Visiting The Natsume Sōseki Memorial Museum in Shinjuku

Innovative Architecture on the Site of the Writer's Destroyed House

The exterior of the Natsume Sōseki Memorial Museum in Shinjuku, Tokyo/All Photos by Hope Anderson

To those who don’t know Natsume Sōseki, I describe him as Japan’s Mark Twain and its Henry James. Why Twain? Because Sōseki’s early comic novels I Am a Cat and Botchan recall The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in their heroes’ picaresque adventures and biting social commentary. Why James? Because Sōseki shared his themes of societal strictures, family hierarchy, marriage and inheritance.

While Sōseki’s life was very different from Twain’s, it was similar to James’s in several respects: both writers were upper class, educated men—and outsiders. While James’s outsider status stemmed from his expatriate upbringing and homosexuality, Sōseki’s was baked in at birth. His birth parents, embarrassed at his arrival in their middle age, gave him up for adoption as an infant and grudgingly took him back when his parents divorced. (He was nine, and found out from the maid that his new parents were his biological ones.) As if being unwanted weren’t bad enough, Sōseki suffered serious lifelong illnesses, physical and mental. As his health worsened in his thirties, the humor that characterized Sōseki’s early novels fell away, giving his later work the gravity and sweep of James’s final books.

But for posthumous literary fame, Sōseki outstrips Twain and James, as well as every other modern writer.