Minae Mizumura - The Fall of Language in the Age of English

It often happens when a national language is formed that there emerges, almost magically, a national figure who single-handedly comes to embody that historical process. In Japan, Natsume Sōseki, the author of Sanshirō , was such a figure. After having spent two and a half years in London, Sōseki returned to Japan in 1903 and became the first Japanese to teach English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, replacing Lafcadio Hearn, an English-language writer best known for introducing Japanese ghost stories to the West. Sōseki naturally conducted his classes in Japanese, thus heralding the conversion of university instruction to the vernacular and elevating the language in the process. Moreover, because he went on to leave the university after only a few years to become a novelist, he also came to embody the dilemma faced by Japanese intellectuals then and now.

THOSE IN SANSHIRŌ WHO READ EXTERNAL LANGUAGES

Let us take a closer look now at Sōseki’s novel Sanshirō , which was cited earlier. 1It is a sort of bildungsroman about a naïve young man who leaves his family — probably landowners — in the rustic southern island of Kyushu to attend Tokyo Imperial University. As the novel progresses, he meets urbanized, sophisticated people for the first time in his life; develops an unspoken infatuation with a woman who breaks his heart by abruptly marrying someone else; and, amid confusion and turmoil, achieves a measure of growth.

A fine novel captures the hearts of readers across time, and I am sure that many Japanese identify with Sanshirō even today, especially those who, like him, have left the countryside to study in a big city. It is natural that even today, many readers should identify with the innocent young protagonist so full of the future, so full of dreams.

Nonetheless, a very different Sanshirō emerges when we take a step back and see the novel as a kind of metanovel. Set in and around the university campus, it could first be read as an analysis of how a university functions in Japan. But it could also be read as a work that allows the reader to see, more lucidly than any work of scholarship, why so many Meiji intellectuals turned to writing novels and why novels were destined to flourish in Japan. To push our interpretation further, Sanshirō highlights the historical necessity for national literature to thrive during this time of rapid modernization.

Let us go back to the scene on the train bound for Tokyo. The night before, Sanshirō has had a rather humiliating experience. When he got off the train in Nagoya for the night, the woman sitting across from him got off as well and asked him to help her find an inn. He did not have the nerve to say no. He found a seedy-looking inn befitting the third-class passengers that they were; the innkeeper instantly mistook them for a couple, and before Sanshirō knew it, he was forced not only to stay in the same room with the woman but also to share the same futon with her. Hastily making up some nonsensical excuse, he rolled up a towel to create a barrier between them and spent the entire night lying beside her wide awake, rigid with tension. When they parted in the morning, she broke her silence, saying suddenly with a mocking smile, “Quite a coward, aren’t you?” Now, on the train from Nagoya, Sanshirō ruminates on her words: “Not even his mother could have hit home so accurately.” He recalls the woman’s mocking smile. He cannot help but feel depressed. Then, to lift his spirits, he imagines the bright future awaiting him: “He was going to Tokyo. He would enter the university, associate with famous scholars, befriend students of taste and character. Do research in the library. Write books, win acclaim. Make his mother happy.” He goes on self-indulgently in this vein.

While all this is going on his mind, spread on Sanshirō’s lap is a book that he took from his bag a little while ago and has been pretending to read: Francis Bacon’s Essays . Now, here is a question few Japanese readers may have bothered to ask: Is the book a translation or the English original? The novel does not tell us. The present-day reader, long accustomed to the idea that every important book from the West has been rendered into Japanese, is likely to assume that it’s a translation. But if one stopped to consider that the novel was written over a hundred years ago, one might conjecture that the book was in the original — which I think would be the case. At the time, translations of Western books were rare. Once we can picture Sanshirō perusing a book in English, we have already taken an important step. We can expect this novel to be about bilingual intellectuals of the Meiji period in whose lives reading Western languages, particularly English, played a central role.

We soon find out that Sanshirō is enrolled in the Department of English Literature at Tokyo Imperial University. We see him reading English — or trying to. The bearded man he met on the train in the scene quoted in the previous chapter, Professor Hirota, is not just a teacher at the university’s affiliated preparatory college but a teacher of English. We see Hirota reading English all the time. Another important character, a research physicist named Nonomiya who comes from Sanshirō’s hometown and is a few years his senior, also reads English as a matter of course. Even the beautiful Mineko, with whom Sanshirō eventually falls in love in his timid and inarticulate way, reads English, though she is “merely” a woman. Her pronunciation, Sanshirō thinks, is excellent.

The university library is quite naturally filled with books from the West: “Some of the books were piled so high you needed a ladder to reach them. Books darkened by handling and greasy fingerprints, books with titles of shining gold. Sheepskin, cowhide, two-century-old paper and, piled on top of it all, dust. Precious dust that took two or three decades to accumulate.” These books piled with “precious dust” are books that the university has been working hard to acquire, volume by volume, language by language, since the Meiji Restoration.

Sanshirō is stunned to realize the diligent use people have made of the library: “He was amazed to discover that every book he handled, no matter what it was, had been read at least once. There were pencil marks scattered throughout. Once, just out of curiosity, he picked up a novel by an author named Aphra Behn. Nobody will have read this, he told himself before opening it. But again, there they were, the neat pencil marks. This was really too much.”

And who should be one of those people who have read Aphra Behn but Professor Hirota! Of the main characters, Hirota reads English the most and hence uses the library the most. He informs Sanshirō that Aphra Behn was England’s first female writer to become a professional novelist. He even tells him that a man by the name of “Southerne” subsequently wrote a play based on her work. Professor Hirota also has a substantial private collection of books in English, which he seems to lend out generously. Indeed, although he has never traveled abroad, he knows more about the West than anyone else, having read more books in Western languages than anyone else. He tells Sanshirō the curious story of Leonardo da Vinci injecting arsenic into the trunk of a peach tree experimentally, to see if the poison would circulate to the fruit. He also informs him about the construction of a Greek theater and explains the meaning of certain Greek and Latin words: theatron, orchêstra, skêne, proskênion . Sanshirō learns from him that, according to some German or other, the theater in Athens could seat seventeen thousand, which was on the small side, as the largest one could seat fifty thousand. The professor even knows that there were two kinds of tickets, ivory and lead, and that a day’s performance cost the equivalent of twelve sen; a full three-day program, thirty-five sen. Professor Hirota, who seems to know everything, is a seeker of knowledge par excellence.