Kokoro

“I couldn’t really see the distinction between visiting someone’s grave and taking a walk.”

The difference between the narrator’s youthful naivety and Sensei’s solemn, aged cynicism is clear. The narrator does not yet understand the ritual and the importance of a visit to a grave; he does not yet comprehend the emotional ramifications of an act beyond the mere action itself. For all his university education, the narrator is woefully uneducated in terms of emotion and experience.

“A man who knows the satisfactions of love would speak of them more warmly. But, you know… love is also a sin.”

Sensei’s words have the power to shock the narrator, even if the narrator does not yet fully comprehend what he is being told. The comparison between love and sin seems significant to the narrator, even if he struggles to move beyond the traditional understanding of such abstract concepts. Sensei’s wisdom is portrayed through the narrator’s lack of understanding.

“In fact, these days perhaps he dislikes the human race. In that sense, given that I’m human, he must feel the same way about me.”

The narrator does not have much experience with women, and he occasionally dismisses women as unintelligent. The more he comes to know Shizu, however, the more he realizes that she is as introspective and as thoughtful as he is. Both characters are fascinated by Sensei, but they struggle to comprehend him. The difference is that Shizu is better able to voice her concerns about Sensei, while the narrator does not understand his own thoughts.

“Surely the only thing either could do was continue just as they were—just as I too was helpless in the face of my father’s approaching death back at home. A sense of human fragility swept over me, of the hopeless frailty of our innately superficial nature.”

The more time he spends with Sensei, the more the narrator is forced to develop a sense of his own mortality. He wrestles with the ideas and how to express profound feelings that he has never felt before. In contrast, Sensei is blunt in his reckoning with death. As will be made apparent, he is a frank and honest person due to the experiences of death that he has endured. Sensei’s cynicism is shaped by his closeness to death, while the narrator is confronting the prospect of death for the first time.

“I took the diploma from my bag and spread it out carefully for my parents to see. Something had crushed it, and it was no longer quite the shape it had been.”

The crumpled diploma symbolizes the narrator’s naïve inability to understand the significance of an action or object beyond face value. The way he crumples the diploma shows how he regards it as a mere object, while his parents understand the diploma’s significance as a metaphor for their son’s achievements. His lack of empathy and his shallow understanding of the world are changing and evolving as he spends more time with Sensei.

“It’s a presumptuous thing to say, but His Majesty’s illness is a little like my own.”

Japanese commoners have a deep and perhaps misplaced love for the Emperor, which prompts them to seek out parallels with a man whose life is so distant and alien to them. The narrator’s father likens his illness to the Emperor’s, even though he is dying a quiet and insignificant death, while the Emperor's last days are spent being doted upon in a palace. This desire for empathy with the ruler is not felt by the narrator, demonstrating the changes that are occurring in Japanese society at the end of the Meiji Restoration.

“In the old days children fed their parents, but these days they devour them.”

The narrator’s father intrinsically feels how the world is changing, but he struggles to put these significant social changes into a meaningful context. Instead, he laments the ways in which children “these days” lack respect for their elders. The comment on generational change feels reactionary and misinformed, especially considering the other parental relationships that are portrayed in the novel. The narrator’s father recognizes a changing society but cannot or will not select a suitable expression of this social change.

“These words struck me as both comic and tragic. After all, he was not in the city, where really tasty food was actually to be had.”

The narrator recognizes the tragic nature of his father’s life when his father praises the good food available in his small town. By this time, the narrator has lived in Tokyo and has become fully urbanized. To him, the food available in rural areas is paltry compared to the culinary delights available in urban spaces. The narrator regards his father’s dying wish as pathetic, a demonstration of the small-minded rural limitations he wants to leave behind. Despite this, the narrator fails to recognize the emotional and nostalgic qualities that may make the food taste so good to his father. He is dismissive and naïve, unable to empathize with someone he believes to be less educated than himself.

“If this opportunity is missed, that firm promise I made to you will have come to naught.”

As he approaches his death, Sensei is choosing to settle his debts. Money has played an important role in his life in a tragic way; he does not care about finances, but his emotional debts remain significant. Sensei wants to leave the world on his own terms, and that means resolving the promises he has made to a friend, approaching this as though he were paying a final bill.

“Indeed, to put it bluntly, the question of your work, of how you should earn a living, was utterly meaningless to me. I didn’t care.”

Sensei’s experiences and age have given him a unique perspective. He recognizes that he is acting selfishly, and he admits to this. The frankness of his statement is brutally honest in a society so focused on etiquette and manners. Sensei’s cynicism cuts through the era’s social expectations and demonstrates the extent to which he is alienated from every aspect of society.

“Their deaths left me stunned and helpless. I had no knowledge, no experience, no wisdom.”

In recounting the story of his life, Sensei draws comparisons with his current self. He was grieving at the time of his parents’ deaths, and he blamed his grief on his lack of wisdom and education. Now, however, he is a wise and experienced man, and he is just as miserable. Knowledge, experience, and wisdom may seem important, but they have not helped Sensei navigate an unforgiving world.

