The lecture Natsume Sōseki gave at the Peers’ School’s Fujinkai society on November 25, 1914 — “My Individualism” (私の個人主義) — is one of the places where Sōseki’s own thinking comes through most directly. It isn’t a technical treatise on literature; it’s a record of him speaking to a young audience, in plain language, about his own life and the ideas he pulled out of it. This feature reads the lecture in the original across seven articles.
A lecture that opens with a rakugo punchline
The lecture doesn’t get straight to the point. Sōseki grumbles about why he was even asked to speak, then works in something close to a rakugo warm-up story: a feudal lord, out hawking near Meguro, finds himself won over by the taste of grilled mackerel pike served at a poor farmer’s house; later, he has his cook painstakingly debone and refine the same fish for a formal dinner — and it turns out to taste of nothing at all. Citing the story’s punchline, “for mackerel pike, Meguro is best,” Sōseki teases his Gakushūin audience: isn’t their eagerness to hear an outsider like him speak exactly the same thing?
After this long preamble, Sōseki tells the story of once failing to become a teacher at the Peers’ School, and moves from there into the story of his own life — Matsuyama, Kumamoto, and finally his study trip to London.
Two parts: experience and argument
Sōseki himself divides the lecture into a “Part One” and “Part Two” (paragraph 59).
Part One is the story of his own experience. He majored in English literature at university but graduated without understanding what literature actually was; even in London, he went through a period of anguish, unsure what to do with himself. Then, at a certain point, he arrives at the idea of jiko-hon’i (self-reliance, or a self-centered standpoint), and from there, finally finds the path he should follow.
Part Two draws out the broader argument from that experience. The students at the Peers’ School, Sōseki says, will go on to hold power and wealth. So he argues that power must carry duty, and wealth must carry responsibility, and that developing one’s own individuality must go hand in hand with respecting the individuality of others. The lecture closes by arguing that individualism is not opposed to nationalism.
This feature’s structure
| Article | Content |
|---|---|
| 1 (this article) | Overview |
| 2 | Discovering self-reliance — the “sack” and “pickaxe” of London |
| 3 | Power and money, and the duty that must attend them |
| 4 | Freedom and duty — defining individualism, and the Miyake Setsurei incident |
| 5 | Individualism does not conflict with nationalism |
| 6 | Close reading: how one metaphor grows from “sack” into “pickaxe” |
| 7 | Verdict: what still holds up, and what belongs to its era |
A public-domain source
Sōseki died in 1916, and under Japan’s copyright term of life-plus-70-years, his work is fully in the public domain. This feature’s quotations follow the text Aozora Bunko publishes (base text: the Chikuma Bunko edition of the collected works), and the original can be quoted directly. Unlike the previous Mishima feature, there is no need here to avoid quoting a living copyright holder — but this feature still keeps quotation to what is needed to convey Sōseki’s own argument, with ToL’s analysis carrying the rest.
Summary
| Point | Content |
|---|---|
| Delivered | November 25, 1914, to the Fujinkai society at the Peers’ School (Gakushūin) |
| Structure | Part One (experience: discovering self-reliance), Part Two (argument: power, money, duty, freedom, nationalism) |
| Copyright | Sōseki died in 1916. Public domain |
| Character | Not a technical treatise, but a plain-spoken statement of ideas addressed to a young audience |
In short — “My Individualism” is the lecture in which Sōseki, telling the story of his own setbacks and discoveries, explained the relationship between duty and freedom to young men who were about to inherit power and money.
