Reading Haruki Murakami again led me to this classic of Japanese 20th century literature, since Murakami provided the introduction to this latest translation by Jay Rubin. "Sanshirō" is the story of a young country boy who goes to Tokyo for his university education, and Murakami's introduction points out that, if the book is effective, it is because it provides an affectionate and accurate representation of the "fragrance" of this particular time in one's life, regardless of where the reader may live.The setting is 1908. Japan, after centuries of non-contact with the West, is open to European and American influences in art, dress, religion, politics, philosophy and expression. The setting, then, is a hurricane of societal change, and that alone would be worthy of a panoramic novel of ideas. But Sanshirō, who has experienced rural life with its suppositions and superstitions, is thrust into modern Japan to receive his education. He approaches the city with a mix of skepticism, innocence, fear and expectation.What follows then is a story with an intimate setting and a small cast of interrelated characters. "Sanshirō" is a novel of college life, but its most important aspects are not lectures or the ideas the characters wrestle with, but what characters learn about the world they will encounter, and themselves, and how they deal with each other. Just as in every university the world over, passionate young people display inordinate emotion over ideas they barely understand, but which dominate them. The students give birth to ideas that have been rubbed raw, already thought and rethought a thousand times. These minds are too young to know how unoriginal these fancies are, but vain enough to exult in the ideas as if they are brand new. "How many aeons did nature expend in fashioning a precious jewel?," one asks. "And how many aeons did the jewel lie gleaming in the earth until fate brought it forth?"Sanshirō is a familiar character, a wise fool who is oblivious to experience as he makes friends with the ebullient Yojirō and pursues the shy Mineko. He "smells of the farm," Yojirō tells him, but his reticence keeps him in awe of the figures he encounters and mindful of danger.This marks him, though, as a "coward," as evident in his first encounter with a woman on a train headed to Tokyo. He ends up sharing a bath and a bed in an inn with a strange woman, but nothing passes between them. It is only at their parting that he realizes she was waiting for him to make a move. Later, his mother repeats the charge that he has always been cowardly. Yet it took some courage for Sanshirō to venture to college in the first place. What we see is not so much a man who is avoiding danger as one who is blind to it. The only question is how willingly blind he is. He is learning, and more than anything, learning to understand. The emotional language of those he meets is foreign to him - just as foreign as "Hamlet" is when he waits for the Danish prince to say something more recognizably Japanese.The question of Japanese identity lies dormant in the novel, as the definition is still being debated during this period. The Japanese are learning, in the early 1900s, to become part of a larger world community. There is awe at some western ideas and healthy skepticism. But a professor counsels Sanshirō from the beginning "not to surrender himself" to the ideas he encounters, which is also a theme running through the novel. All of these grand philosophical and societal ideas are nothing, the same professor says later, because man does not operate according to mechanical laws. The same experiences inspire different responses from men living side by side.The professor offers another critique, in that western ideals have made people less hypocritical, because they are "hyper-villains" - instead of caring for others for the benefit of public approval, they now care for themselves out in the open. This has made society meaner, but more honest, "natural ugliness in all its glory," the professor says. This is one of the paradoxes of modern living, of course. We surrender civilization in the service of "honesty," but we instead give dishonesty a bigger home in wider society. We surrender altruism because it inconvenient, but we mourn the loss. And where does Sanshirō fit in? All he seems to want, even though he doesn't understand it, is Mineko.The bittersweetness of college, though, is that it eventually ends, as does youth. Mineko will not marry Sanshirō, but only because he eventually proves the prophecy of his cowardice. Later on, Sanshirō learns that Mineko is a Christian, which makes her common judgment on others - that they are "stray sheep" - more understandable. It also makes the heart ache to hear her parting words to him, from Psalms 51: "For I acknowledge my transgression, and my sin is ever before me." She has mistakenly given her heart to a man who will not take it. He has learned something, but we are unsure if it is enough to change him.
