‘Masters of Doing Nothing at All’
In Japan, as is often noted, there are separate words for the self you show the world and the one that you reveal behind closed doors; where we regard it as a sin to be reserved at home, the Japanese take it as much more cruel to be too forthcoming in the world. This reticence has little to do with trying to protect oneself, and everything to do with trying to protect others from one’s problems, which shouldn’t be theirs; it’s one reason Japan is so confounding to foreigners, as its people faultlessly sparkle and attend to one another in public, while often seeming passive and unconvinced of their ability to do anything decisive at home.
‘Under the sun the couple presented smiles to the world,’ Sōseki writes, in one of his most beautiful sentences here; ‘under the moon, they were lost in thought: and so they had quietly passed the years.’ At one point Oyone asks her husband, ‘How are things going for Koroku?’
‘Not well at all,’ he answers, and with that they both go to sleep.
—Pico Iyer on Natsume Sōseki’s The Gate, in The New York Review of Books. The essay appears in slightly different form as an introduction to the book.
