The Three-Cornered World by Sōseki Natsume

First published:Kusamakura, 1906 (Unhuman Tour, 1927; better known as The Three-Cornered World)

Type of work: Philosophical realism

Time of work: Around 1906

Locale: The Japanese resort village of Nakoi

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, an artist; unable to paint or write in the city, he travels the countryside
• O-Nami Shioda, the divorced daughter of the resort-keeper, who flirts with the narrator
• Kyuichi Shioda, her cousin, a painter and draftee
• Daitetsu, the abbot of a nearby Zen monastery

The Novel

In The Three-Cornered World, an artist, the novel’s first-person narrator, tells about his journey into the Japanese countryside, where he hopes to find the natural environment necessary for his artistic powers to unfold. Sōseki Natsume’s novel is unconventional in its minimalist approach to its characters, but its silence here is counterbalanced by presentation of philosophical ideas, haiku, and graphic description of natural scenery, all of which are integrated into the overall structure of the narrator’s excursion.

The novel begins a few miles from the hot springs of Nakoi, where the springtime countryside invites the narrator “to rise above emotions, to view things dispassionately.” Ironically, however, a heavy spring rain modifies his abstract ideas and brings home to him the “vulgar” in human existence: Completely drenched, the young artist finds refuge in a roadside teahouse.

There, an old woman waits on him until Gembei, a packhorse driver from Nakoi, stops over. In conversation with him, the old woman casually brings up the story of Shioda’s unfortunate daughter. After her studies at Kyoto, where she fell in love, O-Nami Shioda was married to another man to suit her father’s finances; what arouses the narrator’s interest is that O-Nami divorced her husband upon his sudden bankruptcy and returned to Shioda’s hotel.

Arriving late at night and resting in his room, the artist observes a female figure singing under an aronia tree in the moonlit garden. The young woman vanishes at his approach, only to reappear shortly afterward, searching the room’s cupboard while the narrator feigns sleep. In the morning, the artist meets his night visitor—Shioda’s daughter, in whose room he is lodging—and finds “absolutely no consistency in her expression”: Beneath a snooty surface is real need. Discovering that the haiku poems about the sad singer he composed that night have been jokingly amended by their subject, the narrator begins to feel “a thin thread” being spun between them by fate. Nevertheless, O-Nami rejects his sketch of an ideal landscape for her as being too “cramped and uncomfortable” and representing a two-dimensional world.

The local barber insists to the narrator that O-Nami is mad and dangerous; as he returns to his room, he observes the young woman dancing on the opposite veranda, clad in her bridal gown and oblivious of the onset of a spring rain. Soaking in a hot tub, the artist dreams of painting William Shakespeare’s Ophelia drowning herself with an expression of gentle relaxation; suddenly, half shrouded in the mist of the bathhouse, O-Nami stands naked before him and disappears before her visionlike quality is lost by a further advance.

After tea with Abbot Daitetsu, O-Nami’s confessor at the local Kankaiji temple, and old Shioda, the artist tries to explain to O-Nami how a Western romance novel can be subject to a “non-human, objective approach” when it is read in portions picked at random. In a delicate maneuver, the narrator relates this method to the possibility of his falling in love with O-Nami without their ever marrying. His female counterpart, however, shocks him with her sudden request to be painted while drowning herself.

Visiting Kagami pond, the artist decides that he cannot successfully paint such a picture because of the absence of compassion in O-Nami’s countenance. Joined at the pond by Gembei, he learns from the horse driver that an earlier Shioda girl really drowned herself here; soon after, O-Nami briefly appears on a rock above the lake, again startling the narrator.

On the morning after a nighttime discussion with Daitetsu, the artist climbs a gentle hill, convinced that O-Nami would be the perfect actress since she naturally behaves as if she were onstage, thus conveying an unself-conscious beauty and aesthetic purity which he finds absent in contemporary players. Accidentally, he witnesses the appearance of a rugged fellow, possibly a mercenary, and O-Nami. After she hands him a purse in a moment of sheer beauty of poise and composition, the man disappears. Discovering the peeping narrator, the young woman shocks him a third time by confiding that the ruffian was her ex-husband, who has decided to make money by serving in the ongoing Russo-Japanese War in Manchuria. Together, O-Nami and the narrator visit Shioda’s nephew Kyuichi, a painter and draftee who is also ready to go to the war.

The journey of The Three-Cornered World ends with the Shiodas and the narrator accompanying Kyuichi to a railway station whence he will join his unit. During their final boat ride, the narrator argues with O-Nami, to whom nothing but a heroic death seems appropriate for her cousin, and who insists again on the narrator’s painting her; he still cannot do it, since there is “something missing” in her expression.

