NEW RELEASES
Sorekara by Natsume Soseki
King Joseph’s Baggage by Benito Perez Galdos
SOREKARA
Nagai Daisuke is thirty, unmarried, and lives comfortably on an allowance from his father. He is too refined for ordinary work, but too clear-eyed to pretend the arrangement is anything but what it is. Years ago, when a friend needed a wife and the woman that Daisuke loved needed a husband, Daisuke gave her away himself as a matter of principle. He has spent the intervening years insisting to himself that he regrets nothing.
Then Hiraoka and Michiyo return to Tokyo, and Daisuke sees the marriage for which he sacrificed his heart is falling apart in front of him. Drawn back into their lives, Daisuke discovers that the feelings he spent a decade denying were never resolved and that a life built entirely around good taste and emotional repression has left him with nothing. The novel’s famous closing pages, as Tokyo itself catches fire around him, is considered one of the most striking endings in Japanese literature.
First serialized in 1909, Sorekara is the second novel in Natsume Sōseki’s celebrated trilogy of modern Japanese life and is one of his most direct treatments of the arrangements that structured Meiji society. This new translation by Kenji Weaver completes the trilogy that consists of Sanshiro and The Gate, both of which are also available on Amazon from Castalia House.
Excerpt
Daisuke had first come to know Michiyo four or five years ago, when he was still a student. Through the Nagai family’s connections, he knew the faces and names of a great many young women who appeared on the surface of polite society. But Michiyo wasn’t one of those women. In coloring she was more subdued; in temperament, a touch more withdrawn. In those days Daisuke had a classmate named Suganuma, close to both him and Hiraoka. Michiyo was Suganuma’s younger sister.
Suganuma came from a prefecture near Tokyo. In the spring of his second year as a student, he brought his sister up from the country, ostensibly for her education, and at the same time gave up his boarding house so the two of them could keep house together. The sister had just graduated from the local girls’ high school and was said to be eighteen or so. She wore a brightly patterned inner collar and her kimono was still tucked at the shoulders. Before long she enrolled at a women’s school in the city.
Suganuma’s house was in Shimizu-chō in Yanaka. There was no garden, but from the veranda you could see the old cedars of Ueno’s grove rising high above. They were a peculiar color, like rusted iron. One was nearly dead, nothing but bare bone left at the top, and in the evenings crows gathered on its branches and cried. A young painter lived next door. It was a narrow side street with almost no carriage traffic, a supremely quiet place to live.
Daisuke went there often. The first time he met Michiyo, she bowed and withdrew. He went home commenting on the Ueno trees. On the second visit, and the third, she did nothing but bring out the tea. But the house was small, so she had nowhere to go except the next room. While Daisuke talked with Suganuma, he couldn’t escape the awareness that Michiyo was on the other side of the wall, listening.
How they’d first begun talking he could no longer remember. The fact that he couldn’t remember meant it must have arisen from something trivial and perfectly ordinary. Having grown weary of poetry and novels, Daisuke actually found this satisfying. But once they did begin talking, it went the way of poetry and novels after all: they were soon thoroughly comfortable with each other.
Hiraoka, too, visited Suganuma’s house as frequently as Daisuke. Sometimes the two of them came together. He’d become close to Michiyo at roughly the same time. Michiyo used to tag along with her brother and the two friends, taking walks around Shinobazu Pond.
The four of them went on like this for nearly two years. Then, in the spring of Suganuma’s graduation year, his mother came up from the country for a visit and stayed in Shimizu-chō for a while. She came to Tokyo once or twice a year and would spend five or six days under her children’s roof; that was the usual pattern. But this time, the day before her return, she developed a fever and couldn’t move. A week later it was diagnosed as typhoid, and she was immediately admitted to the university hospital. Michiyo moved in as well, to nurse her. The patient’s condition improved briefly but then worsened, and she died. That wasn’t the end of it. The typhoid spread to Suganuma himself during his visits, and before long he, too, was dead. Only the father remained, alone in the country.
He came up for both deaths and handled the arrangements, and through that he got to know both Daisuke and Hiraoka. When he took Michiyo home, he visited them separately at their lodgings to say goodbye and offer his thanks.
That autumn, Hiraoka married Michiyo. And the person who’d stood between them to bring it about was Daisuke. Officially, they’d enlisted a senior figure from back home to serve as the go-between at the ceremony. But the one who’d actually done the work, the one who’d brought Michiyo’s side together, was Daisuke.
KING JOSEPH’S BAGGAGE
A first-ever English translation of KING JOSEPH’S BAGGAGE is also available today for Kindle. This is the 11th of the Episodios Nacionales by Benito Perez Galdos and the first in its Second Series.
