Natsume Sōseki and Manga

“Natsume Sōseki to manga”

From Shimizu Isao, Manga ga kataru Meiji (The Meiji Period as Told by Manga, Kōdansha Gakujutsu Bunko, 2005), pp. 127-132. This book was originally published in 1980 by Bungei Shunjū as Meiji manga yūransen (Meiji Manga Sightseeing Cruise).

In this essay, famed manga historian Shimizu Isao (1939-2021) describes the connection between early manga (one-panel cartoons in this case) and perhaps Japan’s most important modern novelist, Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916),¹ whose works are synonymous with the Meiji period (1868-1912). Both literature and cartooning developed in these 45 years of remarkable modernization, as Japan emerged from roughly 250 years of seclusion under the Tokugawa shogunate. Backed by a modern and Western-influenced faction, the Emperor Meiji may have been only a figurehead, but Japan’s politics and government changed greatly during his reign. So too did its sciences and arts. Of that era, Sōseki remains one of the most famed writers, so much that his likeness was the face of the Japanese 1,000 yen bill from 1984 to 2007. The novelist Murakami Haruki has acknowledged Sōseki one of his three “personal favorites,”² remarking that Sōseki’s novel Botchan (1906) is “read by virtually everyone in Japan who receives a middle-school education.”³

Shimizu also discusses other prominent Meiji period figures and famous artists, such as the painters Nakamura Fusetsu (1866-1943) and Asai Chū (1856-1907), and the important early cartoonist Okamoto Ippei (1886-1948). When Sōseki arrived on the literary scene shortly after the turn of the century, the magazine in which he serialized his debut work, the satirical novel I Am a Cat, used cartoon images to help bolster the work's popularity. According to Shimizu, Sōseki helped early manga, while early manga in turn helped the burgeoning literary titan. Though not exactly a match made in heaven, literature and comics did undoubtedly intersect in the Meiji period; it was Shimizu’s forte to argue for such existing synergies in Japanese culture that have been lost, have been forgotten, or have been in need of re-discovery. Shimizu has his critics and detractors, but his important imprint on Manga Studies is undeniable.

As a manga scholar, Shimizu’s activities were wide and quite varied. He was a professor at Teikyō Heisei University for 12 years from 1998 to 2010. He was an advisor for the Kyoto International Manga Museum. He was an “integral” part, Ronald Stewart writes, of major manga museum exhibitions, including the early “Meiji Manga” (Machida City Museum, 1978), “300 Years of Japanese Manga” (Kawasaki City Museum, 1996), and an exhibit on the French artist and Japanese resident Georges Bigot (Itami City Art Museum, 2002).⁴ The last major exhibition he supervised, “Giga Manga: From Edo Giga to Modern Manga" (Sumida Hokusai Museum, 2020-2021; and in other museums later throughout Japan), generated much controversy both domestically and abroad.⁵ Shimizu was a contributor to over 100 books (including those he co-authored and edited), and wrote extensively on 19th and early 20th century manga, particularly from the Meiji period, with a focus on political cartoons.

While several of Shimizu's monographs explore the works of Bigot, who helped introduce cartooning to Meiji period Japanese, he argued that Japanese manga ultimately can be traced back to the 12th century via the Kōzan-ji temple's Chōjū-giga scrolls depicting frolicking animals; this position has come under fire in the last decade, though even in recent exhibitions of manga in Japan, Shimizu’s defense of manga’s Japanese origins is still present. Future discussions of where manga today evolved from will inevitably connect back to Shimizu’s opus of writings and exhibitions. His achievements are too many to mention here, and his knowledge of manga was vast: Stewart describes Shimizu as an ikijibiki (a “living dictionary”).⁶ Yet while Shimizu's work is often mentioned in English-language studies of manga or early manga, the writing itself has rarely appeared in English translation.

​We thank the family of Shimizu Isao for permission to translate and publish this small part of his body of work. Shimizu passed away on March 2, 2021 at the age of 81. He continued to write, publish, and supervise museum exhibitions on manga history up to the end of his life. We would like to honor his memory with this translation.

