Sanshiro and some curious references

I finished Sanshiro last night. I don’t have a lot to say—in the end, the characters are still opaque, unlike those in Soseki’s Kokoro and Botchan, and the only exception is Sanshiro’s friend Yojiro, but even he is not a character who would stay with you over time. The usual themes of change, modernisation, and Westernisation of Japan are there, and the novel has a lingering sadness and uncertainty. 

Perhaps my tastes are too Western. 

There are two things that caught my attention, however. First of all, there are many Ibsen references throughout the novel, from different characters.

Here is a conversation Sanshiro overhears, between Yojiro and Professor Hirota, about Mineko. 

““She’s so calm and patient, she would just go on chewing until the flavor came out.”

“She’s calm, all right,” said the Professor, “but wild, too.”

“It’s true she is wild. There’s something of the Ibsen woman about her.”

“With Ibsen women, it’s all out in the open. Mineko is wild deep inside. Of course, I don’t mean wild in the ordinary sense. Take Nonomiya’s sister: she has this kind of wild look at first glance, but in the end she’s very feminine. It’s an odd business.”” (Ch.6) 

(translated by Jay Rubin) 

Sanshiro has a crush on Mineko, so he later asks Yojiro. 

““What’s wild about her?”

“It’s not any one thing. All modern women are wild, not just Mineko.”

“You said she’s like an Ibsen character, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“Which character did you have in mind?”

“Well… she’s just like an Ibsen character, that’s all.”

Sanshirō was not convinced, but he decided not to pursue the matter. They had walked a short way in silence when Yojirō said, “Mineko is not the only one like an Ibsen character. All women are like that nowadays. And not just women. Any man who’s had a whiff of the new atmosphere has something of Ibsen about him. People just don’t act freely the way Ibsen’s characters do. Inside, though, something is usually bothering them.”” (ibid.) 

I wonder if I look at it from the modern perspective, because I can’t see anything wild about Mineko and in the end, she does not defy conventions. But Sanshiro doesn’t think so either and the novel mostly focuses on his perspective, so perhaps Yojiro and the Professor know something that the main character doesn’t know. 

Yojiro mentions Ibsen again, and also mentions Shakespeare, when he’s making a speech campaigning to replace the Western professor with someone Japanese at the university: 

““De te fabula! Who gives a damn how many words Shakespeare used or how many white hairs Ibsen had? We don’t have to worry about ‘surrendering ourselves’ to stupid lectures like that. But it’s the University that suffers. We’ve got to bring in a man who can satisfy the youth of the new age. Foreigners can’t do it. First of all, they have no authority in the University.”” (ibid.) 

Why does he say that? I have no idea.  

The name of Ibsen pops up again when Professor Hirota has a rant with Sanshiro about change in Japan and hypervillains: 

““… Of course, when there’s too much glory, the hypervillains get a little annoyed with each other. When their discomfort reaches a peak, altruism is resurrected. And when that becomes a mere formality and turns sour, egoism comes back. And so on, ad infinitum. That’s how we go on living, you might say. That’s how we progress. Look at England. Egoism and altruism have been in perfect balance there for centuries. That’s why she doesn’t move. That’s why she doesn’t progress. The English are a pitiful lot—they have no Ibsen, no Nietzsche. They’re all puffed up like that, but look at them from the outside and you can see them hardening, turning into fossils.”” (Ch.7) 

Soseki was clearly obsessed with Ibsen when he was writing Sanshiro. That made me laugh though, “The English are a pitiful lot” hahaha. 

Later, when Sanshiro and Mineko are walking together, at her suggestion, he thinks to himself: 

“How would Mineko react if someone told her to live like Miwata Omitsu? Tokyo was different from the country, it was wide open, so perhaps most of the women here were like Mineko. He could only imagine what the others were like, but at a distance they did seem to be a little more old-fashioned than Mineko. It occurred to him how right Yojirō had been: she was an Ibsen woman. But was it only her disregard for convention that made her an Ibsen woman, or did it involve her deepest thoughts and feelings? He did not know.” (Ch.8) 

The disregard for convention is her walking with him without asking anyone’s permission. What about it is like an Ibsen woman? Perhaps I’m too modern to understand. 

Later, at a party, different characters debate whether physicists are naturalists—Nonomiya thinks so, because he himself is doing experiments on the pressure of light, whereas Professor Hirota doesn’t, because “You have to go about it artificially, with quartz threads and vacuums and mica, all these devices so that the pressure becomes visible to the eye of the physicist” (Ch.9). 

One more time, Ibsen is (randomly?) mentioned by entirely different characters. 

““Then physicists are romantic naturalists,” said Dr. Shōji, sitting diagonally opposite Nonomiya, and he offered a comparison: “In literature, that would be someone like Ibsen, I suppose.”

“True,” said the critic in the striped coat. “Ibsen has as many devices as Nonomiya, but I doubt if his characters follow natural laws the way light does.”” (ibid.) 

Isn’t it curious how often the name of Ibsen pops up in this novel? 

The second thing that caught my attention was about Shakespeare. Since I caught the Shakespeare bug, I’ve been noticing him everywhere. It is to be expected—Shakespeare is the greatest and most influential writer of all time—but it’s also a bit weird to actually notice it? Dickens, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, Balzac, Proust… all reference him at some point, then I read Soseki’s Sanshiro and the main characters went to watch a performance of Hamlet, near the end of the book. 

“The movements of this Hamlet were wonderfully nimble. He moved grandly across the stage and imparted grand movement to the others. This was vastly different from Iruka’s restrained Noh style. Especially when he stood in the middle of the stage, stretching his arms out wide or glaring at the sky, he aroused such excitement that the spectators were conscious of nothing but him.

The dialogue, however, was in Japanese, translated Japanese, Japanese spoken with exaggerated intonations, unusual rhythms. It poured forth so fluently at times it seemed almost too eloquent. It was in a fine literary style, but it was not moving. Sanshirō wished that Hamlet would say something a little more characteristically Japanese. Where he expected him to say, “Mother, you must not do that. It is an affront to Father’s memory,” Hamlet would suddenly bring in Apollo or someone and smooth things over. Meanwhile, both mother and son looked ready to burst into tears. Sanshirō was only dimly aware of the inconsistency, however. The courage to pronounce the thing absurd was not forthcoming.” (Ch.12) 

I know that Soseki loves Shakespeare, so either that is a complaint about the Japanese translation, or it’s only Sanshiro’s thoughts and not shared by Soseki. 

More curious is an earlier conversation between Sanshiro and Professor Hirota about marriage. 

““Are there so many things that prevent people from marrying?”

The Professor looked at Sanshirō steadily through the smoke.

“You know that Hamlet didn’t want to marry. Maybe there was only one Hamlet, but there are lots of people like him.”” (Ch.11) 

Would you expect some characters in a novel to bring up Hamlet to discuss “matrimonial cripples”, i.e. people incapable of marrying? I didn’t. 

As he watches the performance, Sanshiro thinks about the conversation. 

“When Hamlet told Ophelia, “Get thee to a nunnery,” Sanshirō thought of Professor Hirota. No one like Hamlet could possibly marry, the Professor had said, which seemed true enough when you lingered over the poetry in the book, but on stage it seemed that Hamlet might just as well marry. After careful consideration, Sanshirō concluded that this was because the line “Get thee to a nunnery” was no good. The proof of this was that even after Hamlet had said it to Ophelia, you didn’t feel sorry for her.” (Ch.12) 

That sounds more like a comment on the performance than on the play itself. 

All these Ibsen and Shakespeare references in Sanshiro are a bit odd though. What do you think? 

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