After failing to become a teacher at the Peers’ School and going on to teach in Matsuyama and Kumamoto, Sōseki was ordered by the Ministry of Education to study in England. What awaited him there was nothing like what he had expected. (This feature’s map is in article 1.)
Three years of English literature, and still no answer
Sōseki majored in English literature at university. Looking back, he describes what that actually amounted to:
You might ask what English literature even is — but even after majoring in it for three years, I honestly had no idea myself. (working translation)
The exam questions were nothing but dates and facts to memorize: what year Wordsworth was born and died, how many folio editions of Shakespeare exist. “Never mind English literature — I couldn’t even grasp what literature itself was, from that,” Sōseki admits plainly. Three years of study, and he ended it no closer to understanding literature.
Shut inside a sack
Things didn’t change once he reached England. Sōseki describes his state of mind at the time in a striking image.
Having been born into this world, I felt I had to do something — and yet I had no idea what that something was. I found myself standing frozen, like someone alone and shut inside fog. (working translation)
Fog, a searchlight, and then a “sack.” Sōseki layers these images one on top of the other.
It felt exactly like being stuffed inside a sack with no way out. If only I had a single awl in my hand, I told myself, agonized, I could pierce through somewhere and break free — but that awl was not going to be handed to me by anyone, nor could I find it myself… (working translation)
Shut inside a sack — and if only there were one single awl to pierce through it. But no one will give him that awl. This image of the “awl” later develops into a “pickaxe,” read closely in article 6.
The malady called “other-reliance”
Sōseki diagnoses the source of this anguish with a term: tanin-hon’i, or “other-reliance.”
Until then I had been entirely other-reliant — drifting aimlessly about like duckweed with no roots — and I finally realized that this was exactly why nothing had worked. What I mean by “other-reliance” here is what amounts to mimicry: letting someone else drink your sake, then hearing their review of it afterward, and accepting that review as gospel whether or not it makes sense. (working translation)
If a Westerner praises some work, one repeats the praise secondhand without ever checking it against one’s own impression. Sōseki points out that this attitude, his own included, was widespread among Japanese intellectuals of the time. “These days everyone’s caught up in whatever Bergson or Eucken say, because the people over there are making noise about them, so the Japanese jump on the bandwagon too” — a line written over a century ago that still lands, for today’s reader, as an oddly familiar scene.
The four characters of “self-reliance”
The key that let Sōseki out of “other-reliance” was the term jiko-hon’i — self-reliance, or a self-centered standpoint. “In short,” he says, “I finally arrived at these four characters, self-reliance” — and in order to establish that standpoint for himself, he threw himself into scientific study and philosophical reflection. And he describes the change that came with holding this phrase:
Once I had this phrase, “self-reliance,” gripped firmly in my own hand, I became remarkably strong. A spirit rose in me that asked: who are they, anyway? (working translation)
“Who are they, anyway?” — a stance of facing Western discourse as an equal for the first time, rather than accepting it, vaguely, as an authority. It’s worth noting that this “self-reliance” does not mean self-satisfaction or selfishness. What Sōseki is describing is not accepting Western authority uncritically, but placing one’s own impressions and judgment as the standard. This point carries straight through to the definition of “individualism” discussed in article 4.
A pickaxe strikes the vein
Sōseki describes the moment he took hold of this phrase, “self-reliance,” through the image of a miner.
After years of anguish, I felt as though my own pickaxe had struck, with a clang, straight into a vein of ore. To say it again: what had been shut inside fog had, at a certain angle, been shown clearly the path it should follow. (working translation)
The “awl” becomes a “pickaxe”; the closed-off “sack” becomes a “vein of ore” waiting to be struck. Article 6 traces this shift in the metaphor closely, against the original text.
Worth checking as you read
First, Sōseki says this discovery “ended in failure as a written undertaking.” The large-scale theoretical work on literature he set out to write as the fruit of his time abroad (understood to refer to what became Theory of Literature) was left unfinished, and Sōseki himself describes it in strikingly harsh terms — “the corpse of a failure,” “the corpse of a deformed child.” Yet he says the idea of self-reliance itself went on supporting him consistently afterward.
Second, “self-reliance” is a term born strictly out of Sōseki’s own personal experience, not offered as a universal method. Sōseki himself makes this explicit in the very next paragraph: “I never for a moment think the same path should be a model for you.”
Third, the very shift in tools, from “awl” to “pickaxe,” is itself characteristic of how Sōseki builds an argument. Rather than explaining an abstract concept once and moving on, he layers metaphor upon metaphor, closing the gap with his audience’s own sense of things a little at a time. The close-reading article examines this technique in more detail, paragraph by paragraph, against the original text.
Summary
| Point | Content |
|---|---|
| Starting point | Three years majoring in English literature, still no idea what literature is |
| The image of anguish | Shut inside fog, shut inside a sack, with no awl to pierce through |
| The diagnosis | Other-reliance — accepting Western authority secondhand, without question |
| The discovery | Self-reliance — placing one’s own impressions and judgment as the standard |
| The arrival | A pickaxe striking a vein of ore — the discovery of a path forward |
In short — Sōseki finally filled the inner emptiness that secondhand borrowing could never fill, through “self-reliance”: an attitude that places one’s own impressions as the standard.