-Jon Holt & Ayumi Naraoka

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Natsume Sōseki and Manga

Natsume Sōseki became instantly famous as a novelist with his debut work, I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru). This long novel was serialized in 11 installments in The Cuckoo (Hototogisu) magazine from its January 1905 issue through its August 1906 issue, though originally Sōseki had intended it to just be a one-off short story. In other words, after I Am a Cat was published in the magazine’s New Year’s issue, and once it became highly acclaimed, it was then continued in the magazine’s February issue. That issue too had great fanfare, and the regular serialization then properly started with the April issue of the magazine.

​Those issues in which I Am a Cat appeared sold out. Issues of The Cuckoo in which it did not appear sold poorly, they say. Even in the middle of its serialization, the story was collected in book format by the Ōkura Shoten and Hattori Shoten publishers (their first volume was released in October 1905). It is because of this that the novel’s popularity grew even more. The second [middle] volume came out shortly after the [serialization] ended, in November 1906. The third and final volume was released in book form the following year, in May 1907.

​The serialization in The Cuckoo had ended with the November issue of its ninth volume, with a publication date of August 1, 1906, but even after serialization ended, [the first volume of] I Am a Cat had great book sales and its second [middle] volume was highly anticipated by audiences. It was around this time, in their August 20, 1906 edition, the Humor Newspaper (Kokkei shimbun, [edited by Miyatake Gaikotsu]) printed a caricature of Natsume Sōseki (Figure 1b).

The cat is drawn so it faces front, and its face is that of [its creator] Natsume Sōseki. There are no other captions to explain it except for the [top caption] “Portrait of Natsume Sōseki” and [bottom caption] “I am a cat.” The publisher made a typo in the kanji spelling of Sōseki's name, using the wrong character of 嗽 “sō” instead of the first kanji 漱 “sō” in the author’s pen name, Sō-seki. They might have intended it to be a play on words suggesting that this "seki” [i.e., cough, or to spread germs] person was now well known all over Japan. By the way, “Sōseki” actually means a person who is very stubborn.⁷

​This picture tells a story of how even this small newspaper [Kokkei shimbun], which was published in Osaka, made Sōseki’s name and novel famous all over Japan, so much so that they were taken up as a joke in a cartoon like this. We do not see similar things happening for Mori Ōgai and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke [two other important fiction writers in early 20th century Japan].

​The book version of I Am a Cat came with comic color images, lithographs and woodblock prints, which we know would have been enjoyable for its readership, adding to the atmosphere and flavor of the novel, which was filled with knowledge and humor. The first volume had Nakamura Fusetsu in charge of its art. Asai Chū was then in charge of art for the second and third volumes. For the cover design and illustration on the title page, it was Hashiguchi Goyō in charge, and Goyō would thereafter be the sole person designing all Sōseki books; but based on what we know, the transition from Nakamura Fusetsu to Asai Chū in the same book series was quite unusual, and I have a feeling there is some backstory to that switch. It has been said there was friction between Sōseki and Fusetsu, but I would like to hypothesize what happened between them.

​The way I see it, Sōseki saw what Fusetsu achieved with his pictures for the first volume of I Am a Cat, but he thought the kind of art Fusetsu did was not in keeping with the caricature style [found in Japan], and that his work had more of a touch of the style of illustration seen in Europe. Also, around the same time, when the twin publishers of Ōkura Shoten and Hattori Shoten were in the middle of preparing the second volume of I Am a Cat, they were also preparing Sōseki’s short story collection Yōkyoshū (Drifting in Space), for which the publishers turned to Fusetsu for help. So, the second and third volumes of I Am a Cat were then entrusted to Asai Chū. To have Nakamura Fusetsu as a pitch-hitter and then make use of Asai Chū probably shows what a keen eye Sōseki had for pictures.

