The Heredity of Taste

Well, first things first, I'm not quite sure what the good folks at Tuttle were thinking when they published this book. Not that it's not a worthwhile title, mind you. Natsume Soseki was definitely one of the finest authors of the twentieth century, and any work by him is welcome; indeed, "The Heredity of Taste" is one of his more minor pieces but it too certainly has much that's interesting about it. However, it's already available by Tuttle, as one of three works included in one volume: "Ten Nights of Dream/Hearing Things/The Heredity of Taste", translated by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson. Despite the fine work that he's done so far in making much of Soseki's lesser-known works and memoirs available in English, Sammy Tsunematsu's translation here seems just a tad redundant. Both versions have their ups and downs, of course. Tsunematsu's rendering is sometimes a bit wooden and stilted, Ito & Wilson's a bit more flowingly natural and idiomatic, but Tsunematsu is often a bit more accurate whereas Ito & Wilson sometimes fudge things a bit. Pick your poison, I guess. Perhaps in today's political climate (on both sides of the Pacific) Tuttle and Tsunematsu wanted to emphasize Soseki's attitudes to war as expressed herein. And certainly these are worth considering. To categorize this piece as "anti-war literature" (as Stephen Kohl does in the Intro) may perhaps be just a tad too cut-and-dried, but Soseki is very clearly evoking for his readers the dreadful costs of war in a serious manner at a time when hysteric triumphalism was more the norm. In a subtle fashion and with doses of typical Sosekian humor to sweeten the medicine dose, he uses his incredible skills as an author to make very concrete and palpable those ugly aspects of warfare its supporters would rather not consider: the loss of irreplaceable lives, the irreversible physical and psychological damage, and the leveling of human individuality and dignity. All of this in a way that is personal and genuine. Still, this was all in the prior publication (which is still in print, last I checked) along with two other equally interesting works. That may be a better deal for your money if you're a Soseki fan, though if your interest is exclusively with literary treatments of the issue of war, then this little tome will do the trick.