A poodle amongst wolves
Francis King
THE TOWER OF LONDON by Natsume Soseki, translated by Damian Flanagan Peter Owen, £14.95, pp. 240, ISBN 0720612349, On one floor of a not easily found house in Clapham, there is a small museum dedicated to the two years, 1900-02, spent by the great Japanese writer Natsume Soseki in England. It is rare to see a non-Japanese face in this modest shrine; but each day unfailingly brings a succession of Japanese pilgrims.
It is writings inspired by Soseki’s stay in London that make up The Tower of London. If the tone is often grim, that is because the stay itself was grim. Having left behind a pregnant wife, the then 31year-old professor of English found his stipend from the Japanese government inadequate to cover the cost of both decent lodgings and the books that he obsessively collected. Since he gave the books precedence, he was obliged to settle in a series of dreary rooming-houses in unfashionable areas of London. He had few friends in the tiny Japanese community and virtually no English ones. It is therefore not surprising that, as he neared the end of his exile, he began to suffer from paranoid delusions. As he himself described it, ‘Amongst the English gentlemen I was a like a poodle amongst a pack of wolves and led a pitiful life.’ What makes this collection so fascinating is that Soseki viewed England as much from the viewpoint of an anthropologist as from that of a creative writer. At one point, amazed by the extravagant hats and veils of the period, he writes of ‘herds of women walking around like horned lionesses with nets on their heads’; at another, he describes his kilted host in Pitlochry as wearing ‘a skirt belonging to a time long ago when no shame was attached to the colour of flesh’.
The London that Soseki so impressively evokes is that of Gustave Doré, with misty sunsets, swirling fog, and streets like narrow valleys hemmed in by gaunt, sheer buildings. The half-educated families with whom he stays horrify him with their vulgarity and exasperate him with their assumption that he knows nothing of English culture. In a brilliant piece, half fiction and half reminiscence, the four members of one such family display hints of incest and illegitimacy in so sinister a manner that, repelled and terrified, he moves out.
Another piece, ‘Bicycle Diary’, is an adroitly self-mocking account of how the author gives way to the urgings of his English hosts and Japanese friends that for his health he should take up the then fashionable sport of bicycling. Soseki’s repeated failures to stay on his hired machine or, when he has managed to stay on, to keep moving in the desired direction, becomes a wry metaphor for his clumsiness in coping with social intercourse in the country of his exile.
For the sort of psychological subtlety that distinguishes the magnificent novels that Soseki was later to write, one need only turn to a coolly devastating account of tutorial visits to the eminent Irish scholar Professor William Craig. Totally absorbed in the compilation of his Shakespeare Dictionary, Craig pays only token attention to his distinguished pupil, whom he treats like an ignorant and tiresome child.
This collection contains only minor works, most of them written at times of extreme despondency, stress and loneliness. But each piece shows a spark of genius, however fugitive, so that one is never in doubt that one is in the presence of greatness. The translator, Damian Flanagan, has provided an excellent introduction and ample notes. I have always thought that of all English novelists it is E. M. Forster that Soseki most resembles. Flanagan, whether deliberately or not, catches Forster’s authorial tone with uncanny accuracy.
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