“When I answered with the single word money, you looked dissatisfied. I well remember that look.”

Sensei repeats an interaction with the narrator from his own perspective. The narrator’s version of events frames Sensei as a fascinating, almost radical thinker. From Sensei’s perspective, however, the narrator’s reaction illustrates his naïve nature. That he should think Sensei to be so radical only further undermines the narrator and makes him seem so much more inexperienced. The change in perspectives helps illustrate the depths of the characters.

“In her woman’s way, however, Okusan did her best to view my liberality with money as an expression of my general character.”

For all his radical views about society, Sensei cannot help but propagate traditional, patronizing views about women. He frames his relationship with Okusan purely in financial terms, perhaps because of the formative experience with his uncle. In terms of Okusan, however, this relationship is due to “her woman’s way” (155), even if men also share such a view of money. Sensei cannot recognize the way patriarchal views slip into his own worldview, perhaps due to the inherently patriarchal nature of Meiji-era Japan.

“And with this thought what had appeared to be kindness suddenly seemed the actions of a cunning strategist.”

Sensei’s experiences with his uncle are emotionally scarring. Even though he is welcomed into a new house and even though he may have the prospect of marrying a woman with whom he has fallen in love, he cannot help but feel manipulated. Sensei is in danger of getting everything he wants and then throwing it away because he cannot trust the world to be nice to him. His cynicism and his suspicion have become toxic, endangering his ability to be happy.

“Better to let him live with me, while I secretly gave Okusan money enough to feed us both.”

Sensei lacks the ability to discuss issues with K in a reliable, adult manner. Instead, he organizes an elaborate scheme to help his friend, which will allow them to both save face and avoid a mature, frank conversation. The contrast between this version of Sensei and the blunt, open, older version is clear. After his experiences with K, Sensei learns the price of not being honest.

“He had decided that if he accustomed himself to hardship, then pain would sooner or later cease to register.”

K convinces himself that he can become hardened to emotional pain through exposure alone. Like many flights of fancy among young men, however, his experiences demonstrate that this is false. When faced with the prospect of losing the woman he loves after being betrayed by his best friend, K is shown a world that he does not like. His hope that he is immune to pain is proven false.

“In retrospect, I see that my jealousy of K was already showing its horns.”

Sensei’s letter is an exercise in retrospection. He is searching through his past for his own benefit as much as the narrator’s. This confession is a way for Sensei to organize his thoughts and emotions concerning his friend. This experiment is also a justification for the suicide Sensei has decided to pursue, however, meaning that he is searching for reasons to blame himself for K’s death. He searches thoroughly for any hints of jealousy and takes care to point them out to the narrator.

“We gaped about us at the swirling life of Tokyo, like two visitors from another world.”

The two young men return to the city, and once again, they are overwhelmed. The contrast between the rural and the urban is such that even two men who have lived in Tokyo for some time are still taken aback by the almost alien environment of the city. The city never ceases to wonder, while the countryside never ceases to bore.

“To digress for a moment, it seems to me that this kind of jealousy is perhaps a necessary part of love.”

For Sensei, jealousy is almost a metric by which love can be measured. To be jealous is to be honest about emotions; without jealousy, love cannot exist. Sensei’s desire to reframe the negative emotion of jealousy as a way to measure the positive emotion of love illustrates his reflective, radical disposition.

“I could see no way to bring it up naturally. I felt dizzy with remorse.”

Sensei feels such an intense emotional reaction to K’s confession that he feels genuine physical pain. Dizziness and remorse blur into a single entity. The barriers between the physical and the emotional blur, intensifying the pain of confession for a man who struggles to express himself emotionally.

“Whether he attained his spiritual aspirations was beside the point—he could reach enlightenment itself, for all I cared.”

As the reality of K’s love for Ojosan becomes apparent, Sensei abandons the pretense of intellectual or spiritual rigor. He does not care about his friend’s religion or any reasonable explanation for the situation; he only cares about his own feelings for Ojosan and how he can beat K to her hand in marriage.

“Once back in my room, I felt somewhat unnerved at how remarkably smoothly the discussion had gone.”

Sensei obsesses for days about how to approach Okusan. His obsession almost makes him feel sick as he plots out every possible scenario, devolving into a neurotic mess. When he does approach her, however, the entire conversation is so smooth and simple that he is “unnerved” (236). Sensei is shown the reality of the world and how it differs from the world he imagines. His active, cynical imagination means that he cannot conceive of a world in which he gets what he wants.

“I read it to the end and understood that K had deliberately avoided mentioning her.”

As he reads the suicide note, Sensei almost wishes that K would admit that Sensei’s actions caused his death. Sensei is convinced that he is responsible, and the note’s careful avoidance of the issue essentially confirms this for him. With K gone, however, the letter is the only piece of evidence. The letter is a lie that will be told to the world, and Sensei will be burdened with the shameful truth for the rest of his life.