Soseki Natsume

Living as I do with human beings, the more that I observe them, the more I am forced to conclude that they are selfish.

It's like the frog that tried to outdo the cow...see, the consequences are reflected in each of us as individuals. A people so oppressed by the West have no mental leisure, they can't do anything worthwhile. They get an education that's stripped to the bare bone, and they're driven with their noses to the grindstone until they're dizzy -- that's why they all end up with nervous breakdowns. Try talking to them -- they're usually stupid. They haven't thought about a thing beyond themselves, that day, that very instant. They're too exhausted to think about anything else; it's not their fault. Unfortunately, exhaustion of the spirit and deterioration of the body come hand-in-hand. And that's not all. The decline of morality has set in too. Look where you will in this country, you won't find one square inch of brightness. It's all pitch black. So what difference would it make...

Reflection may be essential to a scholar, but it__ taboo in social intercourse.

It__ so unrewarding, being a woman.

People may make fun of me because I__ wearing something odd, but it__ still good to be alive.

I may be someone who was always destined to spend my life wandering aimlessly. I can__ settle down. The cruel part is, I want to settle down and the world won__ let me. So what choice do I have but to become a fugitive?

Hirota feels strongly drawn toward nature and the natural, is hyper-sensitive to the artificial__articularly that most cramped and constraining man-made creation, society__nd does his best to avoid it.

Novelists congratulate themselves on their creation of this kind of __haracter_ or that kind of __haracter,_ and readers pretend to talk knowingly about __haracter,_ but all it amounts to is that the writers are enjoying themselves writing lies and the readers are enjoying themselves reading lies. In fact, there is no such thing as character, something fixed and final. The real thing is something that novelists don__ know how to write about. Or, if they tried, the end result would never be a novel. Real people are strangely difficult to make sense out of. Even a god would have his hands full trying.

I am an inconsistent creature. Perhaps it is the pressure of my past, and not my own perverse mind, that has made me into this contradictory being. I am all too well aware of this fault in myself. You must forgive me.

Use your intellect to guide you, and you will end up putting peopleoff. Rely on your emotions, and you will forever be pushed around.Force your will on others, and you will live in constant tension. Thereis no getting around it__eople are hard to live with.

It is painfully easy to define human beings. They are beings who, for no good reason at all, create their own unnecessary suffering.

Your brother is a sensitive person. Aesthetically, ethically, and intellectually he is in fact hypersensitive. As a result, it would seem that he was born only to torture himself. He has none of that saving dullness of intelligence which sees little difference between A and B. To him it must be either A or B. And if it is to be A, its shape, degree, and shade of color must precisely match his own conception of it; otherwise he will not accept it. Your brother, being sensitive, is all his life walking on a line he has chosen__ line as precarious as a tight rope. At the same time he impatiently demands that others also tread an equally precarious rope, without missing their footing. It would be a mistake, though, to think that this stems from selfishness. Imagine a world which could react exactly the way your brother expects; that world would undoubtedly be far more advanced than the world as it is now. Consequently, he detests the world which is__esthetically, intellectually, and ethically__ot as advanced as he is himself. That's why it's different from mere selfishness, I think.

As I see it, you__e always unsteady on your legs. You can__ find your courage. You__l go to any length to avoid what displeases you, and you gallop after whatever you want. And why is that? There is no why; it__ because you__e free to. You enjoy the luxury of picking and choosing because you have the latitude. You__e never pushed into a tight corner as I am, so it never occurs to you to thumb your nose at the world.

But do you imagine there__ a certain type of person in the world who conforms to the idea of a __ad person'? You__l never find someone who fits that mold neatly, you know. On the whole, all people are good, or at least they__e normal. The frightening thing is that they can suddenly turn bad when it comes to the crunch. That__ why you have to be careful.

But once I could look back on it in a calmer frame of mind, it struck me that his motive was surely not so simple and straightforward. Had it resulted from a fatal collision between reality and ideals? Perhaps__ut this was still not quite it. Eventually, I began to wonder whether it was not the same unbearable loneliness that I now felt that had brought K to his decision.

When I was a student, there wasn't a single thing we did that was unrelated to others. It was all for the Emperor, or parents, or the country, or society__verything was other-centered, which means that all educated men were hypocrites. When society changed, this hypocrisy ceased to work, and as a result, self-centeredness was gradually imported into thought and action, and egoism became enormously over-developed. Instead of the old hypocrites, now all we've got are out-and-out rogues. Do you see what I mean by that?

The call for political freedom took place long ago. The call for freedom of speech is also a thing of the past. Freedom is not a word to be used exclusively for phenomena such as this which are so easily given outward manifestation. I believe that we young men of the new age have encountered the moment in time when we must call for that great freedom, the freedom of the mind.

Daisuke was the sort of man who, once he was disturbed by something, no matter what, could not let go of it until he had pursued it to the utmost. Moreover, having the capacity to assess the folly of any given obsession, he was forced to be doubly conscious of it. Three of four years ago he had tackled the question of the process whereby his waking mind entered the realm of dreams. At night, when he had gotten under the covers and begun to doze off nicely, he would immediately think, this is it, this is how I fall asleep. No sooner had he thought of this than he was wide awake. When he had managed to doze off again, he would immediately think, here it is. Night after night, he was plagued by his curiosity and would repeat the same procedure two or three times. In the end, he became disgusted in spite of himself. He wanted somehow to escape his agony. Moreover, he was thoroughly impressed by the extent of his folly. To appeal to his conscious mind in order to apprehend his unconscious, and to try to recollect both at the same time was, as James had put it, analogous to lighting a candle to examine the dark, or stopping a top in order to study is movements; at that rate, it stood to reason that he would never again be able to sleep. He knew all this, but when night came, he still thought, now...