​Asai had travelled to France as a study-abroad student in 1900, and he received a visit from Sōseki when he was in Paris. They became friends and, in 1902, Asai spent several days with Sōseki when the latter lived in London. By 1905, Asai had made a name for himself by participating in Current Affairs Cartoons: Non-Artistic Illustrated News (Jiji manga hi-bijutsu gahō, 1904), which was run by Kanokogi Takeshirō (known by his painter name Futō).⁸ Asai was also known by then for his caricature-esque design pieces, his illustrations for books and magazines, and more. I bet that it was because of his work around the time of the Illustrated News, which Asai would have sent to him, that Asai’s style began to strongly appeal to Sōseki. Asai also in 1907 was drawing a popular sketch-like manga called “The 50-Poem Contest of Contemporary Times” (“Tōsei fūzoku gojū-ban utaawase”), which is a masterpiece of Meiji manga.

When we take into account a talent like that, it is clear Asai was the most appropriate person among all artists to be in charge of the illustrations for the I Am a Cat novel. In the year that the final volume was published [1907], Asai ended up passing away at the age of 51 years old. When one thinks about the works that would be published later in Sōseki’s career, it really is sad that we lost such a good person so early like this.

Sōseki had a sharp eye for manga. It is well-known that he also discovered Okamoto Ippei, the most representative manga artist of the Taishō [1912-1926] and the early part of the Shōwa [1926-1989] eras. It is not quite clear how Ippei and Sōseki met. We just know the facts of that time through what Mr. Miyao Shigeo⁹ wrote in Writers and Artists Cooperative News (Bugeika kyōkai nyūsu). (Now passed away, Ara Masato-sensei kindly informed me of this information.)
​
Based on that, it was around the time that the Asahi Newspaper (Asahi shimbun) was serializing Sōseki's novels (and probably while he was writing The Wayfarer [Kōjin]), that Natori Shunsen was put in charge of the illustrations, but he had caught a cold and became unable to do any drawing, so he recommended Okamoto Ippei as his replacement. Okamoto had put out an art collection called Manga and Translation (Manga to yakubun, [Ishikawa Bun’eidō Press, 1911]), which was a collaboration work [with Natori and Nagata Katsunosuke].¹⁰ This, then, would have been in 1912. “Because I got sick with a cold, we were able to bring Ippei-kun into the Asahi,” Shunsen told Miyao.

In this way, as Sōseki got to know Ippei, he recognized the latter’s incredible talent, and the two of them started to converse. Ippei created his manga-manbun (a new style of cartoon illustration where manga and text were equally balanced) for a series of interviews with geisha, which was entitled “Record of Seeing 8,000 Generations of the Fujita-ya House.” That work became the start of this new kind of manga-manbun, and it has been said that Sōseki gave him the suggestion to use sentences in it like that. It is because of the recognition of his raw talent to create such an investigative type of manga text and manga pictures that Okamoto Ippei came to occupy as a manga artist such a giant place, like that of a Colossus or a Fudō figure (fudō-[myōjin]). Even though we normally only think of him as a figure in modern literature, we should note that Sōseki also exerted a considerable influence on manga in the modern period.

