Kusamakura

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Kusamakura (1906) is an extraordinary work, written at an extraordinary time in Japan’s history, when the nation was tumbling headlong into the twentieth century and toward its “modern miracle,†even as its traditional past everywhere stil haunted it. Kusamakura was conceived out of this double consciousness and embodies it in fascinating ways. It is very much a novel of its historical moment, a literary experiment that was as new and exciting as the great experiment that was Meiji-era Japan.

Until 1868, when the Meiji era began, Japan had maintained a fiercely isolationist policy that kept it cultural y and political y intact for centuries.

When the nation final y chose, after a brief internal struggle, to submit to external pressure and open its doors, this largely untouched world of “old Japan†was suddenly subjected to violent upheavals, with the immediate rush to modernize and Westernize. In Kusamakura the powerful and inexorable transforming impetus that was impel ing Japan out of its past and into a very different future is embodied in the image of the steam train of the final scene “hurtling blindly into the darkness ahead†with its freight of hapless passengers, an image of the sinister “serpent of civilization†that carries the novel off into its open-ended future. In this final scene the steam train is bearing away men who are leaving to fight in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, a war that had just drawn to its victorious end when Natsume Soseki wrote this work. Though written at the height of the nationalistic fervor that fol owed this victory, the novel portrays the war as a bloodbath whose distant echo of guns has penetrated even the idyl ic peace of a mountain vil age that is otherwise virtual y untouched by the modern world.

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