Natsume Soseki’s 1914 novel Kokoro asks, “How does the heart of things change in an increasingly modern world?”
For me, ‘the heart of things’ refers not only to human beings, but also to their humanness, to the emotional and spiritual connections between people: friendships, relationships and love. My impression after having read this novel is that the heart of things becomes increasingly weary as the world modernizes — hence the word ‘ennui’ used toward the end of the narrative (ennui means ‘world weariness’). Although Soseki doesn’t bring the issue of modernization to the story’s foreground, it is obvious that Japan is struggling with a clash of values — traditional values of the past and those new values of a Western culture that is slowly gaining a stranglehold on the Japanese way of life.
Sensei bests sums up the essence of Soseki’s novel on page thirty: “You see, loneliness is the price we pay for being born in this modern age, so full of freedom, independence, and our own egotistical selves.” Modernization has led to loneliness, egoism, and individualism among people. A key culprit in this terrible degeneration of the heart is money, which plays a main role in both Sensei’s — and later the young narrator’s — misanthropy. Modernization emphasizes the necessity of money, and possessing material wealth brings about mistrust, as does getting locked into a marriage simply for the sake of the institution. Loneliness within the individual exists and persists because Japanese society and culture in the Meiji era expected people to rely on themselves and not so much on others — family, for example. I think it likely that this self-reliance is a Western mode of perception introduced to an Eastern culture in the beginning of the 20th century (or perhaps earlier than that). In Kokoro, the young narrator returns home after graduating from a university in Tokyo. He finds that he is in no hurry to get a job, whereas his parents are pressuring him to obtain a high-paying teaching position as soon as possible. The narrator’s mother and father worry that they will have to support their son; the father even says, “You mustn’t blame us if we now expect you to be financially independent” (page 93). Again, this scenario itself seems like a Western standard: students having spent several years living and studying on borrowed money, only to return home and find themselves living with their parents, from whom they are supposed to escape and become financially independent.
It is no coincidence that every male character in this novel experiences loneliness. But even more important than loneliness is human disconnectedness — a feeling of stagnation and of not having anything to do with oneself or with the world. Stagnation surely appears in the tentative, oftentimes tense relationship between Sensei and the young narrator; they spend the first section of the novel talking to each other at great length, and yet nothing seems to click until the final section when the old man allows the youth to read his testament, his confession, his past from which he has never been able to escape. Sensei’s testament reminds us that we are, after all, mortal and that we are also vain, self-serving creatures at heart. Like K, we strive for ideals that we can’t live up to.
I find it interesting that three men commit suicide in the novel. Junshi signals the last gasp of the old way, the Japan of the past before it became modernized. Just as General Noji commits suicide and follows his lord to the grave, so does Sensei commit suicide and follows not only his lord but also his closest friend, K, to the grave. Both men have performed honorable acts in their eyes because their deaths serve as symbols of the human connections they once shared with people. But the times are changing, changing forever. Finally, the death of Emperor Meiji at the end of the novel symbolizes Japan’s passage from the old way to the new, modernized, westernized country of the future.
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