“Walking up a mountain track, I fell to thinking. Approach everything rationally, and you become harsh. Pole along in the stream of emotions, and you will be swept away by the current. Give free rein to your desires, and you become uncomfortably confined. It is not a very agreeable place to live, this world of ours.”
And so this is the opening to Soseki Natsume’s novel, The Three Cornered World. I remember watching an American Experience episode on Walt Whitman, where one of the commentators read aloud the very first lines that Whitman included within Leaves of Grass, noting that “everything that is great about Whitman is contained in these opening lines.” Well, the same theory can be applied to Soseki’s novel, The Three Cornered World, albeit everything that is both good and bad is contained in those very opening lines. Meaning, there are some good insights and ideas, yet suppressed are they at times by clunky, pedestrian, clichéd phrasing. In just the opening paragraph, while the first line is interesting, readers are soon drenched with the tired cliché of being “swept away by the current,” followed by several predictable, trite platitudes that if just phrased better would have carried the power Soseki intended. Indeed, the quote is correct in that when succumbing to the subjective world of mere desire and emotion, one actually stagnates because gone is the growth one gets from challenge.
Think of a painter who relies solely on emotion, and paints whatever he “feels,” regardless of technique or discipline. Everyone has feelings, but it’s learning how to express them well that makes one an artist. And this “not very agreeable place” that is the world is actually result of the struggle between the mind and emotion, but agreement does come when one learns to balance the two. Thomas Wolfe said something similar once, too.
Soseki’s best work is that which is humorous, for it is through his use of humor how he is able to convey the complexity of relationships far better because he does not allow himself to get bogged down by heavy-handedness and at times, melodrama. He is at his best in works like I am a Cat, Botchan or even Kokoro (which thus far has been his best dramatic work I’ve read). As is, The Three Cornered World is rather an erratic book, and I am inclined to think this is due to the mediocre translation (Alan Turney, who continually adds in "Britishisms" throughout, and loses any potential for passion and wordplay — not to mention the occasional incorrect word doesn’t help).
Article comments