Botchan and Sanshiro

Botchan is about a 22-year-old guy from Tokyo coming to a small town to become a teacher. Sanshiro is about a 23-year-old guy from a small town coming to Tokyo to study. I therefore thought it would probably be a good idea to read Sanshiro after Botchan, but now I’m considering quitting it.  

The writing in Sanshiro is arguably more mature than in Botchan.  

“He stood in the center of activity now, but his life as a student was the same as before. He had merely been set down in a new position from which to observe the activity all around him. The world was in an uproar; he watched it, but he could not join it. His own world and the real world were aligned on a single plane, but nowhere did they touch. The real world would move on in its uproar and leave him behind. The thought filled him with a great unease.” (Ch.2) 

(translated by Jay Rubin) 

Some descriptions: 

“Pale red flames of burning sun swept back from the horizon into the sky’s deep clarity, and their fever seemed to rush down upon him.” (ibid.) 

“Nonomiya looked up at the broad sky. A meager gleam was all that remained of the sun’s light. A long wisp of cloud hung across the sky at an angle, like the mark of a stiff brush on the tranquil layer of blue.” (ibid.) 

Look at this: 

“He stared at the surface of the pond. The reflection of many trees seemed to reach to the bottom, and down deeper than the trees, the blue sky. No longer was he thinking of streetcars, or Tokyo, or Japan. A sense of something far-off and remote had come to take their place. The feeling lasted but a moment, when loneliness began to spread across its surface like a veil of clouds.” (ibid.) 

Soseki’s writing is good, but I can’t help thinking that Sanshiro has neither the psychology and intensity of Kokoro, nor the humour and vitality of Botchan. Botchan I do like a lot.

Botchan has a reckless streak in him, he narrates his own story and Soseki gives him a strong voice. 

“I had been taken for plenty of other things as well over the years, but nobody had ever accused me of being a gentleman of quite sophisticated tastes before!” (Ch.3) 

(translated by J.Cohn) 

“I couldn’t stand the Hanger-on. If somebody tied him to a nice big rock and dumped him in the ocean, they’d be doing Japan a favor.” (Ch.6) 

He makes up nicknames for other teachers. Whilst school novels are generally about students, Botchan is about teachers, and the main character—a teacher—often gets into trouble. 

“Still, the world is a strange place when you think about it: a guy who rubs you the wrong way treats you kindly while a friend, somebody you get along with fine, turns out to be a scoundrel; it all seems like some kind of farce. This being the country, I figured, everything must be the opposite of what it was in Tokyo. You’ve got to watch out in a place like this – for all I knew fire might suddenly turn to ice out here, or the rocks might turn into lumps of tofu.” (ibid.)  

He is hilarious. 

“If the Principal was really assuming responsibility for the entire incident, and going so far as to speak of it as his own fault, a manifestation of his own lack of virtue, you would think that it would be better for him to forget about punishing the students and simply turn in his own resignation. In that case, there wouldn’t have been any need to go to the bother of calling a staff meeting. All you needed was to use a little common sense.” (ibid.) 

If you haven’t read Botchan, you should.

“It sounds like a town where the inhabitants must be divided about evenly between monkeys and humans. What kind of whim would make anybody, even somebody as unworldly as the Squash, want to go out there and associate with a bunch of monkeys?” (Ch.8) 

Some readers have compared Botchan to The Catcher in the Rye and I can see why. He is sarcastic, reckless, and impulsive but still lovable because he is good-natured and has a strong sense of principles. Like Holden Caulfield, he feels out of place because he’s straight as a bamboo, unable to flatter and unwilling to put on an act, and he can see hypocrisy and insensitivity in others. But if some readers see Holden as whiny (forgetting that he is grieving), Botchan is not. He is very funny. 

We don’t have such a voice in Sanshiro because it’s written from the third person’s point of view, but I don’t think that’s the only reason Sanshiro seems to lack vitality. The characters are more opaque, like those in the novels of Tanizaki or Kawabata. All the characters in Botchan are distinct and vivid—some of them verge on appearing two-dimensional, but they are vivid and that is how they’re seen by the narrator/ main character. 

Perhaps I’ll finish reading Sanshiro just to see what it’s like. It’s interesting that I’ve read Kokoro, Kusamakura, Botchan, and now part of Sanshiro, and they are all different. I like Soseki.