Perhaps I Am Continuing What Soseki Began

Image in the original: Natsume Sōseki from Wikipedia

I used to believe that a British education gave a person more than knowledge.

It seemed to offer legitimacy. A standard. A more correct way of being serious in the world.

I thought that if I passed through that system, some part of its authority would remain with me.

I was wrong.

I remember sitting across from an interviewer and realizing, before I had said anything of substance, that I would need to explain my degree.

Not what I had studied. Not what I had learned.
But why the institution itself deserved to be taken seriously.

A Harvard or MIT carries its own introduction. The name enters the room before the person does. What I held was different. Outside certain circles, it required a kind of argument. And there is something quietly devastating about having to argue for the value of something you once believed spoke for itself.

There was no alumni network waiting. No quiet fraternity of shared schooling, no invisible hand reaching across a table to say: you passed through the right gate, we recognise you.

In Tokyo, the graduates of my institution were few enough that there was no community to speak of. I carried it alone.

For years, I told myself this was a mark of distinction.
That I moved in a world too provincial to recognise real cultivation. That the fault lay with the room, not with me.

That was not courage. That was the last defence of a man who could not yet afford to let go.

Because letting go would have meant admitting the truth I had avoided for years.

I had not simply studied in Britain. I had believed in it. I had expected it to give me something no place can give — a sense that I had earned my standing in the world, that I belonged somewhere, that the question of who I was had been quietly answered.

It had not answered that question.

No institution can.

The degree did not betray me. I had loved it.
I simply loved it for what it could never give.

It was sometime around then that I found myself reading Soseki — or perhaps returning to him, I am no longer sure.

But I remember the particular stillness of recognising something. Here was a man who had also gone to England with more than academic intent.
Who had also come back carrying something that did not translate.

That is when I first understood why he felt so close to me.

Not as a literary figure. Not as a historical example of cultural navigation.

But as someone who had been in the same place.

When I read his words, I did not feel instructed.

I felt recognised.

That is a different thing entirely.

And then something else: a kind of quiet shame, in the best sense.

Soseki had faced this in a harder time.
No internet. No global conversation to belong to. Japan was being remade from the outside, and a man who had studied English literature in London returned home to find that neither world quite held him.

The pressure to imitate, to defer, to seek permission from the West — it was not a private struggle.
It was the condition of his entire civilisation.

And yet, he found his answer.

Take hold of your standard with your own hand.

I have fewer excuses than he did.
The world is more connected now. There is more room for voices that move between cultures.

But the temptation he named has not disappeared. It has only changed its form.
The pressure today is not only Western prestige. It is the pull toward whatever already works — the successful essayist, the familiar format, the approved tone, the kind of thinking that travels easily. We are invited to imitate all the time.

Even cosmopolitanism can become a form of dependency.

To live by one’s own standard is not to reject influence. It is to digest it so completely that it no longer rules you. That is harder than imitation. Imitation is efficient. It gives you shortcuts. But the cost is this: you begin to perform rather than think. You seek permission before you speak.

The most dangerous defeat is not to be conquered by another civilization. It is to go on living by its permission.

Soseki understood that early.

I do not know if what I am doing now is literature in any serious sense.

I write in English about Japanese thought, for readers who may never have heard of Soseki, or Kenko, or Saigo Takamori. I write from Tokyo, looking both ways. I am not sure there is a name for the position I occupy.

But I am no longer waiting for one.

That, I think, is what Soseki gave me. Not a method. Not a tradition to shelter inside.
Only this: the struggle to speak from somewhere real — rather than somewhere approved — is itself the work. It does not end. It is not supposed to end.

He began it in London, in a rented room, in a language that was not his own.

I continue it here, in a city that is mine now, in a language I chose.

Perhaps that is enough.

Perhaps that is everything. ■

Perhaps I Am Continuing What Soseki Began

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