The Gate Quotes

“Under the sun the couple presented smiles to the world. Under the moon, they were lost in thought: and so they had quietly passed the years.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Gate

“He could only marvel, then, at how those first, colorless murmurings had led to a future for the both of them dyed with the brightest of reds.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Gate

“How to adjust to a world in which the climax of a scene— and sometimes the central event— is going to sleep? We’re going to have to adapt, maybe even invert our sense of priority and our assumptions about what constitutes drama, as most of us foreigners have to do when traveling to Japan.”
― Pico Iyer, The Gate

“To be able to muster so many complaints about one little thing— yes, you’ll get ahead, that’s for sure.”
― Natsume Sōseki, The Gate

“THE UNION between Sōsuke and Oyone had dyed their existence a somber hue and reduced their presence, they felt, to mere wraiths that barely cast a shadow on the world. From one year to the next each lived with the sensation of harboring deep inside a frightening moral contagion, though neither one of them ever acknowledged this feeling to the other.”
― Natsume Sōseki, The Gate

“Sōsuke had never claimed to be the kind of strong man who could be felled only by an abrupt, totally unforeseeable event such as this. He had no doubt that far gentler methods would have been sufficient to dispose of a weakling like himself.”
― Natsume Sōseki, The Gate

“It was destiny’s role to enforce this repetition; it was Sōsuke’s lot to dodge the consequences.”
― Natsume Sōseki, The Gate

“Back then, unlike the present, he had many friends. The plain truth of it was that in his cheerfully callow view all people appeared, more or less interchangeably, as friends. He lightly traversed his youth with optimism intact”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Gate

“classic work like The Tale of Genji, as one recent translator has it, “The more intense the emotion, the more regular the meter.” As in the old-fashioned England in which I grew up—though more unforgivingly so—the individual’s job in public Japan is to keep his private concerns and feelings to himself and to present a surface that gives little away. That the relation of surface to depth is uncertain is part of the point; it offers a degree of protection and makes for absolute consistency. The fewer words spoken, the easier it is to believe you’re standing on common ground. One effect of this careful evenness—a maintenance of the larger harmony, whatever is happening within—is that to live in Japan, to walk through its complex nets of unstatedness, is to receive a rigorous training in attention. You learn to read the small print of life—to notice how the flowers placed in front of the tokonoma scroll have just been changed, in response to a shift in the season, or to register how your visitor is talking about everything except the husband who’s just run out on her. It’s what’s not expressed that sits at the heart of a haiku; a classic sumi-e brush-and-ink drawing leaves as much open space as possible at its center so that it becomes not a statement but a suggestion, an invitation to a collaboration. The reader or viewer is asked to complete a composition, and so the no-color surfaces make”
― Natsume Sōseki, The Gate

“This reticence has little to do with trying to protect oneself and everything to do with trying to protect others from one’s problems, which shouldn’t be theirs; it’s one reason Japan is so confounding to foreigners, as its people faultlessly sparkle and attend to one another in in public, while often seeming passive and unconvinced of their ability to do anything decisive at home.”
― Pico Iyer, The Gate

“Sōseki is an unusually intimate writer— the public world is only his concern by implication— and in Japan (again as in the England that I know) intimacy is shown not by all that you can say to someone else, but by all that you don’t need to say.”
― Pico Iyer, The Gate

“how every character is effectively a tiny figure in a suffocating world of associations and obligations; where many an American novel might send its protagonist out into the world to make his own destiny, in Sōsuke’s Japan he cannot move for all his competing (and unmeetable) responsibilities to his aunt, his younger brother, his wife, and society itself.”
― Pico Iyer, The Gate

“For some reason I have become terribly serious since arriving here,” Sōseki wrote, in his “Letter from London,” a year after his arrival in England. “Looking and listening to everything around me, I think incessantly of the problem of ‘Japan’s future.’” Its future, then as now, involves trying to make a peace, or form a synthesis, between the ancient Chinese ideal of sitting still and watching the seasons pass, tending to social harmonies, and the new American way of pushing forward individually , convinced that tomorrow will be better than today.”
― Pico Iyer, The Gate

“They kept on together by force of a steadfast mixture of resignation and forbearance, seemingly without the balm of hope or any prospect for a better future. As for the past, they rarely spoke of it. Indeed at times they appeared to shun even the mere mention of bygone days, as if by by tacit agreement.”
― Natsume Sōseki, The Gate

“Realizing that both this Sunday and the fine weather that had accompanied it had drawn to a close, a certain mood came over him: a sense that such things did not last for long, and that this was a great pity. From tomorrow he would again, as always, be busy at work -- the thought brought on pangs of regret for the good life he had tasted for this one afternoon. The mindless activity that filled the other six days of the week seemed utterly dreary.”
― Natsume Sōseki, The Gate

“После ужина супруги, сидя всё у того же хибати, ещё с час беседовали на обычные темы, касающиеся их жизни, только обходили молчанием всяческие невзгоды, впрочем, не представляя себе, как, например, погасить задолженность в рисовой лавке, хотя близился конец месяца. И уже не было в их разговоре поистине удивительных и красотой своей, и цветистостью слов, неуловимо скользящих между влюблёнными. А чтобы обменяться мнениями о каком-нибудь прочитанном романе или там научной книге — такое им и в голову не приходило. Всё это осталось позади, и хотя до старости ещё было далеко, жизнь с каждым днём становилась всё бесцветнее, всё скучнее. А может быть, так было всегда, может быть, оба они, сами скучные и бесцветные, соединили свои судьбы, чтобы, в силу обычая, влачить унылое супружеское существование.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Gate

“But it speaks for an inner world— and again this is evident in Murakami— that sits in a different dimension from the smooth-running, flawlessly attentive, and all but anonymous machine that keeps public order moving forward so efficiently in Japan.”
― Pico Iyer, The Gate

“Having gone to bed around half past ten, [Sōseki] snored like a man exhausted by the myriad phenomena of the universe.”
― Natsume Sōseki, The Gate