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The lovely and talented Moira writes, “Is there any sort of analysis of these [Ten Nights and Dreams] stories? I would be interested in reading some kind of critical analysis.”

Well, it’s a minor work, so it has been more or less ignored, I think. There’s one analysis I know of on the web, in Japanese, at this site we can call Reading Natsume Soseki. I know that doesn’t help you at all, since you can’t read Japanese.

Donald Keene wrote of these stories in Dawn to the West that “most of them are disturbing and difficult for the lay person to analyze…Attempts have been made to analyze the dreams in accordance with Freudian principles, but they have proved elusive, suggesting to some a hatred of the dreamer’s father or his yearning for the ideal woman. One scholar, analyzing the components of the dreams, concluded that Soseki had actually dreamed them, though he may have added to or altered the materials for literary purposes.” (324)

He goes on to write, “It is surely significant that Soseki wrote this exploration of his subconscious soon after his approach to the stream-of-consciousness narration in The Miner; he was attempting to discover the ultimate truth about himself. Ochi Haruo believed that the dominate theme was associated with the Zen koan (riddle), ‘What did your face look like before your father and mother were born?’…The central theme of Ten Nights of Dream is the discovery of the source of one’s existence. In the dream of the third night, the most terrifying of the nightmares, a horrible blind child rides on Soseki’s shoulders and commands him to go to a certain spot where, exactly one hundred years before, he had killed the child, who was his own. The child is at once his descendant and ancestor, and its features are his own, before his parents were born.” (325)

But then I’ve also heard people saying that the third dream represents Soseki’s anxiety about the rapid changes that were taking place during his lifetime, as Japan was transforming from a feudalistic society, to a modern one.

“Soseki did not elucidate his reasons for relating these dreams, but they provide invaluable clues to his subconscious, and even if we disregard this scholarly consideration, they make consistently absorbing reading.” (326)

This book, Ten Nights’ Dream, probably has a very detailed analysis, since the stories probably don’t even take up half of its nearly 80 pages.

I don’t have my own analysis yet.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 12th, 2005 at 11:07 pm and is filed under General, Japan, Translation, Natsume Soseki’s “Ten Nights and Dreams”. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.