“When he heard that Sanshiro was going to school forty hours a week, his eyes popped. "You idiot! Do you think it would 'satisfy' you to eat what they serve at your rooming house ten times a day?""What should I do?" Sanshiro pleaded."Ride the streetcar," Yojiro said.Sanshiro tried to find Yojiro's hidden meaning, without success."You mean a real streetcar?" he asked.Yojiro laughed uncontrollably. "Get on the streetcar and ride around Tokyo ten or fifteen times. After a while it will just happen by itself- you will become satisfied. "Why?""Why? Well, look at it this way. Your head is alive, but if you seal it up inside dead classes, you're lost. Take it outside and get the wind into it. Riding the streetcar is not the only way to get satisfaction, of course, but it's the first step, and the easiest.” Natsume SosekiJapan is struggling with the modernization/westernization of Japan at the turn of the last century. Sanshiro is a young man of peasant country stock who has done well enough with his studies that he is allowed to go to Tokyo to the university. He finds himself becoming friends with the intelligentsia: professors, writers, painters, but most intriguing of all with beautiful, strangely intelligent women. He is twenty-three and he knows nothing. He goes to classes religiously because he is studious and because he knows by being industrious is how he has been successful in school to this point. The suggestions by his new friend Yojiro to ride the streetcars instead of going to class is a philosophical concept beyond his scope of understanding. Yojiro is on to something though, because what Sanshiro needs more than anything else is new experiences. He needs more life before what he learns in school will be of any use to him. He is always the fish out of the water. The person who feels the most behind in discovering who he is. ”The others were truer to themselves than he was, he had to admit. They were people of the city who lived beneath heavens that were broad enough to enable them to be true to themselves.” I certainly had some flashbacks to when I first left the farm to move to Phoenix. I always felt like a rube, but it was also exhilarating because I was discovering how much there was to learn. I was a quick study and one advantage I’ve always had is being able to apply what I read to my own life. Sanshiro learns quickly, as did I, that the best way to learn was to be quiet, speak only enough to keep others talking. He falls in love, not by design, but because he meets this woman who sees life with more depth, with more nuance than he does. She awakens ideas and concepts in him. He is thinking about things she said days after their last encounter. When he is walking away from seeing her he is already plotting how he can see her again. Food tastes better. The air smells sweeter. Anything seems possible. His emotions run high. ”Lately, Sanshiro had become the captive of a woman, he had surrendered himself. It would be pleasant enough to be lovers, but this was an incomprehensible kind of surrender. He did not know if he was being loved or laughed at, whether he should be terrified or contemptuous, whether he should end it all or go ahead. He was angry and frustrated.”Remember what it was like? Brilliantly tortuous and oh so brutal when like a house of cards your love is folded up and reshuffled. I’m not sure if Natsume Soseki was making fun of the Japanese obsession with Henrik Ibsen or he was joining the course of admirers. There are many references in the book to someone being a character out of Ibsen or someone being Ibsenesque. Sanshiro’s innocence is doomed of course. It isn’t a trait we admire in a grown man anyway. We are expected to be less gullible, less emotional, certainly not a tangle of unstructured thoughts. It is difficult to pass our wisdom to people younger than ourselves without webbing it with cynicism. What we find annoying in them are the very things we have worked so hard to tamp down in ourselves. By destroying innocence in others we continue to keep it contained in ourselves. No wonder young people ignore us. This was a quick, pleasant read. Natsume Soseki was much more assured with his themes in this book than he was in his first book Botchan but then that too is probably just representative of an author losing his innocence as well.
Do You like book Sanshirō (2002)?
When I first saw this novel's title, I thought it's the story as depicted as a cartoon or movie series on television that our children enjoyed watching some 15-20 years ago. I was then reading Natsume Soseki's excerpts in the pocketbook compiled by Donald Keene. Indeed it was my misunderstanding since it's a story about Sanshiro, a provincial protagonist dictated by fate to pursue his university life in Tokyo some 100 years ago ( this novel first published in 1908-9).There are a few points I'd like to say after reading his "gentle humour and doomed innocence" (back cover) as narrated lively and matter-of-factly. First, this is another fine translation by Jay Rubin because, I think, we can readily follow and clearly understand nearly most of what the author wants to say so that his readers can visualize the plot, the atmosphere and the context as related to each character. By the way, I first enjoyed reading Haruki Murakami's "Kafka On the Shore" translated into English by Prof. Rubin years ago.Second, I liked the Tokyo description in which I can compare to what I saw from out visit last May and thus it helps create my admiration as one of the most technologically-advanced capitals in the world (4G for the time being while Thailand's bidding for 3G). For example, "What startled him most of all was Tokyo itself, for no matter how far he went, it never ended. ... Everything looked as if it were being destroyed, and at the same time everything looked as if it were under construction. The sheer movement of it all was terrible." (p. 17) Moreover, I also liked its natural setting as narrated in the novel, for instance, "That night, in its true form, was dark. Passing beyond this place illuminated by the power of men, he thought he could feel an occasional drop of rain. The wind sighed in the trees. ..." (p. 216)Third, I liked Sanshiro from what he does, says and reacts. I mean the author's done his best to create him as human as possible, therefore, we simply can't expect any miracle during his stay in Tokyo to study. You'd be disappointed if you want to read a thrilling story of a godlike hero. In fact, Sanshiro is a 23-year-old student sometime fascinated by Mineko's beauty and appeal. However, he is true to himself and does his best by returning the 20 yen to Mineko successfully, unlike mischievous Yojiro with his unthinkable and ungrateful loan from Sanshiro of course.I agreed with its citation, that is, "... it has come to be a perennial classic in Japan." (back cover). I think Haruki Murakami's fans would be delighted to read his interesting preface and I found the chronology informative. Finally, we have to feel sorry for Sanshiro who seems unlucky in love but he deserves our respects due to his unwavering natural character as well as his ways of looking at the world. The two words, 'Stray sheep' first mockingly used to tease him by Mineko were repeated by Sanshiro in the last sentence. I wonder if he means to be partly amused and partly angry, and who the real stray sheep is.
