![]() ![]() Did this somehow fuse into a little story about Soseki, first rendered as "The moon is blue tonight" and then finally "The moon is beautiful tonight," gaining a gravitas as it went?Īnd yet, this anecdote about Soseki does somehow ring true. The right way - considering the Japanese cultural propensity to subtlety and intimation - was to say something like, "The moon is beautiful, isn't it?"ĭid he really say that? Or was this story just a post-war fabrication, an urban myth? Certainly, in the 1950s there was a massively best-selling song called "Because the Moon is Blue Tonight," with the moon standing as a symbol for love. No, that was not a correct translation, Soseki is supposed to have said. Soseki, so the story goes, when working as a teacher of English, had corrected a student who had translated "I love you" directly into Japanese as "kimi o aisu." It turns out that this is not something that Soseki ever wrote, nor indeed is there any written record of this anecdote before the 1970s, over 60 years after his death, though it seemed already by then to be widely believed. Was this episode buried in his complete works somewhere without my noticing? I had never come across this little story before, though it is in wide currency in Japan. ![]() ![]() Over 10 years ago, a complete stranger I met in a bar in Kyoto remarked to me, "Did you know that the novelist Natsume Soseki said that, in Japanese, you wouldn't express "I love you" directly but by saying "The moon is beautiful, isn't it?'" ![]()
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