Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Natsume Soseki and The London Adventure

First published on Opera, Thur 29th Apr, 2004.

On May the 29th I will be leading a guided walk around London based on the sojourn in this city of one Natsume Soseki. Natsume Soseki was a native of Japan who came to London in 1900, sponsored by his government, to study English literature. He was a pioneer of scholarship, and, after his two year stay and his return to Japan, went on to become one of the foremost novelists of that country. His portrait even appears on the thousand yen note.




The walk is part of a project called The London Adventure, which involves various writers, artists, scholars and similar enthusiasts, getting together to explore London's literary, artistic and psychogeographical past.


So far, I am enjoying very much the research I have been doing in order to support my walk. As part of if, I have begun to read Soseki's novel Sanshiro, which tells of the eponymous country bumpkin from Kyushu - Japan's southern island - going off to Tokyo to become a university student there. The feelings of this naive, unassuming young man in the strange environment of the big city are wonderfully evoked, with a mixture of anxiety and excitement and the gritty realism of everydayness that anyone with a similar experience (or even without?) can easily relate to. Sanshiro believes that he is about to embark on some grand and lofty adventure. However, education proves to be something of a disappointment. Neither the teachers nor the students seem to give a damn about lectures, and he is left feeling very bewildered.


Eventually a friend advises him that "Forty disgusting meals a day will not make you satisfied," and that he should cut his lectures and try riding on a train instead. This, apparently, to clear his head. When his friend considers his head to be cleared, he next advises him to use the library and do his own research. In the margins of one of the books he finds notes scribbled by a former student.


I am reading Sanshiro in the original, which means I have been obliged to translate the following sections in order to post them here. I happen to know that Soseki is out of copyright, so there are no legal problems involved, but since I am forced to work in isolation, I can't be sure that my translations are without mistakes. I think they are correct, though I have my doubts about one or two places. Anyway, should anyone be in a position to correct me, please feel free to contact me at nopperabor@hotmail.com. Now, for the extracts:


When Hegel lectured philosophy at Berlin University, he had not the least intention of peddling philosophy. His lectures were not lectures to expound the truth; they were lectures to embody the truth. They were not lectures of the tongue, but lectures of the heart. When the truth and the human being become one pure essence in the crucible of teaching, what is expounded, what is spoken, is not lecture for the sake of lecture; it is lecture for the sake of 'the way', that is, for the sake of living. When it reaches this stage, the philosophy lecture becomes, for the first time, something worth listening to. Those who vainly roll 'truth'from the tip of their tongue do nothing more than leave behind dead ink on dead pages in the form of empty notes. To what purpose?... Now, for the sake of exams, in other words, for a crust of bread, I swallow my bitterness, I swallow my tears, and I read this book. But, with head in hands, I curse the exam system for all eternity! You who read this, remember my curse!


And later:


The students who gathered in Berlin from all quarters to hear Hegel speak, had not gathered there from ambition, to use the lectures as material to earn food and clothing. Simply, they had heard that the philosopher Hegel spread supreme and universal truth from his rostrum, and, because they were earnest in their desire for improvement and salvation, they gathered beneath that rostrum; it was nothing other than an expression of their pure-hearted longing to understand their own doubts and disquiets. For this reason they listened to Hegel, and in doing this they decided their futures. They built their own destinies. For we in Japan to believe that our students, who listen blankly to their lectures, who blankly graduate and leave, are of the same kind as these, is the greatest vanity under heaven. We are nothing more than a typewriter. Moreover, we are a greed-stricken typewriter. What we do, what we think, what we say - none of it has any link with an earnest and lively society. Unto death we go blankly. Unto death we go blankly.


I find this a very powerful indictment of the Japanese education system as it was at the time, and as I myself have experienced it. I am interested very much in the lament here that education should be equated with ambition. There has been much debate about top-up fees in Britain recently, but I think what I find most offensive about the policy is the assumption behind it that higher education is somehow about making money. It's not. My higher education enabled me to translate the passages above from Japanese, but no one is paying me for this, and so far, it seems, no one is even willing to dream of paying me for this. And yet, if I were to go to university now, knowing I would come out with a debt of some thirty or forty THOUSAND pounds, the pressure would be on me, not to understand what makes human civilisation great, but simply to understand how to make as much money as I possibly can. This is one more reason why, in the words of Avid Merrion, I would like to kill Tony Blair with a house brick.




Incidentally, the word for 'blank' in the above passages is 'nopperabor', the same as my e-mail address, and the same as the name I gave the evil, vampiric cosmic bureaucrats in my novella 'The Psychopomps'.


Unto death we go blankly! Unto death we go blankly!