Alienation In My Old Home By Lu Xun And Kokoro By Natsume Sōseki

In “My Old Town” the main character returns to his childhood home after more than 20 years away to help his family move. The narrator feels the great distance between the world he remembers from his childhood and the present world he lives in. He meets one of his childhood friends, Jun-Tu, and is dismayed by his inability to reach across the “lamentably thick wall” that has grown between them. He slowly feels the clear memories of his childhood being replaced with the reality of how his home and the people he knew have changed. In his young nephew, the narrator sees himself when he was a young child and hopes that future generation will be unlike his. Like Kokoro, the theme of the divisions of class brought on by modernization are present, and his memory had deceived him. The story ends with the narrator musing on the nature of the difference between his hope for the future and his childhood friend’s faith in traditional idols, and he realizes that the traditional customs that he scoffed at are just as insubstantial has his own modern idea of hope in progress in the future.

In Kokoro, the young man who narrates the first two parts of the novel and Sensei both feel a similar sort of alienation and distance from society. They are both have rural backgrounds and later went to Tokyo and became intellectuals. In Kokoro, one of the primary sources of melancholy and alienation is the tension between traditional Japanese values and the newer western ones that are becoming more and more popular in Japan during the Meiji Restoration. Sensei tells the young narrator that “loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern age, so full of freedom, independence, and our own egotistical selves. Interestingly, the difficulty of understanding that the narrator at times feels towards Sensei is mirrored in Sensei’s interactions with K. Multiple times throughout the book the narrator finds himself at a loss for words in the conversations he has with Sensei. The change in the narrator from his time studying in the city is most evident when he returns home due to his father’s illness. He finds that he is unable to sympathize and understand his dying father, and finds his families old fashioned ways distasteful. He is even more lonely at home and finds the gulf between him and his father to be too great. At the same time the character in Kokoro still feel a pull towards the past, with Sensei’s wife being a non-intellectual and traditional Japanese beauty. This contradiction between both a longing for the past and acceptance of modernization pulls at both Sensei and the narrator.

In both stories, the characters recognize the great and rapid changes modernization has brought upon their societies. The alienation in My Old Town comes from being confronted with the past, and realizing that it is already gone. Similarly, the source of alienation in Kokoro comes from the realization of the drastic changes that have swept across Meiji Japan. The feelings of separation from heritage and past generations almost universal in East Asia in this time period, and the theme is at the heart of both Kokoro and My Old Home.