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1. Some readers may be aware that Natsume Sōseki is the grandfather of cartoonist and scholar Natsume Fusanosuke. Natsume Sōseki, as with many writers and artists in the Meiji period, is known by Sōseki, his literary sobriquet (gō); because calling such artists by these invented first names is customary both in academic circles as well as in general parlance, we will refer to him here as "Sōseki" rather than by the familial name Natsume.
2. Murakami Haruki, “Introduction: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke: Downfall of the Chosen,” in Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories, trans. Jay Rubin, (Penguin, 2006), xxiv.
3. Murakami, “Downfall,” xxii.
4. Ronald Stewart, “Obituary & Remembrance of Manga Historian Shimizu Isao,” International Journal of Comic Art Vol. 23 No. 1 (Spring 2021), 514-515.
5. A discussion of this controversy can be found in Eike Exner, Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History (Rutgers Univ. Press, 2022), 186-187. Briefly, Shimizu sought to characterize giga, a form of Edo period caricature, as the starting point for contemporary manga; this theory was criticized as resting on tenuous historical analysis.
6. Stewart, “Obituary,” 519.
7. [Translators’ Note] Begging the indulgence of our readers, the translators feel compelled to further expound upon the name "Sōseki," if only because Sōseki is such a canonical modern author and his nom de plume so reflects the Meiji sensibility, which is under consideration here. Sōseki (born: Natsume Kinnosuke) adopted that pen name early in his life as an amateur literatus. The source for it is found in classical Chinese literature, which Sōseki, as a modern Meiji man, still enjoyed and of which he was quite experienced, in addition to his other expertise in both English language and literature. Although the term “sōseki” is often cited as coming from the Jin Shu (The Book of Jin), a Tang dynasty history of Jin dynasty events from about the 3rd to 5th centuries, the locus classicus is found in A New Account of Tales of the World (Shih-shuo Hsin-yü, ca. 5th century), which precedes the Jin Shu and was composed in a time more contemporaneous with the periods that it covers. Paging through Richard Mather’s English translation of the New Account, we find the biography of the military leader Sun Chu (孫楚). Sun, even as a young man, wanted to live the easier and aesthetic life of a recluse: to forsake the world and spend his time as a literatus. He expressed this desire to a friend with the poetic phrase “gargle-rocks-pillow-stream” (漱石枕流, sōseki chinryū). The story goes thus: “Speaking of it once to Wang [Ji], he intended to say, ‘I’ll pillow my head on the rocks and rinse my mouth in the streams.’ Instead, he said by mistake, ‘I’ll rinse my mouth with rocks and pillow my head on the streams.’ Wang asked, ‘Are streams something you can pillow on, and rocks something you can rinse with?’ Sun replied, ‘My reason for pillowing on streams is to ‘wash my ears,’ and my reason for rinsing with rocks is to ‘sharpen my teeth.’” This is all to say that Sun was an obstinate person in insisting that he was right when he obviously just misspoke. Following this stubborn example, Japan’s greatest modern novelist adopted the phrase "Sōseki" as his literary moniker - and, as fate would have it, he too became quite a stubborn person who resisted and questioned much of the changes that came with the Westernization of Japan in the Meiji period. (See Liu I-ch’ing, Shih-shuo Hsin-yü: A New Account of Tales of the World, translated by Richard B. Mather [University of Minnesota Press, 1976], 402.)
8. [Translators’ Note] Elsewhere, Shimizu writes that Futō’s publication (which was not affiliated with the more famous “Jiji Manga” page run by Kitazawa Rakuten in Jiji Shinpō), was “the first magazine to use ‘manga’ in its title. It was an experimental cartoon [manga] magazine that would feature caricatures of famous people of the time in an Art Nouveau style.” (Shimizu, Zusetsu: Manga no rekishi [An Illustrated History of Manga, Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1999], 32). The translators thank Eike Exner for helping us check the facts on this short-lived but important magazine, and how it was not connected to the better known 1902-06 “Jiji manga” cartoon supplement.
9. [Translators’ Note] Miyao Shigeo, writes Frederik Schodt in his Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (Kōdansha International, 1983), “had the distinction of being one of the first professional artists to specialize in children’s comics. After an apprenticeship to Ippei Okamoto, in 1922 he began serializing a six-panel strip, Manga Tarō (‘Comics Tarō’), in a daily newspaper… in 1924 he began a comedy tale of a little samurai-superman, Dango Kushisuke Man’yūki, as a successor [to Manga Tarō]. When published as a hardbound book by Kōdansha, it became a long-term bestseller, with over a hundred reprintings in the next ten years.” (Schodt, 48-49).
10. [Translators’ Note] Eike Exner writes that this co-authored book “featur[ed] ‘serious’ sketches (of persons or scenery),” and that it had “translations of some of Baudelaire’s poems,” so the authors used “manga in its original meaning of ‘essayistic sketches’ instead of ‘caricature’ or ‘cartooning.’” Exner, Comics and the Origins of Manga, 209.