![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() This ‘darkness’ can be interpreted to represent the instability of the changing times, as well as the epistemological impasse, the uncertainty of understanding that the narrator experiences at this stage of national transition.Įven Sensei’s house, described here as a “single point of light”, was imagined to “struggle blindly through the darkness”, “destined to soon blink out and disappear” (88). After visually “examin the effect” of the “flag and the black mourning strip” that “hung listlessly in the windless air”, the narrator imagines the scene of “the vast city stirring everywhere with movement in the midst of a great darkness” (Soseki 88). In response to his death, the people have become situated in a time of transition: this is where much of the text’s ambiguity stems from.Īfter receiving news of the emperor’s death, the narrator is described to hang a mourning flag outside his house. The personal is rendered political here, where the microcosm of the individual emperor’s death affects the macrocosm of the Japanese nation state and its people. Emperor Meiji’s death marks the end of the Meiji era in Japan. Despite its status as a work of fiction, Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro is situated within the historical timeline of Emperor Meiji’s death. ![]()
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