from Eight Miscellaneous Views of Mount Hakone and The Sawdust Records

When not writing his many novels and essays, Natsume Sōseki, although ethnically and linguistically Japanese, composed a total of 208 kanshi over the course of his life. Kanshi—classical Chinese poetry authored by Japanese writers—was one of the earliest literary styles to develop in Japan, alongside its prose equivalent kanbun (which Sōseki practiced too), and was first anthologized in the Kaifūsō of 751 by a nameless scribe, some three centuries after the introduction of kanji from China through tributary travel and trade. For nearly a millennium and a half, despite its markedly different syntax, the Chinese written language served a central literary, scholarly, and bureaucratic role in Japan, as it did in Vietnam and Korea (comparable to Latin in pre-modern Europe). It was only going into the twentieth century that Japan, with its newfound nationalism and Western-inspired modernization, began keeping government documents in vernacular Japanese and the prestige of Chinese literature finally faded in favor of native forms and those spurred on by the new literatures of the world, which made Sōseki among the last true Japonic disciples of literary Chinese. He was, and still is, popularly known for his seminal realist novels about contemporary society and, perhaps secondly, as the one-time face of the thousand-yen bill. His English literature expertise was another source of renown, having traveled to England in 1900 on a high-profile academic exchange. But Chinese literature was Sōseki’s first and, in a sense, longest-lived love. His oldest kanshi dates to 1889—years before the 1905-06 serialization of I Am a Cat, his debut novel that would seal his fame—and
his last was written weeks before his death from a stomach ulcer. The five poems presented here are drawn from the author’s early life, written before he achieved the celebrity status that he both hated and craved, and all but unread today outside the cloisters of Sōseki scholarship.