Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. RETURN TO FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. RETURN TO CHA REVIEW OF BOOKS AND FILMS

^{For Gab Angeles, who lent me the book.}

Natsume Sōseki (author), Meredith McKinney (translator), Kokoro, Penguin Classics, 2010. 256 pgs.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Kokoro is the final novel written by Natsume Sōseki. The English translation I read, by Meredith McKinney, was published by Penguin Classics. It is a story composed primarily of dialogue—not an action-packed work—but within this form of narrative, a delicate intensity is woven. The young, unnamed narrator forms a bond with “Sensei” and comes to understand the latter’s deep-seated contempt for humanity. Later, Sensei’s confession reveals the origins of this disdain. The novel’s emotional weight is quiet, a quality one might expect in Japanese literature, and the contrast between perspectives gradually moves the narrative toward an inquiry into individualism. As a reader of Greek philosophy, I cannot help but compare it to a Platonic dialogue—especially those from Socrates’ era, when the older philosopher’s voice was still echoed in the words of the younger.

This comparison, however, is superficial. Kokoro does not merely evoke the student and the philosopher, the individual and the inquirer—it also gestures toward themes of friendship and the nature of living as friends. Love is present in Kokoro, but not as a moral virtue; the novel is neither a treatise nor a guide to life. Rather, it offers a subtle, fleeting glimpse into existence—an impression, much like the book title is, of two hearts, a hint of their inside, more than a didactic lesson from the outside.

Like any country, Japan has long been celebrated for its preservation of tradition. In truth, however, it is also troubled by the new generation. Sōseki’s Kokoro attempts to illustrate this divergence and disconnection. It is a character-driven novel—but amidst individuals propelled by self-awareness and despair, shaped by the symptoms of their time and the signals of their own insights, one symbol quietly emerges: the cicadas. What role do they play in Sōseki’s novel?

I did my best to console him and returned to my desk. Sitting my jumble of books, I thoughtfully turned over in my mind my father’s unhappy words and what lay behind them. As I did so, I heard the cicada’s song. This time it wasn’t a continuous shrill but the intermittent call of the cicada known as tsutsukubōshi which sings toward the end of the summer.

What the young disciple—who also happens to be a son in a household where he was seldom present due to his friendship with Sensei—remarks is not merely a sophisticated articulation of his sorrow in light of his surroundings. The young man assumes the role of the old, consoling his ailing father, if not delivering to him a sound call. This is evident in the succeeding paragraphs, when the disciple returns home, and “the summer cicada’s strident song gradually gave way to the more hesitant call of the tsutsukubōshi,” after which “everything seemed to be slowly turning through the great karmic wheel.” The karmic wheel, a Buddhist symbol, serves multiple purposes within the novel. Yet, the more immediate wheel at play—the one set in motion—manifests in the young adopting the role of the old, while the old long for the attention of a child. The cicadas’ tune has turned the wheel.

The cicadas are far from finished, however, continuing to signal these implications. As their song wrings melancholy from the youthful soul—

In past summers when I had been home, I often tasted a strange sadness as I sat quietly in the midst of the seething cicada song. This sorrow seemed to pierce deep into my heart along with the piercing insect cry.

—here, the crisis of tradition at the heart of the present generation deepens within the novel. The cicada, from its conception by the ancient philosopher, has become an atom for the modernist poet—this small yet nuclear creature offered Eugenio Montale a refuge, a point of cohesion he sought to capture in his poetry. Jonathan Galassi has written a sublime postscript on the cicada’s radiance in Montale’s Collected Poems. I include it here to provide context for what it means to sing still, to live still—even as tradition stands on the brink of collapse.

The cicada, in fact, is an age-old symbol for the poet, going back at least as far as Plato’s Phaedrus, where Socrates narrates the legend of the cicada who sings unendingly from birth to death without sustenance of any kind…[A]s always, Montale “begins with the real”: the sound of the cicadas evokes a vivid memory out of childhood—and is thus an occasion for his poetry.

What Montale achieved with Italian poetry is akin to what Sōseki accomplished with the Japanese novel—continuing, as Galassi observes:

The image of the insect becomes internalized and self-identified, after which additional connotations, even external, cultural ones, are gradually accrued, until the cicada becomes synonymous not only the speaker of “L’ombrella della magnolia…” but with the entire figure of the poet, sole inheritor and continuer of a threatened, perhaps even mortally wounded tradition.

Moreover, what suggests this identification of two artists within their literary traditions—through their self-internalisation and engagement with their respective national inheritances—is the striking parallel in their language. Galassi notes that the cicada’s music “evokes a memory out of childhood,” where everything external and cultural is “gradually accrued” in Montale’s poetry. Similarly, the young disciple in Sōseki’s novel observes that “the sadness had undergone a gradual change.” Suddenly, he recalls his past conversation with Sensei and “evoked a memory.”

