not mark’d by flit of Shades,—unmeaning, they As moonlight on the dial of the day!
Coleridge, The Complete Poems, 357. Coleridge’s poem is more haunting, but both he and Sōseki were interested in representing the experience of being in liminal space. For Sōseki on Coleridge, see SZ, 27: 67–70.
- 90.
Bachelard: “The storyteller feels…that he cannot give the impression of this essential fall, at the very limits of death and the abyss, unless he tries to make associations with the effort to rise up again.… It is these efforts to rise up again, these efforts to become conscious of the vertigo, that give a kind of undulating effect to the fall, that make the imaginary fall an example of that undulating psychology in which the contradictions between the real and the imaginary constantly change places, reinforce each other, and interact with each other as opposites. Then vertigo becomes stronger in this dialectics wavering between life and death; it reaches the point of that infinite fall, an unforgettable dynamic experience that so deeply affected Poe’s soul.” Bachelard, Air and Dreams, 96–97 (original emphasis). For Sōseki on Poe, see SZ, 25: 340. In his essay “Poe’s Imagination” (Pō no sōzō), Sōseki argues that Poe has a scientific imagination.
- 91.
The line alludes to Bashō’s death poem:Verse
Verse Sick on a journey, But over withered fields dreams Are running all around. 旅に病で夢は枯野をかけ廻る
Trans. Robert Backus. Backus, “What Goes Into a Haiku,” 754. Bashō kushū, 216. Iida Rigyō has noted the Bashō reference. Iida, Sōseki shishū yaku, 201. The frail minds and bodies of Bashō and the poet in Recollecting and Such are wandering in a space of darkness and absence. Bashō’s haiku pairs sickness and death with oneiric vitality: dreams that will continue to run around the fields. In the haiku, such a pairing suggests potentiality for life in death. But in the narrator’s kanshi that potentiality is ironized.
- 92.
Many annotators comment that this line alludes to the first lines in “Nine Changes” (Jiu bian) in Lyrics of Chu.Verse
Verse Alas for the breath of autumn! Wan and drear: flower and leaf fluttering fall and turn to decay. 悲哉!秋之為氣也. 蕭瑟兮, 草木搖落而變衰.
Hawkes, The Songs of the South, 209. Soji, 282. Lyrics of Chu, a poetry collection that transports its reader on a journey into the spiritual realm, seems to have informed Sōseki’s poetic diction when describing movement in ethereal space.
- 93.
The Chinese graph kaku 廓 originally refers to the domain of a castle town. The meaning of this word resembles the meaning of “circumference” in an Emily Dickinson poem:Verse
Verse The Poets light but Lamps— Themselves—go out— The Wicks they stimulate If vital Light Inhere as do the Suns— Each Age a Lens— Disseminating their Circumference.
Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 397–398. Lines 7 and 8 end the poem with the suggestion that the lens of future readers enables the circulation of light (poetry), but with the firm assertion that such circulation has a limit, as “circumference” refers to the enclosing boundary of a circle.
- 94.
This line alludes to a couplet in “Far-off Journey” (Yuan you) in Lyrics of Chu:Verse
Verse In the sheer depths below, the earth was invisible; In the vastness above, the sky could not be seen. 下崢嶸而無地兮, 上寥廓而無天.
Hawkes, The Songs of the South, 199. Soji, 270.
- 95.
Iida Rigyō, Wada Toshio, and Nakamura Hiroshi read the Chinese graph 澹 as awaku. Iida, Sōseki shishū yaku, 198. Wada, Sōseki no shi to haiku, 299. Nakamura, Sōseki kanshi no sekai, 159. Yoshikawa Kōjirō and Ikkai Tomoyoshi retain the Chinese reading: tan. Yoshikawa, Sōseki shichū, 126.
- 96.
Yoshikawa and Ikkai have interpreted ososhi to mean “slow,” reading the line as more of a comment about the emergence of a poetic feeling than the actual result of coming to grips with dulled senses. Furui Yoshikichi has also read the line in this way, praising Sōseki’s usage of the adjective ososhi, writing that the line comments on the length of time required to feel the charm of autumn. Furui, Sōseki no kanshi o yomu, 77.
- 97.
SZ, 12: 450.
- 98.
SZ, 12: 451.
- 99.
Sōseki published an essay entitled “Spring in the Hospital” (Byōin no haru) in the Tokyo Asahi newspaper on April 13, 1911 (April 9 in Osaka). Recollecting and Such was anthologized in book form in Kirinukichō yori (From the scrapbook) on August 18, 1911. In the volume, the essay appears as installment 33 of Recollecting and Such. The extra installment can be read as but another coda to a prose poem of codas.
- 100.
SZ, 12: 451. For annotations see SZ, 18: 249–252.
- 101.
See note 93.
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Mewhinney, M. (2022). Anxiety and Grief in the Prose Poems of Natsume Sōseki. In: Form and Feeling in Japanese Literati Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11922-4_5
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