March 1813, Madrid. The French occupation is ending, and Joseph Bonaparte, the Spanish king few Spaniards ever wanted, loads the plundered treasures of a nation into his baggage train and flees north. In the gossip-circles of the capital, clerks and friars and idlers trade rumor for news, waiting to see which way the war will finally break.
Into this collapsing world steps Salvador Monsalud: young, poor, quick-witted, and fatally divided. He wears the green coat of King Joseph’s Spanish Guard and is bound to the French by gratitude and circumstance, while his heart belongs to his nation and to Jenara, the fierce, beautiful woman who could never love a man in a French uniform. As the occupation crumbles, Monsalud must choose between the masters who saved him and the nation that claims him, in the first chapter of a saga that will carry him across two decades of Spanish upheaval.
The opening novel of Galdós’s celebrated Second Series of the Episodios Nacionales, King Joseph’s Baggage fuses sweeping history with intimate human drama in the manner that made its author the chronicler of a great nation’s history. Here Galdós turns from the great battles of the War of Independence to the tangled loyalties, secret intrigues, and private passions of the men and women who lived through its aftermath.
The translation, by Vox Day, is the first English translation of El equipaje del rey José.
Excerpt
“The French are leaving! A change of government!” muttered Bragas uneasily. “Now all of us who held positions under the intruder’s government…”
“Out on the street, my friend. And no small disgrace they carry on their backs, having served the intruder! Oh, the infamy!”
“But I am a Spaniard, a thorough Spaniard. I detest the French.”
“Now that they are going it is very comfortable to say so. I, Señor don Juan, bear them a grudge. With them I have served, and with them I go.”
“Then you would say: ‘Long live Napoleon!’”
“I shall say neither that he live nor that he die, for it is not in my power to kill or raise anyone from the dead. I shall be glad if Fernando VII becomes king of Spain. You know well enough why I served José: I was starving, and I took his colours. Perhaps I did wrong; but I swore to them, and where they lead I follow. This business of crying Bonaparte today and Fernando tomorrow, as so many do, is not my way. I serve José without enthusiasm, but with loyalty.”
“José, José,” cried Bragas, raising his voice, “is a drunkard! One does not owe loyalty to drunkards.”
“He has given you and me our bread. We were both of us in Madrid, rather lost and beaten down. My uncle placed me in the regiment of jurados, which was easily done, for no one else would enter it. Your placement seemed more difficult; but you wept and whimpered so before the Conde de Cabarrús that the good gentleman, considering you the son of his servant, threw you that bone to gnaw in the government offices. To obtain it you feigned enthusiasm for Bonaparte’s fraternal government, and what petitions you wrote him! What reams you smeared with lamentations and sighs! And so that it should not all be music and empty words, you applied yourself to the trade of cheering and clapping in the street whenever the king passed, and crying: ‘Death to the madripáparos!’”
“Lies, lies!” shrieked Juan Bragas, whose blush could not be distinguished in the darkness of the night. “Where have you got such inventions?”
“Truth, plain truth, I say,” continued Monsalud, “as it is also true that you were paid something like three reales a performance, that is to say, for each run behind Pepe Botellas’s coach, shouting and cheering him on. The fact is that if you screamed yourself hoarse, winning that hoarseness which nearly put you in danger of keeping silent forever in the grave, you received in return the post you hold, which in truth is no great reward for so much clapping and deafening of the public with your vivas.”
“Salvador, Salvador, take care, you are making me angry,” said Bragas in a faltering voice, a sign that the faithful portrait his friend so deftly sketched was putting him in a temper. “Anyone who hears you, what will they think of me?”
“Now you want to pass for a man of substance. You go about very grave and puffed up in the street; you stride into the government offices stamping your heels, and anyone would suppose that inside that great coat you bought in the Rastro there goes a Councillor of the Indies.”
“If there is not one yet, there will be in time, my good sir.”
“And since it appears that king José and the French and the jurados are leaving for good, you wish to make people forget that the Conde de Cabarrús placed you. Now it is necessary to turn patriot, Señor Juan Bragas, as your honour turned patriot when the French evacuated the town and the allies occupied it, after the Battle of Arapiles.”
“My friend Monsalud,” growled the other, “I am master of my own blessed will, now and always. I know where the shoe pinches me, and every man keeps his own soul in his own cupboard. You yourself, who now put on the airs of a man upright and punctilious, are only waiting for the French to leave before you desert their ranks and go over to the Spanish, which is very commendable and exceedingly patriotic; for there is no glory more enviable than serving one’s country, nor disgrace to compare with aiding the enemy against our brothers. And now that the French are on the wane and seem to be fleeing in defeat, heroism consists in turning one’s back on them.”
“That I shall not do,” said Monsalud with energy, “for when I entered their service I did it of my own will.”
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Will Sorekara be added to audible in the future, or am I just missing it?