Japanese Literature Summaries
日本語

Light and Darkness — Summary and Characters

Unfinished: the pen stopped here

Author
Natsume Sōseki
Published
May 1916
First appeared in
Asahi Shimbun
Form
Novel
Genres
  • Psychological
  • Romance
Setting
  • Tokyo
Length
322,643 characters
Reading time
About 10 hr 45 min
Orthography
Modern script and kana

About this work

Sōseki's last novel, written until just before his death and left unfinished. It dissects, in closer detail than anything he had written before, the fine egoism and psychological manoeuvring between husband and wife, relatives and friends. Around Tsuda, his wife Onobu, and Kiyoko, whom Tsuda once loved, it follows exactly how people bare the self without meaning to. Said to aim at the state he called "following heaven, leaving the self," it breaks off in the middle of the scene in which Tsuda meets Kiyoko again at a hot-spring inn, with only the word "unfinished" after it.

Summary

Tsuda Yoshio, an office worker, is about to undergo an operation, and alongside his new life with O-Nobu, the wife he has lately married, his mind is held by his own past. He once loved a woman named Kiyoko deeply, and she left without a word of explanation to marry another man. Carrying that wound, Tsuda married O-Nobu at the urging of those around him. Clever and proud, O-Nobu keeps herself on guard, trying to make sure of her husband's love, and among the people about them — Tsuda's sister O-Hide, the meddlesome Madam Yoshikawa and the rest — vanity, calculation and private designs are tangled together. Madam Yoshikawa, who sees straight through Tsuda's heart, quietly sends him off, on the pretext of a rest cure, to the hot-spring inn where Kiyoko is staying. Without telling his wife, Tsuda goes, and at last meets Kiyoko again. Why did she abandon him? — and as he is still trying to take the measure of her smile and solve that riddle, he returns to his room, and there the novel breaks off for ever with the two words "unfinished."

Characters

Chapter-by-chapter synopsis

The app covers this work chapter by chapter (full text in the app).

  1. 1. About This Work
  2. 2. Main Characters
  3. 3. Major Supporting Characters
  4. 4. The Opening — “There's Still More Beyond”
  5. 5. The Fujii House, and a Man Named Kobayashi
  6. 6. A Day at the Theater — The People Around O-Nobu
  7. 7. The Sickroom — Brother and Sister Clash, and the Wife Arrives
  8. 8. Two Probings — The Same Afternoon
  9. 9. Compromise — A Night Between Husband and Wife
  10. 10. The Farewell Dinner and the Departure
  11. 11. The Hot-Spring Inn — Reunion with Kiyoko, and “Unfinished”
  12. 12. Key Motifs and Foreshadowing

The opening (original text)

After probing, the doctor let Tsuda down from the operating table. "It turns out the passage does run all the way to the bowel after all. When I probed the other time there was a ridge of scar tissue partway along, and I took it for the end and told you so; but today, when I scraped it away to open the channel, there proved to be more beyond it."

Light and Darkness by Natsume Sōseki (Aozora Bunko)

The ending (original text)

Kiyoko said this and smiled. Tsuda went back to his own room, trying by himself to explain the meaning of that smile.

Light and Darkness by Natsume Sōseki (Aozora Bunko)

Read the original

The original Japanese text is available at Aozora Bunko, and the app downloads the same text for its vertical-text reader.

Aozora Bunko library card

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