Do we like Natsume Soseki?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful turned up in his own words and his best-known lecture backs self-reliance, but the dated record we could open is thin.
Natsume Soseki is the bloke on the old 1,000-yen note's reputation, if not the note: Kirkus calls him beloved in Japan but little known elsewhere. He was adopted twice as a kid and had a hard start, which a recent biography ties to the outlook in his writing.
He was a strong student who taught English after university, then went to England in 1900 to study. He read widely in English literature, Henry James especially. Back home he took over at Tokyo Imperial University from the sacked writer Lafcadio Hearn, and at 38 he set out to build a new kind of Japanese literature.
His debut, I Am a Cat, is a mordantly comic satire and, per Kirkus, a self-lacerating portrait of the author himself. That tells you the target of his sharpest jokes was mostly himself, which is a decent sign in a novelist.
On the harm check, nothing nasty from his own words or acts turned up in the pages we could open. Scholars do argue over his 1909 travelogue of Manchuria and Korea, with some reading it as colonial in outlook and others as ambivalent. We couldn't open those studies, so call that an open question rather than a mark against him.
The good stuff is in his ideas. In his 1914 Gakushuin lecture, My Individualism, he described struggling for years before concluding he had to build his own idea of what literature was. A Keio dean reads it as a call to be the agent of your own life.
Nothing new on him lately beyond anniversary editions and reprints, and the record we could verify is thin, so we've held the score back from the top. He's a long way from the culture-war grifters, and his books are still worth your time.