The Book:
Kokoro
By Natsume Soseki
Translated by Meredith McKinney
Penguin Classics
First Published in 1914
The Talk:
In May the Surgeon General released an 82-page report on America’s epidemic of loneliness. According to the report, in 1960, single-person households accounted for only 13% of all U.S. households. In 2022, that number more than doubled, to 29% of all households. A third of homes today are an individual living alone.
But today’s pandemic-scarred loneliness is nestled within the larger trend of loneliness that began with the loss of community social groups in the late 20th Century. (Bowling Alone)
And that loneliness is nestled within the larger loneliness of alienation in the age of mass media that began earlier still. (Man Against Mass Society)
And that loneliness sits within the even bigger trend of modernity that began with the urbanization, industrialization, and technological transformation of the 19th Century.
None of these waves of loneliness ever really ended. They’ve only deepened with each generation. And it’s easy to imagine people in the near future will spend even less time on social media and more time chatting with personalized bots, driving our loneliness even deeper still.
But it is this first layer of loneliness, the one that began in the 19th Century, which remains with us, that Japanese writer Natsume Soseki explores in his 1914 novel Kokoro.
One of the characters, known only as Sensei, explains it simply:
We who are born into this age of freedom and independence and the self must undergo this loneliness. It’s the price we pay for these times of ours.
Escape to the city
Kokoro is set in the Meiji Era of Japan (1868-1912), a period of rapid modernization in a country that had long closed itself off from the West. In the story, modern culture, such as newspapers, trains, telegrams, and electric light bulbs, rub up against traditional Japanese culture, such as ancestor worship, flower arranging, and kimonos. At one point, a character buys lace-up shoes—a very Western and very modern fashion statement.
All the characters in the novel are pulled between two incompatible approaches to life. Small town life vs. the big city. Family vs. freedom. Honor vs. money.
Around this same time in America there was a popular story plot: The escape from the claustrophobic, backward small town. Willa Cather’s 1915 novel Song of the Lark fits this mold. As does Sinclair Lewis’ 1922 novel Babbitt.
In one memorable scene, the titular Babbitt has found a way to get some free time, away from his family and his work, and this idea of independent, personal time gives him a sense of vertigo:
For many minutes, for many hours, for a bleak eternity, he lay awake, shivering, reduced to primitive terror, comprehending that he had won freedom, and wondering what he could do with anything so unknown and so embarrassing as freedom.
Movies like The Wizard of Oz and It’s A Wonderful Life tell the same story from the opposite direction. Dorothy leans against a hay bale, dreaming of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, finds her way to the big City, but learns in the end that it’s better to never leave home. George Bailey dreams of leaving Bedford Falls to build a professional career, only to learn that the true meaning of life is found in staying put.
Kokoro is more on the Babbitt side. The unnamed narrator returns home after finishing his education to handle some unavoidable family responsibilities. He loathes the experience. The people are ignorant of modern medicine. They are obsessed with what the neighbors will think and say about them. But perhaps worst of all, nobody gets him. He feels disconnected from his family, who all seem absorbed in maintaining values that don’t matter to him one bit. He can’t wait to escape again to Tokyo, where, mostly alone, he feels most like himself.
Man is a wolf to man
Soseki seems to say that we can’t go home. Once you’ve grown up in the modern world, you can’t go back. This is sad. But, at the same time, home wasn’t all that idyllic either.
We miss the close, intimate social bonds of yesteryear—and yet Soskei shows that families are capable of selfishness, cruelty, and deceit. We may miss earlier generations when people had a lot of close friends—but those friends could quickly become our worst enemy, insult us, manipulate us.
Modern society, supported by modern technology, isolates us from others. This makes us more lonely. But it may also allow us to escape bad people. Abuse scandals grow best in informal, intimate, private spaces where a sense of “tradition” and “not going against the family” and immense social pressure are present. Traditional marriage values can form a framework for commitment, but they can also trap spouses in harrowing terror and manipulation.
Much has been made about the toxic consequences of anonymity on the Internet, but the people who wound us in ways that shape our character, our identity, and our destiny are those we know best.
Sigmund Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents that “we are never more vulnerable than when we love.” We hunger for that opportunity to love, we are desperate for that love—only to find that sometimes, when we get that love, we have exposed ourselves to our own personal hell.
Gaze steadfastly into this darkness
Modernity did not make humans bad. And if some people use modern society to escape from the wolves, surely that’s a good thing. The trade-off for being able to escape peer pressure is more loneliness. What we once took for granted, we now have to work for.
But Soseki takes this one step further. If humans cannot be fully trusted, that includes ourselves. To draw a circle of misanthropy, we must stand inside it. We can be kind and then cruel. We can open our hearts to others, gain their trust, and then shut our hearts, invisibly, in silence, in a moment. We can destroy others lives without them even knowing, simply by withholding ourselves.
Here I say “we” to avoid saying “I.” I can destroy people. I can betray people. I can be cruel. The closer you are to me, the easier it gets.
And the sooner we learn this lesson, Soseki seems to say, the wiser we will be. Sensei writes to the narrator:
I will not hesitate to cast upon you the shadow thrown by the darkness of human life. But do not be afraid. Gaze steadfastly into this darkness, and find there the things that will be of use to you. The darkness of which I speak is a moral darkness. I was born a moral man and raised as one. My morality is probably very different from that of young people today. But different though it may be, it is my own. It is not some rented clothing I have borrowed to suit the moment. This is why I believe it will be some use to you, a young man just starting out in life.