Sōseki fled London mad and invented modern Japan’s novelist
Government scholar Natsume Sōseki spent two wretched London years (1900–02) until a telegram warned "Natsume has gone mad." Back home, I Am a Cat (1905) made him famous; quitting Tokyo Imperial University for the Asahi Shimbun in 1907 helped invent Japan's professional novelist.
Born Natsume Kinnosuke in Edo on 9 February 1867—eve of the Meiji Restoration—he was an unwelcome late child of nanushi Naokatsu. Given up twice, he lived with foster Shiobaras who claimed to be his parents, caught smallpox at six that scarred his face, and learned the truth from a whispering maid. Legal tug-of-war ended in 1888 when Naokatsu paid Shiobara 240 yen; the alienation fed lifelong misanthropy in his fiction.
After Tokyo Imperial University English study and unhappy teaching, he "buried himself alive" at a Matsuyama middle school—raw material for Botchan—then married Nakane Kyōko in Kumamoto (1896). Ordered to England in 1900, he scraped by on a meagre stipend, felt like "a stray dog among wolves," amassed some four hundred books, and plotted a ten-year scientific rethink of literature before nervous collapse and Masaoka Shiki's death broke him. The ministry recalled him late in 1902.
Returning January 1903, paranoid rages drove Kyōko and the children out for months, yet he succeeded Lafcadio Hearn as English lecturer; Shakespeare classes packed standing room. I Am a Cat's satire opened a novel-a-year career exploring ego, loneliness, and Meiji Westernisation—Sanshirō (1908), Kokoro (1914), unfinished Light and Dark (1916). Stomach ulcers and mental illness shadowed him until death on 9 December 1916 at forty-nine; his face later rode Japan's 1,000-yen note (1984–2004).
Source: Natsume Sōseki