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

^{Constantin Brancusi. Socrates Image © The Museum of Modern Art; Licensed by Scala/A}

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

As memory is evoked, melancholy is invoked. Plato’s dialogue remains relevant—for after the song of the cicada briefly grips the first part of the novel, the latter part transitions into the letter of a human, still entwined with this biological symbol. As Socrates states, “the story goes that the cicadas used to be human beings who lived before the birth of the Muses” (Phaedrus, 259b).

The comparison between Phaedrus and Kokoro becomes particularly striking in the latter part of the novel, when Sensei confesses to the young disciple—his cowardice, his choice of isolation as salvation, and the way his harsh contempt for humanity became his greatest defence. In Plato’s dialogue, before the cicada is first mentioned, Socrates, too, makes a confession to Phaedrus. Mind what I have italicised:

I am still unable, as the Delphic inscription orders, to know myself; and it really seems to me ridiculous to look into other things before I have understood that. This is why I do not concern myself with them. I accept what is generally believed, and, as I was just saying, I look not into them but into my own self: Am I a beast more complicated and savage than Typhon, or am I a tamer, simpler animal with a share in a divine and gentle nature? (Phaedrus, 230a)

The final chapter, titled “Sensei’s Testament,” closely mirrors Socrates’ ignorance. Yet this ignorance is not one of deficiency—for anyone familiar with Socrates knows that he was a seeker, refining himself through inquiry, never burdened by the illusion of knowing all. Free from egoism, he found wisdom in questioning, his ignorance a foundation for learning.

In Kokoro, however, Sensei’s crisis and his contempt for humanity do not stem from an inability to act, but from an inability to know himself. Even after marrying Ojōsan, hoping that her companionship might ease his guilt, he could not escape the truth—he appeared calm outwardly, yet remained unstable within, much like his friend K, who took his own life. He did not know how to move forward because, like K, “he could not reject a self and a past that had been so noble and exalted.” If wisdom is the chief virtue of Socrates, then for Sensei, it is melancholy.

This phenomenon of the human condition—this entrapment within uncertainty—plagues those like Sensei and K, who are caught in cycles of internal conflict and remorse. Yet, as with the cicadas in poetry and the novel, the problem is not purely internal—it is also external, cultural. Melancholy exists as an apparition just behind us, a shadow of remorse, ever intertwined with modernity. As Sensei states, “We who are born into this age of freedom and independence and the self must undergo this loneliness. It’s the price we pay for these times of ours.”

And so, melancholy and modernity rhyme—unfolding a compatibility from the inside to the outside, if not the outside to the inside. The contrasts persist, much like the karmic wheel hinted at in the novel. Now, this is the symbolic wheel, composed of motifs that define the main characters: the disciple speaks of the cicada, while Sensei, in contrast, strikes a chord with the cricket.

It’s possible I am writing this long letter to you with a calmer heart than someone else in my position might. The rumble of streetcars, which disturbs at night once the world is sleeping, has now ceased. Beyond the doors, the faint, touching song of a little cricket has begun, subtly evoking the transient dews of autumn.

It is commonly believed that the cicada is the insect that sings at night. Scientifically speaking, however, it sings during the day—it is the cricket that fills the nocturne with its song. Kokoro positions the young and the old as day and night, aligning them with the cicada and the cricket. Sōseki’s taxonomic precision is not incidental; it is instrumental in imbuing these symbols with literary significance.

Like day and night, a cosmic revolution turns them in harmony—separated by space, distinct in time and tradition—yet both longing for a response, a reciprocity, perhaps. The thing is—any return could never be. After all, they were only human, all too human; and to expect reincarnation is to distinguish the mystical absolute from modern relativity. But this was not the case in the past:

