Towards the end of his life Sōseki Natsume reflects on his earliest days in his essays and ‘Michikusa’. His recollections remind us of a landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope, which, though withdrawn to a great distance, is curiously bright and clear. From these recollections of his we know that as a child Sōseki was given in adoption twice, first to a street junk seller, secondly to a minor office clerk. There is something pathetic about his early life. As the late L. Auer said, there must be something buried in the soul by poverty (poverty used to be a very ‘pathetic’ status of life), something mystical, something beautiful, something that developed feeling, force, sympathy and tenderness. We find that this remark which was originally applied to musical genius is very true of Sōseki.

　During his lonely and pathetic childhood and boyhood Sōseki cultivated a special sense of ‘human existence’ (called ‘karma relation’ in Buddhist terminology) and a habit of being absorbed in the type of old Chinese and Japanese landscape pictures (usually with poems attached to them) called ‘Nan'ga’. It seems that he really understood ‘karma’ and the world of Nan’ga. According to August Graf von Platen :

　Wer die Schönheit angeschaut mit Augen,　

　Ist dem Tode schon anheimgegeben,

　Wird zu keinem Dienst der Erde taugen.

　Sōseki, as a child, had seen the beauty of the world of Nan’ga, and he became a man who was useless in worldly affairs. At first sight Sōseki may seem to have been a successful man, but how spiritually unfit he was for this world can be traced in his Chinese poems which he kept on composing from his boyhood to the end of his life excepting only a very meaningful ten-year interruption.

　Sōseki began his life with an ardent wish to stay in the world of Nan'ga, the beauty of which he had seen as a child, that is, a world beyond evolution and struggle for survival, where one can safely be incompetent and useless. But the age in which Sōseki happened to grow up, the Era of Meiji, was that of the most radical and rapid transition from Old Japan to New Japan. Herbert Spencer’s philosophy of evolution was generally accepted by Japanese intellectuals and was taught him by his eldest brother. Since English seemed to symbolize the foreign force which had been breaking down the equilibrium of Old Japan, Sōseki, as a schoolboy, hated English lessons just as morbidly as Lafcadio Hearn condemned Christian missions to Japan and for exactly the same reason. Sōseki’s erudition in the field of Chinese classics was already so remarkable that it astounds first-class scholars of the same speciality today.

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