Natsume Soseki on Fathers & Sons

I had come to regard a university education as commonplace, and I was touched by my father’s unexpected pleasure at my graduation.

“I am glad that you were able to graduate,” he said repeatedly. Inwardly, I compared my father’s unaffected pleasure with the way Sensei had congratulated me that night at the dinner table. And I had greater admiration for Sensei with his secret contempt for such things as university degrees than I had for my father, who seemed to me to value them more than they were worth. I began at last to dislike my father’s naïve provincialism.

“You shouldn’t get so excited over such a trifling thing as a university degree,” I blurted out. “After all, several hundred students graduate every year.” My father looked at me strangely.

“It isn’t simply your graduation that I am happy about, you know. Of course I am glad that you graduated. But you don’t know all the reasons why I say I am glad. If you could only understand…”

I asked him what he meant. He seemed reluctant to tell me, but finally he said:

“You see, I am glad for my own sake. As you know, I am a sick man. When you were home last winter, I was convinced that I had no more than three or four months left to live. Providentially, I am still alive and am able to potter about comfortably. And now, you have graduated. I am happy because you, who have worked so hard at your studies, managed to graduate before I died and while I was in good health. Surely, I, as your father, have reason to be happy. Of course, you have bigger ideas than I, and it must annoy you to see me fuss over such an insignificant thing as your graduation. But try to look at it from my point of view. I am glad so much for your own sake as for my own. Do you understand?”

I didn’t expect that I would connect to Natsume Soseki’s famous novel “Kokoro” on so many novels. It just captured so much of my lived experience that I fell in love with it completely. And I realize that no matter how much theory you pour into reading, for me at least, it is always those works of literature that speak to me on a personal level that I truly cherish and enjoy.

This passage from the novel floored me. Especially when the protagonist started talking about his father’s “naïve” sensibilities and his own fathers admission of the intellectual gulf that now separated them.

Heartbreaking. Beautiful.