Heroic Adultery: Uncovering 'Literature' in Natsume Sōseki’s Novel Sorekara

Abstract

Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), canonized today as one of Japan’s most famous novelists, was in fact highly suspicious of the modern novel (shōsetsu). An important reason for his suspicion was the novel’s focus on male-female love and desire, in line with the new Meiji concept of “literature” (bungaku) based on Western models. This generic orientation radically differed from the traditional Sino-Japanese understanding of “literature” in which Sōseki was still steeped—an understanding that emphasized the ethical, political, and even heroic mission of texts deemed “literary.” Yet beginning in 1907, the year when he joined the Asahi newspaper as an in-house writer, Sōseki started to produce novels that dramatized the intricacies of love between men and women. My presentation seeks to shed new light on this seeming paradox through a rereading of the novel Sorekara (And Then, 1909). This novel presents the loss of ethical values and feelings, associated with a male homosocial past, as the civilizational crisis of Meiji modernity. But its plot, I argue, also hinges on the possibility to retrieve ethical, even heroic, acts and emotions through an adulterous love. The problematic conflation of adultery and ethical heroism, however, leads to an affective and narrative breakdown, explored in particular in Sorekara’s sequel, the novel Mon (The Gate, 1910), that I briefly discuss at the end. Uncovering the ruptures produced by competing notions of “literature” at the heart of these narratives, my presentation historicizes Sōseki’s literary project and its contradictions at a moment of radical historical change.