Sensei knew no spiritual intimacy could be favorable to him; more so, no modern inhibitions could be favorable to K. About the present, all these he told his young follower at the end of his life through a letter. He could no longer return into the past to correct it; more so he would never return to his correspondent, and say it had been corrected. Because it never was. And how heavy the words which were never said. Such was Sensei’s case when his letter became a memoir-like in quantity, because it was now here: the life of virtue passive and melancholy active; and for one, last shot—he confessed. He took his chances to tell a life that was so silent it was broken, that was so attached it was wounded, before his time would be scorched by Tokyo’s modern lights. The philosophers were right about the two, melancholy and modernity, like Blake and Nietzsche they are, but no return would be eternal, no apocalypse would be more haunting than the specter of the self—they only exist as one, cosmic dread, while they turn the city into a graveyard of stars. Hannah Arendt was one of the brilliant doctors on such matter. She knew before long that in a modern laboring society, a mass melancholy shall sweep us all, especially if totalitarianism is popular, and modern working conditions nurture alienation amongst us. It is from Arendt we learn the rise of melancholy is due to the rise of society. It is not far off in the novel: Sensei’s young friend was also in his path of finding a job; and Japan then was undergoing a societal change in the time when the Meiji era was on the brink of its collapse. In fact, Sensei had made up his mind to end his life when he learned that the emperor’s right hand, General Nogi followed his ruler with suicide. This impact of the public world didn’t only alter the modern human condition, it also refined the swerve of traditions, disrupting the revolution of history’s wheel, and turned it into a diametrical line instead, where there is a start, there is an end. There is no return, hence. As Arendt drew from Marx—this is “the hallmark of the modern age”: world alienation, not self-alienation. Even if Sensei had resolved this by his own, he knew in the end, it was, after all, a matter of traditions—that the rebirth of the world into the modern times would not only be against nature, but also “would break the heart.” As he said, “It must be simply put down to the different eras we belong to, I think. Or perhaps, after all, our differences spring from the individual natures we were born with.”

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

The virtue of melancholy does not proclaim itself as a virtue. No philosopher would define melancholy as an element of virtue, though some pessimists might regard it as an irony—one to be embraced in and for life. In all its weight in the examined life, melancholy serves as a measure of courage—the courage to begin again or the courage to bring an end. Sensei measured himself time and again, questioning whether he possessed that courage—the courage to endure sorrow, to be sorry, and to transmute it into a stoic bravery after the long penance of atonement. It took him a lifetime to weigh this, marked by his daily visits to K’s grave and the letters he wrote to his young follower. For Sensei, melancholy was both testament and self-reckoning, a way to know himself in the depths of silence. In turn, his disciple came to understand what this melancholy meant. All along, they engaged in a communication that was at once austere and warm, candid and cold. And yet, in the end, there was only transition, never true transmission—for as Sensei admitted, “I was lonely. That’s why I wrote letters: I hoped for a response.”

He too had to measure—had to wait. He had to reach out and be as candid with Sensei as Sensei had been with him, even if his mentor remained cold. Yet, in their exchange, the ice thawed—to borrow one of the novel’s own metaphors. There was a response: a long letter, a letter imbued with the virtue of melancholy. Sensei had made up his mind. Like Socrates’ cicada, he had to die (Phaedrus, 259c). At long last, Sensei knew himself: he was a coward, a human failure. The only act of bravery left to him was to say goodbye. In farewells, courage and sincerity do not always go hand in hand. Yet for the first time since his hands had been bloodied by K’s death, he possessed both—and he committed them to writing, so that his young friend would understand. Of course, the disciple could not accept this. Even as his own father lay on the verge of death, he fled his home, desperate to reject the thought that Sensei was truly gone. He ran to the train station—and here lies the ultimate symbol, one that completes the abrupt, unembellished ending of Kokoro, devoid of neat closure or artistic finality. Recall Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. The train station was the site of Anna’s fate, where her life and death converged upon a single track. In Kokoro, earlier hints foreshadowed Sensei’s end, yet at the time, the young disciple had not yet gained the literary refinement to recognise them—to write them into meaning. Because what if he could break the cycle? This cycle of suicide, this despair that haunts both traditions? But he could not. “You cannot save people,” Anaïs Nin once said. “You can only love them.” Sensei had come to learn this—years after K’s death, days after writing his final letter. For him, it was both the end of a beginning and the beginning of an end. And yet, the young disciple returned to him, believing, as Sensei had with his melancholy, that nothing truly ends.

But everything ends.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

^{“Death of Professor Natsume Sōseki (1916)” by Okamoto Ippei, Honolulu Museum of Art.}

How to cite: Fariñas, Ramzzi. “The Virtue of Melancholy: Reading Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 9 Mar. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/03/09/kokoro.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Ramzzi Fariñas grew up in Ilocos Sur and Abra. He is a poet, writer, and a pioneering member of The Time of Assassins Literary Guild (TTALG). His poems and essays have been published in Philippines Graphic, Rappler, Ani 41, Write to Power (Cha: An Asian Literary Journal), Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine聲韻詩刊, Novice: Issue 03, Buhawi: Ang Unang Hagupit, and Digital-Hypertext Garden 2020, among others. His short stories have appeared in zine collections such as Cheap Lives & Hard Drives: A Cyberpunk Anthology and Open Fire by TTALG. He is currently pursuing an MA in Philosophy at the University of the Philippines Diliman.