Book review: The Soil
Feb. 24th, 2011 23:19![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahorbinskiNagatsuka Takashi. Tsuchi | The Soil: A Portrait of Rural Life in Meiji Japan. Trans. Ann Waswo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Natsume Sôseki hated this novel. I wish I could say that I loved it, but it's simply too grim and depressing, because more or less completely true, though it does make a nice change from the navel-gazing of urban strivers that makes up the bulk of modern Japanese literature.
Nagatsuka Takashi completed the novel shortly before he died of tuberculosis; he was the son of the most well-off family in his village (called East Neighbor in the novel), and the story he tells is largely based on the lives of actual people in his village, most of whom outlived him. We read this book for my "work in Japan, 1600-now" class as an example of the so-called 'losers' in Japan's modernization/industrialization: at the time of the novel (roughly 1903-1910), well over 75% of the country's population was still rural and agrarian, but the resources of the countryside were being ruthlessly extracted by the government and used to fuel the country's industrial transformation and urbanization. The horrible thing (well, one of many horrible things) reading this novel is the knowledge that as badly off as the people it depicts are, things are far worse in other parts of the country, particularly Tôhoku, and that in another ten or twenty years, after the Depression and the collapse in silk and rice prices, things will be far, far worse for everyone.
The one person in the novel for whom I felt any personal sympathy--though I had, how to put it, systemic sympathy for just about everyone--was Otsugi, the daughter and oldest child of the family depicted in the novel who is forced to grow up quickly after her mother dies of a self-administered abortion. I particularly loathed her younger brother Yokichi, whom she brings up spoiled as all Japanese men and who eventually pays back his family's care of him by thoughtlessly burning down their house. It's an interesting choice on Nagatsuka's part, as we discussed in class, to portray the life of rural Japan largely through its women--Otsugi, her dead mother Oshina, and East Neighbor's wife Okami-san structure the novel and in many ways the possibilities and experience of the male characters such as Kanji and Uhei. Prof. Barshay also suggested,vis-a-vis the way East Neighbor is nameless and faceless in and literally absent from the novel, that there's at least some incipient Marxism in Nagatsuka's views, and that this is as far as he felt that he could go. I think that's certainly plausible.
Natsume Sôseki hated this novel. I wish I could say that I loved it, but it's simply too grim and depressing, because more or less completely true, though it does make a nice change from the navel-gazing of urban strivers that makes up the bulk of modern Japanese literature.
Nagatsuka Takashi completed the novel shortly before he died of tuberculosis; he was the son of the most well-off family in his village (called East Neighbor in the novel), and the story he tells is largely based on the lives of actual people in his village, most of whom outlived him. We read this book for my "work in Japan, 1600-now" class as an example of the so-called 'losers' in Japan's modernization/industrialization: at the time of the novel (roughly 1903-1910), well over 75% of the country's population was still rural and agrarian, but the resources of the countryside were being ruthlessly extracted by the government and used to fuel the country's industrial transformation and urbanization. The horrible thing (well, one of many horrible things) reading this novel is the knowledge that as badly off as the people it depicts are, things are far worse in other parts of the country, particularly Tôhoku, and that in another ten or twenty years, after the Depression and the collapse in silk and rice prices, things will be far, far worse for everyone.
The one person in the novel for whom I felt any personal sympathy--though I had, how to put it, systemic sympathy for just about everyone--was Otsugi, the daughter and oldest child of the family depicted in the novel who is forced to grow up quickly after her mother dies of a self-administered abortion. I particularly loathed her younger brother Yokichi, whom she brings up spoiled as all Japanese men and who eventually pays back his family's care of him by thoughtlessly burning down their house. It's an interesting choice on Nagatsuka's part, as we discussed in class, to portray the life of rural Japan largely through its women--Otsugi, her dead mother Oshina, and East Neighbor's wife Okami-san structure the novel and in many ways the possibilities and experience of the male characters such as Kanji and Uhei. Prof. Barshay also suggested,vis-a-vis the way East Neighbor is nameless and faceless in and literally absent from the novel, that there's at least some incipient Marxism in Nagatsuka's views, and that this is as far as he felt that he could go. I think that's certainly plausible.