Natsume Soseki

Born Natsume Kinnosuke in Ushigome, Shinjuku ard,central Tokyo in the last year of the Edo-era, 1867, by he time he died almost half a century later in 1916, Soseki Natsume as he was known for much of his adult life and is still known in the decades since his passing has left an indelible mark on the Japanese literary psyche that is unlikely to be erased anytime soon.

Such fictional classics as I am a Cat, Sanshiro and Botchan remain popular reads today, almost a century after the teacher turned writer met his maker.

Soseki’s story, as with so many in the Japanese literary field at the end of the 19th century centers on tragedy, loss and the ability to live through it all. Poverty is never far away and likely due to the unhappiness in his own life, pervades so many of the tales still told about Soseki as well as his own stories.

It is known that his mother died when he was just a child and he was all but packed off to the house of a family servant for many years, rarely seeing any of his siblings or his father. By the time he had matured into a young man just out of his teens, he had started to develop a yearning to put pen to paper. He learnt the art of haiku composition from the famed poet Masaoka Shiki whom
he met in the late 1880s, headed off to the English capital as part of a Japanese government scholarship in 1901 and remained there until 1903.

His London home is now a museum to his life having survived the London Blitz, but it is common knowledge that the time he spent in London was so miserable that he rarely left his room, save for a lone trip to the Scottish town of Pitlochry. Soseki himself said at the time that he felt as if he had been cast among the wolves (of British society) such was his despair.

Once back in Japan, and back into teaching, he eventually found himself at Tokyo University where he continued to be published until the end of his prematurely short life. Throughout the 20th century his books formed the backbone of many of Japan’s reading classes, with, perhaps the final honor he will receive, his face appearing on the Japanese 1,000 yen note for 1984 to 2004. He has
since been replaced by biologist Hideyo Noguchi.

His grave (pictured), as do the graves of literaty figures in the west, in Zoshigaya Cemetery, remains a point of focus for so many fans of his work and is best accessed via the Zoshigaya stop on the Minowabashi to Waseda Arakawa Toden tram line near Higashi Ikebukuro.

Ironically, or maybe intentional, Soseki’s grave is located just metres from the grave of the man he replaced as a teacher in Tokyo University’s English Faculty – and another great writer on things Japanese – Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) who was also known in Japanese as Koizumi Yakumo.

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