—umberto
Sanshiro by Natsume Soseki is a novel about Japanese masculinity in which Sanshiro, our hero, comes to terms with his role as a college-educated man from the country. Sanshiro is a Modern(ist) hero who develops a heightened sense of self-consciousness as a result of the industrialized and urbane environment of higher education in the city, a confusing confrontation with “unintelligible” Western literary artifacts that seem important in Japanese education, and from his indomitable fear of women. In the city, Sanshiro finds himself among flowers with “no fragrance to speak of.” The lectures that he initially painstakingly transcribes come to “neither cheer nor depress him,” and he is “quite unable to determine whether they were boring or not.” In fact, he comes to find it “strangely pleasant that he could not understand the lecture.” This period of Japanese history is referred to as a time in which “a freedom of the mind” is necessary and desirable through education. For this reason, Sanshiro reads his literature closely but “when he asked himself what he read, there was nothing. There was so much nothing, it was funny.” His journey to become an academic becomes meaningful due to its meaninglessness. Sanshiro “could not say he felt satisfied, but neither was he totally unsatisfied.” He is positioned in the lukewarm existence of a Modern hero who straddles — often confusedly — disparate states of being.Such a contradictory journey leads Sanshiro, of course, to a different — perhaps somewhat related — journey of finding love. The novel begins with an embarrassing encounter with a “dark” woman on the train who weasels her way into his hotel room in order to, apparently, have a sexual encounter after much staring-down. After putting herself in Sanshiro’s way in just about every way imaginable, the woman observes, “You’re quite a coward, aren’t you?” Sanshiro thinks and over-thinks whether he should approach the willing woman. After an uneventful night together, he reflections that “He should have tried to go a little farther. But he was afraid. She called him a coward when they parted, and it shocked him, as though a twenty-three-year-old weakness had been revealed at a single blow.” He comes to the conclusion that “desire is a frightening thing.” Women, really, are frightening things for Sanshiro as we learn through his similar, unproductive affair with Mineko.Mineko is a Modern Japanese woman who has the license to wear mismatched sandals, bright kimonos, and to give her money to whomever she pleases. She scares Sanshiro but also attracts him. For whatever reason, she likes Sanshiro — seems to want to marry him. Sanshiro wants to marry Mineko the “hypervillain,” too, but doesn’t. He has things to say but “cannot verbalize them” because “women are terrifying.” Mineko is disappointed and marries a very attractive friend of her brother’s. Sanshiro is disappointed and returns to his constant awareness of his body, which reflects the observations that he hears from Professor Hirota (a kind of academic hero) on his way to the city:“‘We Japanese are sad-looking things next to them [Americans]. We can beat the Russians, we can become a ‘first class power,’ but it doesn’t make any difference. We still have the same faces, the same feeble little bodies.’m [...] Sanshiro had never expected to meet anyone like this after Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese war. The man was almost not Japanese, he felt.”At first disgusted with Hirota’s observations about the Japanese male body, Sanshiro comes to think like-mindedly as he observes “the awareness that he was a youth of the new age had been strengthened [...] but nothing else had been strengthened; physically he was still the same.” This sense of Sanshiro’s physicality is contrasted with Mineko’s eventual husband, who is very attractive. Mineko marries the hot friend. Hirota, that all-admired “Great Darkness” doesn’t get a real position with the university.Sanshiro ends with Sanshiro’s verdict that “Tokyo is not a very interesting place.” We are led to believe that Sanshiro, too, is uninteresting despite all the effort he has put in. His journey is disappointing. He hasn’t changed from the coward that he has been “since childhood.” We are left to acknowledge the role of the Japanese male — especially in contrast to the progressive Japanese female — is an impoverished enterprise.
—Jenn McCollum
"I'm shy boy!"I don't know where it came from, but saying "I'm shy boy!" in English and moving your hands to a cutesy under the chin pose was something some young men did (do?) in Japan. One time, the male teachers were drunk and talking about going to a girly bar. One of those that wasn't saying "I'm shy boy!" kept saying "It's paradise in the earth! It's paradise in the earth!" but his pronunciation was such that us two native English speakers thought he was saying, "It's paradise in the arse! It's paradise in the arse!" We weren't quite sure what was going on ... Anyway, Sanshiro is a very adorable tale about your average Japanese shy boys. It's cute because there are 120 million Japanese people but reading Sanshiro makes such a feat seem impossible.Bits I liked:"'How do you feel? What is it, a headache? It must have been the crowd. There were some pretty low-class men in the doll shed - did one of them do something?'"Hmmm."Lately, Sanshiro had become the captive of a woman. He had surrendered himself to her. It would be pleasant enough if they were lovers, but this was an incomprehensible kind of surrender. He did not know if he was being loved or laughed at, whether he should be terrified or contemptuous, whether he should end it or keep going."I love that "terrified or contemptuous" are the two options."'No, thanks. I'd rather take up the Noh drum. I don't know, when I hear the plop of that little drum, I feel I'm not in the twentieth century anymore. I like that.'"
—David
