Soseki Natsume was a popular Meiji period novelist in Japan, born in 1867. He was infatuated with Chinese literature and poetry, and studied English and British literature. He wrote a wide variety of novels, including I Am A Cat and Kokoro, exploring themes of love, family, and confusion. Natsume wrote 18 novels in his short career and died with an unfinished 19th novel in 1916.
Soseki Natsume is one of the most popular novelists of the Meiji period in Japan. Born in Edo, now called Tokyo, in 1867, Soseki Natsume died in 1916 at the age of 49. Soseki Natsume became infatuated with Chinese literature and poetry in his school years, and these influences show in his writing, which has many uniquely Chinese qualities. Natsume Soseki spent most of his life as a scholar, studying the English language to proficiency and British literature. He did not begin writing full-time until 1907.
Soseki Natsume was born Kinnosuke Natsume and began life as an unwanted child, the sixth in a minor and declining samurai family. His parents were older and not interested in raising a child, and they kept the boy under the care of a servant until he was nine years old. When he returned to his family, his mother was eager to see him, but his father was relatively uninterested, and parent-child relationships were a theme that Soseki Natsume explored in much of his later writing. His mother died when he was 14 and he turned to literature for solace.
Although Soseki Natsume wanted to be a writer, his family strongly disapproved of him, and when he entered Tokyo University in 1884, he intended to train as an architect. He decided to study English as well, because he thought it could further his career. However, in 1887, he met Masaoka Shiki, who encouraged him to pursue his dreams of becoming a writer. Soseki Natsume began using the name Soseki, a Chinese idiom meaning “stubborn,” at this time to sign his poem, while challenging his family. In 1890, he entered the English department of the University of Tokyo, rejecting his family’s plans for him.
After graduating in 1893, Soseki Natsume taught in several Japanese schools and published haiku and Chinese poems in various newspapers. In 1896 he married Kyoko Nakane and settled with her in Kumamoto. In 1900 she won a scholarship from the Japanese government to study British literature and traveled to Great Britain, where she spent the two “most unpleasant years of my life”. She was unable to afford tuition fees in Britain and she holed up in a variety of lodgings reading during her stay, leading her friends to think she was going crazy. When he returned to Japan, he became a professor of English literature at Tokyo Imperial University.
Soseki Natsume’s earliest and arguably most important work is I Am A Cat, which originally appeared as a tale from the point of view of an alley cat in 1905. Readers acclaimed the work and encouraged by its reception, Soseki Natsume expanded it into a full-length book. Mr. Kushami, the cat’s owner, is clearly a parody of Natsume himself. In 1907, Natsume left his post at the university to write for the Asahi Shimbum, a major Japanese newspaper, and began writing full-time.
Soseki Natsume wrote a wide variety of novels dealing in a highly satirical style with various aspects of the human condition during the short period of his life in which his writing career flourished. They included Botchan (1906), Sanshiro (1908), And Then (1909), The Wayfarer (1912) and Inside My Glass Doors (1915). Natsume was a very prolific writer, managing to write 18 novels between 1905 and 1916 and dying with a 19th, Light and Darkness, unfinished in 1916.
Soseki Natsume’s other best-known work is Kokoro (1914), an exploration of Japan after the decline of the Tokugawa shogunate, with characters that are ambiguous and never fully formed. Kokoro is about love, betrayal, and eventual suicide, and the book unfolds like a delicate Chinese poem, unfolding bit by bit. Many of Soseki Natsume’s books deal with the themes of love, family, and confusion, suggesting that she may have lived a somewhat bitter life. Her legacy to Japanese literature, however, is monumental, and most 20th-century Japanese writers have been greatly influenced by her work.
Protect your devices with Threat Protection by NordVPN
