Light and Dark, Natsume Soseki's longest novel and masterpiece,
although unfinished, is a minutely observed study of haute-bourgeois
manners on the eve of World War I. It is also a psychological portrait
of a new marriage that achieves a depth and exactitude of character
revelation that had no precedent in Japan at the time of its publication
and has not been equaled since. With Light and Dark, Soseki invented
the modern Japanese novel.
Recovering in a clinic following surgery, thirty-year-old Tsuda Yoshio
receives visits from a procession of intimates: his coquettish young
wife, O-Nobu; his unsparing younger sister, O-Hide, who blames O-Nobu's
extravagance for her brother's financial difficulties; his
self-deprecating friend, Kobayashi, a ne'er-do-well and troublemaker who
might have stepped from the pages of a Dostoevsky novel; and his
employer's wife, Madam Yoshikawa, a conniving meddler with a connection
to Tsuda that is unknown to the others. Divergent interests create
friction among this closely interrelated cast of characters that
explodes into scenes of jealousy, rancor, and recrimination that will
astonish Western readers conditioned to expect Japanese reticence.
Released from the clinic, Tsuda leaves Tokyo to continue his
convalescence at a hot-springs resort. For reasons of her own, Madam
Yoshikawa informs him that a woman who inhabits his dreams, Kiyoko, is
staying alone at the same inn, recovering from a miscarriage. Dissuading
O-Nobu from accompanying him, Tsuda travels to the spa, a lengthy
journey fraught with real and symbolic obstacles that feels like a
passage from one world to another. He encounters Kiyoko, who attempts to
avoid him, but finally manages a meeting alone with her in her room.
Soseki's final scene is a sublime exercise in indirection that leaves
Tsuda to "explain the meaning of her smile."
