| | Mon (The Gate) is the last novel in Natsume Soseki’s First Trilogy. The first two installments, Sanshiro and Sore Kara (And Then), covered alienated intellectuals that could not find a place in the rough and tumble of modernizing Japan at the beginning of the 20th century.
Mon (The Gate) departs from the parentally-supported characters and focuses on two adults that make up an unlucky couple. They lead a drab, uneventful life, barely able to make ends meet on his salary as a government clerk. He works five and half days a week and his too exhausted to deal with basic family problems, much less live the examined life. They only positive aspect the couple has is their love for each other but for his part even the stance of “us against the world” is not enough to keep his unlived life from stirring and making trouble with guilt, anxiety and depression. He takes a spiritual retreat to a Zen temple, thus the title of the novel, the gate that lead to the monastery.
Granted, a portrait of middle-aged people in a lower-middle-class marriage sounds like unpromising stuff for a whole novel. Such is Soseki’s art that he takes this mundane material and makes us readers turn the page in aroused expectation that something surprising is going to happen. Skillful modernist that he is, Soseki uses time shifts to reveal gradually, with great control, how the couple find themselves in such a narrow world.
The translator was Francis Mathy. Though a glossary and biography list are included, they are not needed by somebody who knows already what geta and o-zoni are. Unlike the other Soseki novels in the Perigee editions from the late 1980s, this one has no forward or afterward by the translator.
I read this for the Japan Literature Challenge 3.
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| | Posted 11/5/2009 9:18 AM - 9 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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