Kokoro

Sensei is the novel’s protagonist. He is introduced to the audience in a structurally interesting way. The audience, like the narrator, first meets Sensei as an older man. He is jaded and cynical, refusing to engage with the world and having deliberately cut himself off from everything. This cynicism is seen from the narrator’s perspective, and so is laden with the narrator’s misassumptions. The narrator believes that Sensei is apathetic about the world and people, which prompts Sensei to hate everything. This interpretation of Sensei is compelling for the narrator, but it is only part of the story. To provide the audience with the fullest understanding, Sensei cannot allow the narrator to tell the whole story. He must take over, becoming a second narrator by writing a letter that also functions as a confession.

Sensei’s letter comprises nearly half the novel. After the audience has met jaded, older Sensei, they meet a youthful, energetic Sensei, who is still seen through the eyes of the older man composing the letter. As narrator-Sensei points out, this version of himself seems so strange and unfamiliar to his mature, cynical self. The story of Sensei being betrayed by his family and then turning this betrayal around on his best friend is the older Sensei’s origin story, whom the audience already knows. The older Sensei is not kind to the younger Sensei. He shows himself as an intellectual featherweight who betrays his best friend. Sensei shows that rather than caring about no one—rather than hating everything in the world and considering himself separate—he views himself as guilty of exactly the same sins as everyone else. He is not separate from society; he is a product of it and a perpetuator of its failures. This brutal, frank Sensei is his own fiercest critic, undercutting the praise and reverence he received from the narrator.

At the end of his letter, Sensei explains that he has decided to die by suicide. The Emperor’s recent death was followed by the suicide of his loyal military officer, General Nogi. The General waited until the Emperor’s death before dying by suicide as a way to atone for what he believed were terrible failures in his past. Sensei believes that Nogi’s fate provides him with an actionable way to resolve the grief and pain that have defined him for so long. Like Nogi, he can reassert agency over his life by setting the terms for his own demise. Sensei has been cut off from society for so long that he feels powerless and pained. By attempting suicide, he believes that he can end the pain and regain control over the events that have veered wildly out of his control.

The letter also hints that Sensei has learned from K’s death. While K deliberately omitted the truth from his suicide note, Sensei writes out his autobiography and leaves the decision of whether or not to publish the account entirely up to the narrator. He entrusts another person with the truth, asking only that no one reveal anything to Shizu. Sensei does not want to be remembered as a good person. Instead, he leaves behind a damning account of the pain that has shaped his existence and entrusts his final friend with the decision of whether or not his true self should be known by society. That the audience is reading Kokoro suggests that the narrator decided to accept Sensei’s request and made the story public. 

Shizu is one of the few female characters who plays an active role in Kokoro. She is a complicated figure, in part because she is portrayed at two different stages of her life by two different narrators who have very different relationships with her. This division in identity is demonstrated by the different names she is given. The narrator refers to her as Shizu. To him, Shizu is the representative of a completely different social sphere. He has so little experience talking to women other than his mother that he struggles to relate to her. Women are completely alien to the narrator, which itself functions as a commentary on the marginalized role of women in Japanese society in the late stage of the Meiji Restoration. When the narrator spends more time with Shizu, he is somewhat surprised to find that she is insightful and intelligent in her own right. His surprise is a demonstration of his naivety; even the other male characters are not as set in their patronizing view of women. In this way, the narrator’s portrayal of Shizu functions more as an illustration of the social relationship between the sexes rather than as a character in her own right.

In the novel’s second half, Sensei’s narration shows an entirely different side of her character. This different perspective comes with a different name; Sensei refers to her as Ojosan as a mark of respect, similar to how the narrator chooses to mask Sensei’s own name. Sensei’s portrayal of Ojosan is bittersweet. He presents her as a fitting object of his adoration and the center of his attention, yet she is rarely presented as anything other than a prize to be won and a barometer of individual male success. Sensei competes with the unwitting K for her affection. He wants nothing more than to marry her, even though he rarely speaks to her. When Sensei does marry Ojosan, he loses everything. Not only does he win her through betrayal—losing his moral sense of himself—but he believes his actions caused his best friend to die by suicide. He can never forgive himself; every time he looks at his wife, he is reminded of what he did to marry her, and he is reminded of everything that he has lost. Through no fault of her own, Ojosan’s marriage is defined by her husband’s mistakes and his ensuing regret.

The competing portrayals of Shizu and Ojosan are illustrative of women’s role in society during the Meiji Restoration. The true version of the character is denied to the audience, as she is limited by competing male narrators who view her as a benchmark against which they can measure their own successes and beliefs. She, like many Japanese women during this time, is limited by the narrative male gaze and given no identity of her own. Even years after K’s death, Ojosan’s life is shaped by actions and forces that she cannot understand because her husband refuses to share them with her. Even when he is writing his autobiographical suicide note, he chooses to send it to his young male friend rather than her. Instead, he sends her away to visit a sick aunt and insists that the narrator never tell her the truth.

The tragedy of Shizu’s portrayal is that she is doomed to exist in a world that does not trust her with any agency over her own life. Her role is emblematic of the role of women in Japan during this period, not only because the novel was written at this time but because the male narrators choose to present her in this way. They cannot conceive of Shizu as an individual, only as an ambassador for the opposite sex from which they are alienated.