After months of pondering the theme for this year’s spring celebration at the Stanford Humanities Center, I have finally come around to the idea that hope is a lot like a cat—it scurries out of sight as soon as you make a point of chasing after it. But if you’re lucky, it might saunter across your line of sight or even brush up against your ankles when you’re thinking about something else.

My current research delves into the rise of a new comic sensibility in the Meiji era in Japan (1868-1912). I don’t actively chase after hope in my work, but I am constantly hoping for some sudden illumination—which is often the key ingredient in great humor. Widely shared narratives can pack a wallop of propulsive force – once they have our attention, they carry us through a chain of causal relations to a conclusion that often seems foregone. And our thinking processes are so dependent on narratives that we often fail to notice when we have become trapped within them. Jokes that suddenly impede narrative momentum can open up new vistas by forcing us to look sideways or up and down rather than just craning forward.

In the early 20th century, when Japan was first emerging on the world stage as a modern nation, narratives of national pride promoted by newspaper journalists helped propel Japan into a war with Russia in 1904 and even led to riots against the Japanese government in 1905 when victory in that war failed to produce major concessions of land and reparations. If anti-government riots were the unexpected consequence of excessive narrative momentum, another unexpected consequence was the emergence of a new comic sensibility that included some searing jokes about national consciousness. 

Natsume Sôseki’s entire literary career could be called the unintended consequence of a Japanese government scholarship that sent him to England to study literature in 1900. Sôseki returned to Japan in 1903 to teach at Tokyo Imperial University. In the midst of the Russo-Japanese war, he launched a work of comic fiction titled I am a Cat, which was so successful that he went on to become a full-time novelist, quitting his professorship altogether. In 1908 Sôseki published Sanshirô, a novel named after a young protagonist who travels from the provincial city of Kumamoto to attend Tokyo Imperial University. In the train on the way to Tokyo, an older man happens to strike up a conversation with him. Their exchange begins with the older man admiring a Western couple passing by his window:

“We Japanese are sad-looking things next to them. We can beat the Russians, we can become a ‘first-class power,’ but it doesn’t make any difference. We still have the same faces, the same feeble little bodies…. –Oh yes, this is your first time to Tokyo, isn’t it? You’ve never seen Mount Fuji. We go by it a little farther on. It’s the finest thing Japan has to offer, the only thing we have to boast about. The trouble is, of course, it’s just a natural object. It’s been sitting there for all time. We didn’t make it.” He grinned broadly once again.

Sanshirô had never expected to meet anyone like this after Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War. The man was almost not Japanese, he felt.

“But still,” Sanshirô argued, “Japan will start developing from now on at least.”

“Japan is going to perish,” the man replied coolly.

Anyone who dared say such a thing in Kumamoto would have been beaten on the spot, perhaps even arrested for treason. Sanshiro had grown up in an atmosphere that gave his mind no room at all for inserting an idea like this. Could the man be toying with him, taking advantage of his youth? The man was still grinning, but he spoke with complete detachment. Sanshirô did not know what to make of him. He decided to say nothing.

But then the man said, “Tokyo is bigger than Kumamoto. And Japan is bigger than Tokyo. And even bigger than Japan…” He paused and looked at Sanshirô, who was listening intently now. “Even bigger than Japan is the inside of your head. Don’t ever surrender yourself – not to Japan, not to anything. You may think that what you’re doing is for the sake of the nation, but let something take possession of you like that, and all you do is bring it down.”[1]

It is not the kind of joke that makes us laugh out loud, because it teases us as much as it toys with Sanshirô. Just like him, we are expecting something else to be “bigger than Japan”—namely, the West. With a perfectly timed sidestep, the older man derails the familiar train of thinking he had set in motion, planting a new seed in the young protagonist. 

At a time when it is impossible to know what the future holds and how we will manage to navigate our way through it, I find glimmers of hope in the idea that unintended consequences happen all the time, they are not always bad, and whatever direction our narratives seem to be propelling us toward, there is still the possibility that they can be productively derailed.

Notes

[1] Natsume Sôseki, Sanshirô (Trans. Jay Rubin; New York: Penguin Classics, 2009) pp. 15-16.