Reclaiming ethics through love: ‘literature’ in Natsume Sōseki’s novel Sorekara

Abstract

This study seeks to shed new light on a well-known contradiction: why did Natsume Sōseki start writing novels (shōsetsu) despite his suspicion, if not dislike of the genre? A major reason for his suspicion was the novel’s representation of love and romance, conforming to the new Meiji concept of literature (bungaku) derived from Western models. This focus greatly differed from the traditional notion of literature to which Sōseki was still attached, which emphasized the social, moral, and political mission of literary texts. Through a rereading of his novel Sorekara (And Then, 1909), I argue that Sōseki paradoxically sought to retrieve the traditional mission of literature through the novel’s focus on male-female romance. Sorekara reflects on the loss of ethical values, associated with the Edo past, as the civilizational crisis of Meiji modernity, but it also presents an adulterous love as the locus where ethical and heroic activity is recovered. Solving the crisis of modernity and the nation, this love briefly reinstitutes literature’s social and political mission, but the conflation of adultery and ethical heroism also leads to an affective and narrative breakdown. Ultimately, this article uncovers Sōseki’s self-conscious and artistic negotiation between irreconcilable notions of literature within his novelistic plots.