Ichiro Struggles at the End of Meiji Era

Since yesterday, my neck hurts! I must have sprained it while sleeping. I can’t turn it. How fitting, or ironic, or condemning. There is a Japanese saying, “I can’t turn my neck because of debts.”

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I finished “Ko-jin” at around 6 am. While the first half of the story focuses on happenings among the family members, its second one almost exclusively concentrates, through a long narrative by “H,” on the psychology of Ichiro (一郎), who his younger brother (二郎) thinks may be a little “crazy.” Ichiro, a scholar, is an absolutist who doesn’t fail to see things in the light of right or wrong, beautiful or ugly, etc. and pathetically (or pathologically?) incapable to connect with people around him, even his wife, Nao (直). Lamenting his own “only study, no action” life, he agonises his inability to accept the real world of imperfection. Thanks to one of the very few gifts depression endows me, I can now empathise with this man of odd character. “I have three choices, die, go mad and live as a religious person,” he tells H. He answers himself, “I don’t think I can’t go into religion. I would be drawn back by my lingering attachment to life. Then the only choice should be death.” With a strong scholarly mind, he has no choice but to dig deeper and deeper innocently to find the truth of life.

At the end of the era of Meiji (明治), Ichiro must have been struggling to cope with the quickened pace of modernisation and the disintegration of the old way of life.