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

Professor Hirota represents not only the most knowledgeable but also the wisest character in the novel, universally respected. This comes out in the scene at the very beginning of the novel where Sanshirō looks at him and sees only a shabbily dressed, middle-aged man with a mustache who, at his age, is still riding third class; Sanshirō inwardly looks down on him, comfortably contrasting the man with himself and the bright future he has in store. Yet the man says things that Sanshirō has never heard before: Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War hardly made the country a first-class power; it’s actually a sorry place with just one thing to be proud of — Mount Fuji, a product of nature. The professor’s unmincing words astonish Sanshirō, who is fresh out of Kyushu. He feels compelled to offer a counterargument:

… He said defensively, “But from now on, Japan is sure to develop.”

“Japan’s headed for a fall,” the man said coolly.

Say a thing like that in Kumamoto and you’d get a punch in the nose, or be called a traitor. The atmosphere Sanshirō grew up in left no room in his head for such an idea. Just because he was young, was the man having some fun at his expense? The man kept on grinning. Yet his way of talking was perfectly composed. Not knowing what to think, Sanshirō held his tongue.

His companion went on, “Tokyo is bigger than Kumamoto. Japan is bigger than Tokyo. And what’s bigger than Japan is…” He paused and looked at Sanshirō, who was listening intently. “… the inside of your head. That’s bigger than Japan. Don’t let yourself get bogged down. You may believe your way of thinking is for the good of the nation, but you could actually be bringing it down.”

When he heard this, Sanshirō felt he had indeed left Kumamoto. And he realized, too, what a small person his Kumamoto self had been.

What makes the inside of one’s head “bigger” than a nation? It is thinking in a national language that came into being through translations of universal languages . On his way from Kumamoto to Tokyo, Sanshirō encounters for the first time his own language used as a national language — a language that can transcend and critique one’s own nation-state, a language that presumes a global consciousness. A naïve young man, Sanshirō does not fully appreciate the invaluableness of someone like Professor Hirota. The first chapter ends: “The bearded man never told Sanshirō his name. There were bound to be men like this everywhere in Tokyo, Sanshirō thought, and never bothered to ask.”

Needless to say, this portends that even in Tokyo, the likes of Professor Hirota are hard to find.

Professor Hirota appears as someone who can use Japanese in such a way precisely because he is constantly reading books in Western languages and thinking, while mentally translating what he has read into Japanese. Indeed, scenes abound in which the subject of translation comes up. Meeting Sanshirō again in Tokyo, Professor Hirota recognizes him and asks out of the blue: “Did you ever try to translate Mount Fuji?” When some young people, including Sanshirō, help the professor move into a new rental house with all his foreign books, he asks them how to translate the English proverb, “Pity is akin to love.” And a discussion on how to translate ensues. Easily influenced, even Sanshirō, as he thinks of Mineko, starts having thoughts like this: “Beautiful women could be translated any number of ways.” Mineko herself puzzles Sanshirō with a question: “Do you know the English translation for ‘lost child’?”

And it is through the character of Professor Hirota that the novel stealthily asks the critical questions: What does it mean to pursue scholarship in Japanese? Is it truly possible to do so? Such questions underlie the fact that Professor Hirota, with all his knowledge and wisdom, can be seen as little more than a walking encyclopedia, someone who makes no good use of the vast store of knowledge and wisdom he has acquired. Though he reads more Western books than anyone else, he never writes anything himself. He absorbs all the glories of the world’s knowledge and never emits any light of his own. This is why he is referred to as “the Great Darkness” by Sanshirō’s classmate Yojirō, the clown in the novel, who lives with Professor Hirota as his disciple-cum-houseboy. Professor Hirota is always smoking a cigarette and, in Yojirō’s words, “emitting his customary puffs of philosophy.” He does not have a single published book to his name. He occasionally writes essays of sorts, but nobody pays any attention. And he is content with teaching English at the preparatory college.

Feeling sorry for Professor Hirota and frustrated at the same time, Yojirō works behind the scenes to try to get him a position on the English literature faculty at Tokyo Imperial University. He first publishes a long magazine essay entitled “The Great Darkness” in which he sings the professor’s praises in extravagant terms. The essay is “particularly severe on foreigners teaching foreign literature in the university” and argues that the university should hire Japanese professors: “Of course, the situation cannot be helped if there is no one suitable, but here is Professor Hirota.” Yojirō then goes on to organize a student gathering where he delivers a ringing speech: “We’ve got to get hold of someone who can satisfy the youth of the new age. A foreigner won’t do. They don’t have what it takes.”

Yojirō’s efforts are in vain. The position goes to someone “who had until recently been studying abroad under government orders”—in other words, to a man like Sōseki himself, who in real life obtained the very position in question after studying abroad under government orders. Sōseki’s mischievous humor has Yojirō say he heard a rumor that “the other fellow was pulling strings.” This subplot is a light sideline in which Yojirō ends up causing trouble for all concerned. But the historical background of the subplot is anything but light. The incident symbolizes the incremental replacement of foreign faculty by Japanese that had to take place for the Japanese language to be elevated into a language used in academia.

Professor Hirota himself does not seem the least bit disappointed at the failure of Yojirō’s scheme. He scoffs at Yojirō’s long essay and goes on teaching at his college, unruffled. The reader is led to believe that this is because he is a man who transcends the worldly. Yet I would argue that there is a deeper significance. Professor Hirota attaches no great importance to becoming a professor of English literature at Tokyo Imperial University. Indeed, how on earth could he or any Japanese become a true scholar of English literature? Even if the Japanese were able to pursue scholarship in their own language, so long as they all wrote in their own language, how could anybody’s writing enter the world’s chain of “texts to read”?

Though he has no publications to speak of, Professor Hirota seems to be idly working on a magnum opus that, Yojirō fears, will amount only to “a heap of scrap paper” when he dies. He is a lazy scholar not despite having read more books from the West than anyone else, but precisely because he has. He understands all too well how ultimately futile it is for a liberal-arts scholar like himself to write and publish in Japanese, how impossible it is for him to make a contribution in the field that way. And yet the West is too far, psychologically as well as geographically, for him to try writing in English — or in any other European language for that matter. Furthermore, even if, against all odds, he did write his book in English, what Western scholar of the time would read it? What Western scholar in his right mind would trouble to read a book on English literature written by a Japanese?