A final change comes when the train pulls out of the station and O-Nami detects her ex-husband on it. Now, she looks after his disappearing figure “with that ‘compassion’ which had hitherto been lacking.” Hence O-Nami is redeemed, and the narrator concludes the novel with his whisper to her: “That’s it! That’s it! Now that you can express that feeling, you are worth painting.”

The Characters

The narrator of The Three-Cornered World occupies the triple position of protagonist, philosopher, and poet-artist. Through his poems, which demonstrate mastery of the haiku form, he longs to arrive at an aesthetically satisfying understanding of his life. It is always at crucial moments during his journey that the narrator becomes most poetically active; after his first, nighttime discovery of O-Nami, he puts his tempestuous mind at rest by composing the seventeen-syllable poems until he finds sleep. As a complete artist, however, he is still in a state of development. His dependence on nature as “a land which is completely detached from feelings and emotions” is not uncriticized. “A man cannot be said to have completed his education until he can stand at Nihonbashi in the center of Tokyo, and lay bare his soul to the world without embarrassment,” advises Daitetsu. Furthermore, the narrator has not yet painted a single picture—and thus worked in his prime artistic profession—when he leaves Nakoi on the final boat ride.

O-Nami functions as a catalyst for the narrator, who becomes intellectually fascinated by the prospect of a love relationship between them. Yet she is driven by a dynamic force of her own and refuses to comply with outside expectations or restrictions. Her self-asserted independence is labeled as “madness” by the villagers, who place her in a long row of similarly dangerous female ancestors; these have their Western counterparts in the “madwomen” of such nineteenth century novels as Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847).

In their subtle relationship, the narrator believes that O-Nami is “definitely ahead in the game.” It is she who startles the protagonist with her direct ideas and unconventional frankness; at times, Shioda’s daughter shames him by her implicit demonstration of his shortcomings as aesthete and romancer. Thus, the narrator finds himself first blaming the moonlight singer for indecency before succumbing to the beauty of her act. Similarly, he is inclined to dismiss her dance in the rain as madness. O-Nami reminds him that it was he who casually mentioned to the old women of the teahouse how he would like to see her dancing in her old bridal gown, and who now failed to recognize her act as being a special performance for him.

O-Nami’s closeness to the narrator’s feelings and visions is uncanny; this quality gives her an impact far beyond the other characters’, who all remain somewhat distant. Although their traits and problems are multilayered, their conflicts stay static. Old Shioda’s obsession with knickknacks is demonstrated, but there never emerges a consistent criticism of his collection, which transfers such artifacts as a precious inkstone from their intended functional contexts to the sterility of a museum. Similarly, Kyuichi can be viewed as the artist’s younger double, who has to decide between artistic vocation and patriotic duty; again, he leaves the novel in tranquillity before his conflict has really erupted.

Critical Context

Sōseki’s own experience informs The Three-Cornered World, which ultimately is about the Japanese intellectual’s place in a modernized and Westernized society. In that experience, early studies of Chinese literature (which has traditionally influenced Japanese culture) were balanced by a lifelong interest in and study of English and a two-year stay in London at the turn of the century. In The Three-Cornered World, Sōseki delivers at times caustic criticism of the West; this is not done out of mere conservatism or xenophobia but represents a necessary corrective to immature and faddish imitation of Western culture in post-1868 Japan. The artistic independence of Sōseki, as of Mori Ogai, distinguished him among his Japanese contemporaries. Sōseki’s insistence on intrinsically Oriental values in a world in which changes are clearly seen has earned for him a place among Japan’s most respected modern writers.

The Three-Cornered World is a powerful novel about artistic integrity and achievement. Sōseki has been criticized for being elitist; after all, he describes the artist’s ideal habitat as “the triangle which remains after the angle which we may call common sense has been removed from this four-cornered world.” Yet his radical vision of an aesthetic life that requires objectivity and personal distance convinces because of its ironic tenderness and ultimate humanism. Thus, it is fitting that the artist-protagonist goes beyond perceiving change for the better in O-Nami; it is her transformation into a compassionate human being that finally liberates his pent-up artistic energy and sets him free to paint the picture which has glimmered unrealized in his head throughout his journey in his three-cornered world.

Bibliography

McClellan, Edwin. “An Introduction to Sōseki,” in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. XX (1959), pp. 150-208.

Miyoshi, Masao. “Through the Glass Darkly,” in Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel, 1974.

Okazaki, Yoshie. “The Romanticism and Idealism Around Sōseki,” in Japanese Literature in the Meiji Era, 1955.

Yu, Beongcheon. “The Frustrated Years, 1903-1907,” in Natsume Sōseki, 1969.