Nagatsuka Takashi - The Soil: A Portrait of Rural Life in Meiji Japan

LONDON AND NEW YORK

ROUTLEDGE

London and New York

I first learned of the existence of Tsuchi (The Soil) some twenty years ago when I was a graduate student in Tokyo collecting material for what later became a book about Japanese landlords. During one of my infrequent but always useful visits to my unofficial mentor, Professor Furushima Toshio, then Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture at Tokyo University, I had somehow felt emboldened to complain that after several months work in libraries I was saturated with information about crop yields, rent levels and the concentration of land ownership in the Meiji era (18681912). Couldnt you suggest some books about the texture of rural life at the time?, I asked. Professor Furushima smiled, ruefully I thought, and replied that since he and many other Japanese scholars of his generation had grown up in villages or small towns and knew what the texture of rural life was like, they had not dealt with that facet of the countrys agrarian history in their work. You ought to read Tsuchi, he advised, and so, eventually, I did.

At the outset my intention was simply to mine the novel, as other historians have mined other novels, for anecdotal information about rural values, customs and social relations. That I subsequently took the more radical decision to translate it in its entirety stemmed primarily from my realization that although Tsuchi was undeniably a novel it was simultaneously an informal ethnography of a rural community and its inhabitants in the early 1900s and, as such, a valuable historical document.

Except for the dialect the characters speak, which I have found no viable way of capturing in English, and a relatively small number of Japanese terms that are defined in an appended glossary, I have tried to provide as accurate and as complete a translation as I could. I should emphasize, however, that it has been as an historian and not as a specialist in literature that I have approached the task. To be frank, the ethnographic features of the novel have always interested me more than its equally careful observations about natural phenomena, and I am quite sure that this bias, despite my efforts to control it, is still reflected in my rendering of the text. I am also quite sure that I have failed to notice, much less to correct, what others more skilled in Japanese than I will detect as blatant errors of translation. For the latter, especially if they result in misconstruction of the narrative, I apologize.

Without in any way tainting them with responsibility for such errors, or for other shortcomings in what follows, I would like to thank Gail Bernstein, Karin Blair, Sarah Metzger-Court, Eiichi Motono, Arthur Stockwin, Richard Waswo, and in Japan Watanabe Yoshio, Shirai Atsushi, Shirai Takako, Noguchi Mitsuo, Nagase Junichi and Kawamura Yoshio (whose own translation of the novel was privately published in Japan in 1986) for the special help they have given me at one time or another during the rather long time it has taken me to get this translation finished. I would also like to thank the University of Virginia and the Inter-Faculty Committee for Japanese studies, University of Oxford, for financial support at the beginning and end of the project.

A.W.
Oxford, 1988