There’s a Japanese word for someone who buys books, to have most of them pile up somewhere without reading them: tsundoku. That’s me. I’ve always been reading a lot, but over the course of the pandemic, I somehow slowed down. There are many unread issues of the New York Review of Books around here somewhere. And there are all those books.
I will buy books either when someone I trust recommends one or when I come across something that looks interesting in a trusted source (this includes the NYRB). I suppose the main reason why I am a tsundoku is that I find more than I can read. I now don’t buy a book immediately but rather come back to it the day after: do I really need this? This is helping a little bit, but not all that much.
So I decided to start reading the books that are waiting for me. First up was The Miner by Natsume Sōseki (who, Wikipedia tells me, “is often considered the greatest writer in modern Japanese history”). I bought the book at San Francisco’s City Lights Books last year. They had such a great selection of East Asian books that I made sure to look for some I had wanted to check out. This included The Miner.
I’d love to tell you that reading The Miner had been a bucket-list item of my own, but it wasn’t. Instead, when I was in Tōkyō last year, a former Japanese student told me about it. We share a dislike of Haruki Murakami’s work and a general affinity for literature, so he recommended the book as something startlingly modern, despite it having been written in 1908.
The internet informs me that The Miner isn’t considered as an I-novel (“a literary genre in Japanese literature used to describe a type of confessional literature where the events in the story correspond to events in the author's life” — Wikipedia). For sure, it reads like one. Or maybe it just purports to be one.
The book chronicles the events following the narrator’s having run away from home at age 19, after — and this is revealed in pieces a little bit later — having been involved in relationships with two women at the same time. The writing isn’t supposed to be contemporaneous: it is the older narrator’s self who re-counts his earlier experiences. This makes for an interesting device because at various times, the narrator comments on his younger self’s naiveté, a naiveté caused both by the relatively young age and his privileged family background in Tōkyō.
It’s not just the older narrator commenting on his younger self, it’s also the younger self attempting to process what is being presented to him. This back and forth makes for an interesting experience for the reader. For sure it’s not something I would have expected in a novel written in 1908.
As an aside, the foreword, written by Haruki Murakami, tells me the novel originally was serialized in a newspaper. There is yet another meta level present that alludes to this fact. Sprinkled here and there in the text, there are references to what a novel ought to or might be, as if the author were questioning his own role of writing in installments for a newspaper reader.
So the narrator has run away to disappear and finds himself in the woods north of Tōkyō where he comes across a tea stand. Walking by the stand, there’s a man who calls after him, asking whether he’s in search of a job that will pay a lot of money. The narrator turns around, meets the man (his name is Chōzō), shares some food, and is then taken to a mine in the mountains where work is to be had.
Along the way, Chōzō picks up two other young men, one young country bumpkin, one a teenager. The group makes their way up into the mountains to the mine. Here, the narrator is left at one of the many “boilers” — a community house of sorts, maybe more like barracks for miners, where he has to convince the foreman that he indeed wants to become a miner. After some discussion, it is agreed that they might try having what indirectly is described as a pampered weakling from Tōkyō become a miner.
After a first night in the boiler, the narrator is taken down the mine by a man named Hatsu who acts as a guide. Much like the foreman, Hatsu attempts to dissuade the young man from becoming a miner as they push deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth. Here, there are similarities with Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, in which Dante is taken through the circles of Hell by Virgil. The Miner stays with a description of the different levels they encounter, but the similarity cannot be coincidental.
If there is any doubt about the idea of the mine as a form of Hell, a chance encounter with a man named Yasu manages to do away with it. On their way back up, the narrator appears to be a little bit too cocky for Hatsu who proceeds to climb out fast. So the narrator ends up being lost and stumbles across Yasu while hoping to find someone who can show him the way out.
Their encounter, near the end the book, provides the climax of the book, as both men end up shedding tears over their reasons for being where they are. “I was a student once, too.” says Yasu:
“I’ve been educated beyond high school. But when I was twenty-three, I became involved with a woman and—I’m not going to go into detail, but because of this I committed a terrible crime.”
(As can be expected, the larger background of the novel follows the very patriarchal structure of Japanese society, where dealings with women or becoming involved with them inevitably leads men down a dark path. Thankfully, there are few instances in the book where this becomes openly spelled out, even though when it happens, it felt more than a little grating to this reader.)
Yasu then proceeds to implore the narrator not to follow his lead, while giving the reasons for why he will never leave, even though at this stage he could:
“Back in society—that place where the sun shines—there are far more painful things than what I have here. That’s what keeps me going. When I think how dark and cramped this place is, I’m satisfied.”
And with that, he offers to pay the narrator’s fare back to Tōkyō (something the foreman had already done earlier). This has the narrator realize what just happened.
Such chance encounters are rare enough in a big city, but almost impossible in the depths of a mine. To think that there could be a stage far down in a sunless hole where two men, forgotten by the world, by other men, by history, and even by the sun, were bestowing sacred teachings and shedding precious tears: surely no one could know this but the men themselves who sat cross-legged upon the earth, gazing wordlessly at each other.
The narrator decides he wants to stay. Yasu shows him the way out of the mine. He finds Hatsu, the guide who had abandoned him, and back at the boiler, he informs the foreman of his decision. I am not going to reveal the ending, the few events that happened after that.
This is maybe an unfair comparison, but unlike any of Murakami’s books I read, The Miner operates on a completely different, much higher level. There’s a forced stylishness to Murakami’s work — it is as if he’s writing his novels while winking at readers at the same time: “hey, aren’t we both cool?” And he’s writing mostly for male readers, isn’t he, given that his female characters are mostly one-dimensional cyphers whose only purpose is to satisfy the male heroes.
In contrast, Sōseki’s writing does not possess that stylishness at all. In some ways, The Miner does feel a lot more Japanese in that its main character displays the sense of self-awareness and self-deprecation that can be found in a lot of novels from Japan. On the other side, The Miner is filled with a sense of self-recognition: it often explicitly questions itself in ways that would be unthinkable in a Murakami.
So Murakami’s books are more modern in the sense that they operate against the background of many of today’s themes. But The Miner is a lot more modern in a different, almost meta sense: more often than not, it’s questioning its own motivations. Its anonymous narrator thus has a depth that none of Murakami’s characters can even remotely hope for.
And with that I’ll leave you for today. Maybe the above managed to get you interested in The Miner. Whenever I spent too much time looking at only photography, I have to remind myself that there’s a whole world of wonder beyond. Sometimes, wonder can even be found in the fictional bowels of a Japanese mine.
As always thank you for reading. Stay safe and well!
— Jörg
I’m a freelance writer, photographer, and educator currently living and working in the US.
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