Kokoro - loneliness and love

Kokoro is a book by the renowned Japanese author Natsume Soseki. It follows the story of two unnamed men: the narrator and his friend who he only ever refers to as Sensei. the story is split into three parts: Sensei and I, My parents and I, and Sensei's testament. Throughout, The younger narrator makes many efforts to try and get close to Sensei, but he feels there's always something separating them, and Sensei won't tell him what it is. one day, his father becomes extremely sick and the narrator has to go back to his childhood home to look after him. after repeatedly trying to contact Sensei via letter and telegram with no success for months, he suddenly receives an extremely long scroll from Sensei. On a whim, he decides to go back to Tokyo in an attempt to see him again, and he reads the letter on the train. the letter ends up being his final Testament.

As I mentioned before, the main characters of the story are the unnamed narrator and Sensei. another important character is Sensei's wife, Shizu. however, throughout the story, she is referred to as Ojosan, which is the Japanese equivalent of 'young lady' and this is how I will be referring to her throughout. although we don't find out about this until the final part of the story "sensei's testament", she is a major catalyst for most of the events of the story, albeit indirectly. A final significant character is a young man who is only ever referred to by Sensei as K. The time they shared and his subsequent death is the reason why Sensei is the way he is.

The main theme of Kokoro is simply put loneliness. the entire story follows how different people feel isolated from the world and why. Almost every character in the story is or feels alone in the universe, be that because of their experiences or because of their place in society. while this is a theme that appears through every character, its most pertinent vessel is Sensei.

Sensei from the very beginning of the story is described as being different from those around him. The narrator, in his own loneliness, is desperate to get to know Sensei more intimately, but he quickly discovers that he has built a solid brick wall around himself and it is near impossible to get in. there are many reasons for his loneliness.

the first, and the one that somewhat includes all the others, is his misanthropy. he experienced many betrayals, and they gradually corroded his heart until only a husk was left. he became unable to trust or even like humans. He says to the narrator, “You seem to be under the impression that there is a special breed of bad humans. There is no such thing as a stereotype bad man in this world. Under normal conditions, everybody is more or less good, or, at least, ordinary. But tempt them, and they may suddenly change. That is what is so frightening about men.” (page ?). Sensei doesn't dislike humanity because he thinks people are inherently evil. rather he despises how unreliable they are, and how little it takes to tip them over the balance from good to bad. in Sensei's Testament, he talks about how his uncle betrayed him as a young man out of greed and wanting to take Sensei's wealth for himself. after that point, he was always in doubt about the motives of everyone around him. He never knew if people were truly being kind to him, or if they wanted something from him. this lack of trust in everyone around him led him to isolate himself from the outside world so we wouldn't have to deal with that constant fear.

The second reason for his isolation is his self-hatred. In Sensei's Testament, we find that Sensei somewhat contributed to his best friend K's suicide by marrying Ojosan while being fully aware that K was in love with her and how much torment that fact caused him due to his spiritual practices. Sensei feared yet another "betrayal" from someone he cared about (in this case, his friend marrying Ojosan) and instead decided to betray his friend before he, himself could get hurt. When K discovered that Sensei and Ojosan were engaged, he committed suicide in their shared home. Whether K killed himself because he wanted Shizu for himself or whether it was because of his religious guilt at that fact is left unanswered. However, Sensei was overcome with guilt and self-hatred at what he had done, feeling certain he had a part in his friend's death. Until this point, he had hated most of the world, but not himself: he believed he, along with Ojosan, was one of the few good people in a corrupted world. After K's suicide, however, he realized he was just as corrupt as all the people he despised, and there truly was no good in the world. He never told Ojosan that he felt as if he had killed K as well as if he'd been the one to slit his belly. His bearing the burden alone cast a shadow over their relationship. he still loved her with all his heart, but it was as if K's grave was a wall that separated them and could never be broken down. he separated himself from his wife, and the rest of the world, knowing there was nothing good in it whatsoever. In Sensei and I, he says to the narrator "The memory of having sat at someone's feet will later make you want to trample him underfoot.”. this is reflective of his hesitance of letting the narrator get close to him, out of fear that when he discovers that Sensei is just as awful as the rest of the world, he will want to 'trample him underfoot'

Another form of separation explored in the book is that of the generations. this book is set near and during the end of the Meiji era of Japan. This was the period during which Emperor Meiji was in power. most importantly, however, at the beginning of this era is when Japan was forced to open its borders to the world whereas, for centuries they had almost completely shut themselves in from everywhere else. for this reason, they developed a cultural identity entirely different from the west. the foremost important thing to japan was community, whether that be within a family or city. in 1853, however, America forced Japan to reopen its borders and establish regular trade with the west. this led to extremely rushed cultural development. the west brought its ideologies of self-centeredness and individualism. this caused a huge rift between the pre-invasion generations and the Meiji generations. Sensei regularly brings this up to the narrator. he was part of the generation that experienced some of both worlds, and he expresses to the younger narrator how much lonelier the youth of the new age are than their elders because the sense of community has been ripped apart. for example, he says “You see, loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern age, so full of freedom, independence, and our own egoistical selves.” In Sensei's Testament, he also talks about Ojosan and how she was a woman "untainted by modernity" and how that was one of the biggest reasons he fell in love with her. she didn't have the bitter loneliness of most of the youth in his time, her heart still lived within the spirit of ancient Japan. The rest of humanity, however, was forced to take on a self-serving mentality so quickly that they ended up isolating themselves entirely, himself included.

Sensei is a beautiful character and a perfect vessel for the themes of this book. the story is beautifully written and encompasses so much raw emotion, there is a reason why it is one of the single most famous books in Japanese history. loneliness is such a universal experience, but there are some that experience it at such a all consuming depth that it feels like there's no way to run. this book takes all that and sucks it up into 234 beautiful pages. I want to end this on my favourite quote from the book. one i feel sums up every raw emotion I felt reading this masterpiece.

"You revealed something truly alive from within my very being. You were prepared to rip open my heart and drink at it's warm fountain of blood. I was still alive then. I did not want to die. So I evaded your urgings and promised to do as you asked another day. Now I will wrench open my heart and pour it's blood over you. I will be satisfied if, when my own heart has ceased to beat, your breast houses new life."

So, this is a little assignment i did for my english class a couple months ago. Kokoro is one of my favourite books, so if even one person decided to read it because of me, that would make my heart soar. on the other hand, i dont care too much about who reads this post, i just wanted to get it out there, somewhere