Encumbrance publishes ‘beyond the vernal equinox’, one of the great novels of the japanese writer
Has been the model for the Laureate Kenzaburo Oe, and for the applicant Haruki Murakami. Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) was the battering ram that opened the way to modernity in japanese literature. In 1868 came to the throne, the young emperor Meiji, who undertook numerous political reforms, social, economic, religious, and cultural aimed at pulling Japan out of isolation for over 250 years, to leave behind the traces are engrained in the medievalism feudal, to put his country into contact with the West. The official motto of the Meiji era was: “Learn from the West to reach the West”.
So remember the teacher and translator Carlos Rubio, maximum expert in Japanese Literature, in the fully comprehensive introduction to his translation of Kokoro, published by Gredos in 2009. Kokoro (1914) happens to be the masterpiece of Soseki. It is a novel already late japanese writer and part of the trilogy in which it is inserted beyond the spring equinox (1912), a story of quest and initiation to the adult life who now publishes Encumbrance.
This imprint is the maximum diffuser of the work of Soseki in Spain, because it has already been previously published other eight of the 14 novels of the japanese writer. Among them, the first, I Am a cat (1904), hilarious satire of social from the point of view of a feline. Fernando Sanchez Drago, as linked to Japan, called Soseki -in tribute to the novelist – one of his cats and, when he died the animal, wrote about it one of his best books, Soseki. Immortal and tiger (2009).
Soseki published I Am a cat on his return from a miserable three year stay in England that aims to extend your knowledge of English literature, forged during her degree at the Imperial University of Tokyo, the city in which he was born in 1867 -when it was still called Edo and was the capital of the country, being the youngest of eight children of a staff member surnamed Kinnosuke, a descendant of a declining family of samurai, and unscrupulous man who handed it on to two adoptive parents, one of them future blackmailer of the successful writer. That history and the death of the mother and two siblings in adolescence marked the personality of Soseki.
she specialized in English Literature and was awarded a scholarship (poorly) by the government to study in England because that trait of opening to the outside was one of the features of the Meiji era, which ended in 1912, four years before the death of the writer due to a gastric ulcer that had remained severely ill and vomiting blood in periodic crisis, the past six years of his life. But without stop writing. Soseki had many children and a long marriage, and scarcely happy, despite their attachment to zen buddhism.
Formed, like many, in the chinese poetry -which he cultivated, like the haiku-, Soseki, interestingly, had doubts at the beginning about the desirability and consequences of being influenced by the western literature. After that, would be the main paradigm of this influence in the letters japan, which resulted -according to professor Rubio – a new narrative that drove the individualism -ignored by the japanese culture-the psychological analysis and treatment of romantic love.
Before engaging (from 1907) literary journalism -and not without controversy-, Soseki, also an essayist and diarist, was focused on teaching in several schools and, finally, in the University of Tokyo, which he left abruptly and where he had replaced in the chair the incomparable Lafcadio Hearn. Among his novels, most celebrated is Botchan (1906) -also edited by Impedimenta-, a permanent best seller in Japan, where Soseki has humor his disastrous experience on a remote island to which he was destined at the beginning of his career as a professor.
The above-mentioned Lafcadio Hearn, born to a Greek island, emigrated to the united States and a globe-trotting tireless, ended up being an accomplished orientalist, and an academic authority in Japan. We take care of it here when Errata Naturae published his formidable travel book A summer cruise through the west Indies. The case is that Lafcadio Hearn also wrote, long before Soseki, a book titled Kokoro (1891), an essay on “echoes and notions of the inner life of japan”, which was translated into Spanish by Julián Besteiro. The word kokoro means, in japanese, to heart. And, by the way, soseki, the name Natsume chose as a pseudonym, it means stubborn in chinese. But this is another story.
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