What is a ‘chapter’ anyway? Reading Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro – now with answers

January 9, 2014

I was inspired by a tweet from Niven Govinden (who’s reading his The Gate) to put down The Magic Mountain (it will wait for me) and pick up Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro, as recommended to me by David Hayden, when I mentioned how much I loved Kusamakura, probably the best known of this Meiji-era Japanese novelist’s books.

I am enjoying Kokoro, which is the story of the friendship between a young and an old man, but one thing is confusing, or annoying, me. The novel (234pp in its elegant Penguin Classics edition, not counting introduction etc) is divided up into 110 chapters, the vast majority of which – do the maths – are two pages long.

Despite their brevity, the chapters are often not self-contained, but some four or five of them may cover the same scene, and run directly on from one to the next. As an extreme example, here is the end of Chapter 26 and the beginning of Chapter 27, during which the narrator and ‘Sensei’, as he calls his friend, are sitting in a garden, talking.

A passing breeze lifted Sensei’s hat from where he had hung it, on the tip of a slender little cedar sapling, and tossed it to the ground.

CHAPTER 27

I immediately retrieved the hat. “It fell off, Sensei,” I said, flicking off the red grains of earth that clung here and there.

“Thank you.”

Now, obviously, quoting such a short amount doesn’t give a real sense of things, but I’m finding these divisions rather off-putting, not least for being labelled ‘chapters’. They aren’t doing what ‘chapters’, in the usual sense of the term – in a Western novel – do. They don’t narrate a finite and definite scene. They don’t really seem to give any shape to the narrative as a whole.

So, my question is: what would they be called in Japanese, these divisions, and how do they operate? And what else could they be called, in translation, that would unsettle me less?

(This might sound a little like being oversensitive, but Sōseki clearly divided up his novels with a purpose in mind: Kusamakura has 13 chapters; Sanshirō has 13 numbered sections (not labelled ‘chapter’), which are subdivided by asterisks; I Am A Cat has 11 chapters spread across three ‘Volumes’; while Kokoro itself spreads its 110 chapters across three ‘Parts’. I think if the sections had just been numbered, rather than called chapters, I would have been happier.)

Someone, help me out. Thank you.

***

Well, as you can see from the comments below, people wiser than I have kindly helped me out: Kokoro was originally published in serial form in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, and it is those – likely daily – sections that are reproduced as the book’s chapters.

But, before that, the book’s three ‘parts’ (‘Sensei and I’, ‘My Parents and I’, and ‘Sensei’s Will’) were thought of by the author as separate stories, each whole unto itself, and were chopped up for serialisation. As David Hayden says, in his comment below,

An odd translation decision to publish it using the restrictions that newspaper serialisation forced on Soseki rather than the organisational plan that the author chose himself for the book. Although I can see the value in creating more space around each installment. A period of following silence for reflection. Calling this a chapter is unhelpful though.

Which sums up my thoughts entirely.

Now, serialisation is something that pops up now and again as an idea that people try to push. I think it’s probably had its day, as have newspapers, more or less. The last successful serialisation I can think of was Bridget Jones’ Diary, in The Independent, which wasn’t really a serialisation at all, it was a column that turned into a book, but certainly I remember people turning to it on the day it came out with something like the same eagerness that may have applied to the last slice of a Dickens novel, or whatever.

People don’t want to wait any more. Think of the box set syndrome, when you save up the whole thing to binge on in one go, or at least at your own pace. The latest iteration of this was the US version of House of Cards, which was released on Netflix in one go, taking a format – the TV series – which until then had until then been essentially a serialised one, and removing the timebound aspect altogether.

Now, fiction serialisation on the internet is another thing entirely. I’ve written here about #twitterfiction experiments, and here about my now finished year-long story ‘J’. And I note that Five Dials is doing something similar with ‘365‘, a story by James Robertson that is being published online, a chunk a day for the whole of 2014 – his chunks being 365 words each, whereas mine were 140 characters each.

Well, having seen ‘J’ come and go, with 100 followers – and seeing two other writers from Mapped carry on the experiment on @365daystory – I’m still hopeful that Twitter can play a part in online fiction dissemination goes beyond the 140-character microstory (ugh!).

You only need to look at Teju Cole’s recent intervention (Storified by Slate here) to see that getting in, doing your thing, and getting out again is the way forward. I point you, also, towards Paraic O’Donnell, who occasionally knocks out a narrative, unannounced, on his Twitter feed, almost as a form of relaxation, it sometimes seems, and with also a nod to Sam Byers, who has described his current Twitter modus operandi (not in so many words) as the five-tweet-rant-then-out.

In any case, these are the things that sprung to mind as inspirations when I had an idea earlier today for a new piece of Twitter fiction, details to be announced, which will probably start next week. Onward – and thanks to my Sōseki correspondents.

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Written by Jonathan Gibbs Posted in Reading Tagged with kokoro, kusamakura, Natsume Soseki, Sam Byers, Teju Cole, Twitter, twitterfiction