And Then, by Natsume Soseki

It is rather a relief, after a long string of positive reviews, to be able to bash something; it is a pity, though, that the book chosen to receive such a bashing is a classic of Japanese literature, widely accepted, or so its introduction claims, as one of the best books by one of Japan’s best authors.

Oops.

Yet, be that as it may, I hated this book. I understood its themes, yes, and I understood why it could be considered a good book: it treats, as so many other novels of its day, the position of Japan vis-a-vis the Western world, the conditions of modernity and the angst and detachment they may bring, and the dilemma of a young generation, or even a young country, trying to find its place in the world.

Sure, this is all well and good, and it certainly was treated thoroughly here, though the character of Daisuke, an indolent but educated young man, who wastes his time reading foreign novels and not working, because, or so he claims, “the relationship between Japan and the West is no good.” His very idleness, then, is painted as a rebellion, against the hard-working, stressed-out members of his generation who only try to catch up with and imitate the West, against the traditional older folks who only encourage him to marry and find work, to focus on potatoes rather than diamonds, and against his own self, which loves foreign novels yet rejects them for being “too bald, too self-indulgent, and moreover, too unsubtly rich.”

(That last quote, of course, gratified me, since, as a person used to Western novels and culture, I feel precisely the opposite about Japanese novels: too subtle!)

While I’m all for the theme, then, and while I find those issues truly interesting, I still didn’t enjoy the novel. It was, in a word, boring. The problem with writing a book about an idler, and I’ve seen plenty of other authors fall into this trap, is that the character doesn’t do anything. And, what’s worse, that’s the point. So then the reader has to endure 250 pages of a character waffling, trying to make up his mind: to marry or not to marry? To love or not to love? To work or not to work? To be or not to be? At least in Hamlet there were swordfights; in this novel there are only soliloquies. So, while there were some beautiful images presented, and some beautiful sentences produced, and some interesting issues addressed, the novel as a whole wasn’t worth it. Read a poem instead.