This Dark World of Ours: Personal Reflections on Kokoro and Yuhi
Christina Yi (Canada)

I first began learning Japanese in high school. As a secondgeneration Korean American whose first language is English I would have jumped at the opportunity to learn advanced Korean if I could, but Japanese was the only Asian language offered by our school at the time; manga and anime were also just starting to become mainstream in the American media landscape, and so I chose Japanese purely out of popular culture interest. I had always been a voracious reader of English books, since the very moment I learned how to read, but for some reason it never occurred to me to seek out works of Japanese literature until my Japanese language teacher, a wonderful man named Fujita-sensei, plucked Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro (1914) from the classroom bookshelf and literally placed it in my hands, urging me to give it a try. I did, and loved it—and I haven’t stopped reading Japanese literature since.

Thinking about that first encounter with Sōseki, though, what remains most vividly in my memories is not actually the novel itself but the translator’s introduction by Edwin McClellan, in which he (via Lafcadio Hearn) renders kokoro as “the heart of things.”¹ 16-year-old me was floored by the idea that a seemingly simple word like kokoro could be interpreted in such a profoundly poetic way. Presentday me (considerably older, and I suppose considerably more cynical) now thinks it a rather selfindulgent embellishment on McClellan’s part. Still, I think the memory endures because that translation does capture something of the spirit of the novel itself, its attention to the heart of things.

At a key point in Kokoro, one of the main characters writes a long letter in which he says the following: “Without hesitation, I am about to force you into the shadows of this dark world of ours. But you must not fear. Gaze steadily into the shadows and then take whatever will be of use to you in your own life” (128). Even 16-year-old me could understand the metanarrative Sōseki was trying to say about the fraught act of writing and reading the words of others. But in rereading that quote now, I am struck not by Sōseki’s use of “you” but by the word “ours.” We are all of us in the same dark world, whether we access it through Japanese or English or any other language; the real question, then, is what we are supposed to do with that knowledge—how we might use it to bridge the gap between the impenetrable, unknowable heart of others and the painfully beating heart of one’s own terrible, self-contradictory self.

**

My life changed again with another book recommended by another wonderful teacher. I continued to study Japanese language and literature at university and was finally able to go to Japan in my junior year, through a four-month study abroad program at Chubu University. There, I took a course with a Japanese literature professor who, when he found out that I was Korean American, promptly recommended that I read Yi Yangji’s 1988 novella Yuhi.² I did—and learned, for the first time, of the history of “resident” Koreans in Japan (zainichi Chōsenjin or zainichi Kankokujin), a community that emerged during Japan’s colonial rule of Korea (1910-1945) and remains one of its most enduring legacies. Yi Yangji self-identified as a second-generation Zainichi Korean. But while the novella does feature a Zainichi Korean character (the eponymous Yuhi), what I found most interesting and

puzzling about it was how it is narrated in the Japanese language by an unnamed South Korean narrator who supposedly knows no Japanese.

Again, aided by many years of academic training, present-day me understands the seemingly awkward or artificial linguistic structure of the novella as the very point—the way it calls attention to how language constitutes subjectivity through complex and also self-contradictory narratives irreducible to national borders.³ 21-year-old me wasn’t quite as able to articulate the novella in such terms, but she knew (even then) something of how language boxes us into certain kinds of identities, even as it can also be used to fashion radically new or different ones. Yuhi also hammered into me the absolute necessity of reading a diversity of writers, with a diversity of viewpoints and histories and positionalities. Before reading the book, I had always accepted the view of Japan as homogenous; afterwards, I knew never to make that mistake again. But more importantly, the experience made me begin to ask why: why had I thought of Japan like that, where did those ideas come from? Why does the myth of Japanese homogeneity continue to persist?

Fortunately, many excellent scholars have provided persuasive answers to those questions; for a start, I recommend Oguma Eiji’s seminal A Genealogy of “Japanese” Self-Images and Tessa MorrisSuzuki’s Re-Inventing Japan.⁴ What I’ll just say here is that if there is anything I have learned from reading Kokoro and Yuhi together, it is that words always and inevitably spill across boundaries: boundaries of country, race, politics, and one’s own unthinking prejudices. Japanese literature is like any other literature in that way. But what’s notable about these two texts is the way they necessarily make “Japan(ese)” contingent to the rest of the world, forcing the reader to think through the specific, particular histories that constitute “Japan(ese)” (and thereby us, and the rest of the world).

Finally: I am who I am and where I am now in part because of those two teachers who recommended Kokoro and Yuhi to me. In a way, this essay is my attempt to pass it forward. Consider reading those books, if you’re able and interested. I hope that in doing so you’ll be able to take whatever will be of use to you in your own life, in whatever language(s) of our dark world.

1. ¹ Edwin McClellan, “Forward” in Natsume Sōseki, Kokoro trans. Edwin McClellan (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1999), vi.
2. ² Available in English translation as Nabi T’aryŏng and Other Stories trans. Cindi Textor and Lee Soo Mi (Irvine: Seoul Selection, 2022), under the romanization Lee Yang-ji.
3. ³ Christina Yi, Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), xxvi.
4. ⁴ Oguma Eiji, Tan’itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 1995; English translation published under the title A Genealogy of “Japanese” Self-Images in 2002); Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Re-inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation (Armonk, New York: ME Sharpe, 1997).

(Associate Professor, Modern Japanese Literature at UBC)