Mori Ogai (in translation)

During my graduate school days at the University of Hawaii, in a seminar on Meiji period writers, we read works by Tayama Katai, Natsume Soseki, and Mori Ogai. I later translated a number of works by Ogai into English. While Soseki is the better novelist, Ogai as a person appealed to me because he had two lives. He was a career army officer in this day job and a superb writer, critic, and translator in his off-hours.

Among the works that I translated was one called Asobi (Play). The protagonist is a civil-servant named Kimura, who does mindless, time-consuming work and has no influence in his office. After hours, however, he translates European plays and writes novels and newspaper columns.
One of Kimura’s co-workers comments how boring their work is and suggests that Kimura must be especially regretful that he has to waste his energy doing paperwork at the office day after day. Wouldn’t it be more pleasant to quit and write or translate full time?

The next passage has always stuck with me. Kimura “occasionally thought of quitting. But what would happen after he quit? At present, he wrote at night beneath the light of a lamp. He tried to imagine doing the same from morning to night. When he wrote, he felt like a child playing its favorite game…. But if did what he enjoyed from morning to night, surely it would become monotonous and he would grow tired of it. Even his trivial job at the office helped to break the monotony.” Wise words.

(257 words)