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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how the novelist Sōseki Natsume relates aesthetic genres of poetry, painting and the novel in Kusamakura (1906). I contend that the work’s prosodic imagination unsettles novelistic teleological narrative while also dissolving the formal binary between poetry and painting.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how the Japanese novelist Sōseki Natsume defines and relates aesthetic genres, focusing in particular on his Kusamakura (1906) – a novel that frequently flirts with elements of stream-of-consciousness.

Kojin Karatani called Kusamakura ‘a novel about the novel’, because of its keen awareness of the contours of genre. This novel is almost a non-novel, evading the coherent development of plot and character. This scepticism about novelistic formulation has understandably been associated with its attention to the idea of the painting – an artistic mode concerned less with temporal process than with the impression of a single moment. The first-person narrator is a painter who meets a woman Nami whose intricate facial expressions he tries to capture.

Although the binary between the novel and painting dominates Kusamakura, the work also allocates some of its attention to another genre: poetry. At the beginning of the work, the narrator sighs at the difficulty of living one’s life: ‘When one realises that it will be hard to live no matter where one goes, poetry is born and paintings come into being.’ Poetry and painting are repeatedly compared throughout the novel, interestingly without any sustained discussion of their stylistic differences. Sōseki treats poetry and painting as almost interchangeable, defining them only in relative contrast to the genre of the novel. The smooth flow of the paired phrase, ‘poetry is born and paintings come into being’, which recurs later in the novel, may even lead us to suspect that the juxtaposition exists primarily for the sake of euphony rather than aesthetic philosophy.

The present study seeks to explain this association between poetry and painting by paying closer attention to Kusamakura’s poetic and prosodic imagination. The work’s inclination for neat epigrams and rhythmical phrasing signifies its resistance to novelistic storytelling. I argue that such phonetic sensitivity paradoxically dissolves the apparent formal opposition between prosodic and visual arts, highlighting their shared tendency to deconstruct the developmental and teleological narrative of the novel. In Kusamakura, poetry, painting and the novel form a triangular relationship – a pattern that mirrors the love triangles in some of Sōseki’s novels.