One of the characters Yojiro mischievously offers a 'crude' translation - 'Kawaisodata horetatte kotoyo' which is virtually untranslatable back into English - along the lines that pitying someone can be the beginnings of falling in love with them. The most famous example of this - on the theme of love - is where the characters in his 1908 novel 'Sanshiro' discuss the meaning of the famous phrase, 'Pity's akin to love,' from Aphra Behn's novel 'Orinooko' (1688). And when Soseki slyly inserted a 'translated' phrase into one of his own writings, as he often did, it was nearly always a masterpiece translation. He scorned much of the 'direct translations' being conducted by Japanese scholars and writers at the time, pointing out that references to Greek gods and the like meant virtually nothing to Japanese readers. Yet he was extremely opinionated and knowledgeable about the art of translation itself, once famously correcting an entry in the English dictionary when his students at Matsuyama Middle School tried to catch him out over its meaning. Soseki had little interest in translating the works of others because he felt it was antipathetic to his own quest for individual expression. Did this somehow fuse into a little story about Soseki, first rendered as 'The moon is blue tonight' and then finally 'The moon is beautiful tonight,' gaining a gravitas as it went?Īnd yet, this anecdote about Soseki does somehow ring true. The right way - considering the Japanese cultural propensity to subtlety and intimation - was to say something like, 'The moon is beautiful, isn't it?'ĭid he really say that? Or was this story just a post-war fabrication, an urban myth? Certainly, in the 1950s there was a massively best-selling song called 'Because the Moon is Blue Tonight,' with the moon standing as a symbol for love. No, that was not a correct translation, Soseki is supposed to have said. Soseki, so the story goes, when working as a teacher of English, had corrected a student who had translated 'I love you' directly into Japanese as 'kimi o aisu.' It turns out that this is not something that Soseki ever wrote, nor indeed is there any written record of this anecdote before the 1970s, over 60 years after his death, though it seemed already by then to be widely believed. Was this episode buried in his complete works somewhere without my noticing? I had never come across this little story before, though it is in wide currency in Japan. Over 10 years ago, a complete stranger I met in a bar in Kyoto remarked to me, 'Did you know that the novelist Natsume Soseki said that, in Japanese, you wouldn't express 'I love you' directly but by saying 'The moon is beautiful, isn't it?''

Rahasia hati natsume soseki