The Soseki statue that never was: a tale of two suburbs

Japanese author Natsume Soseki. This grave, diffident, hyper-sensitive soul spent many hours wandering on Clapham
Common, at the end of a street he was living in, unhappily. It might have seemed fitting to have a statue there to
memorialise those formative experiences of a great novelist. No such luck. You can see this nice 2010 bronze at the Soseki Museum in Clapham - but only until 2017, when the museum closes due to lack of funding.

A recent visit to the Natsume Soseki in London Museum reminded me of a row that blew up a quarter of a century ago relating to this deeply revered Japanese author, soon after I first moved into the area. This was the sad case of the Soseki memorial statue that never was.

It was a story of mutual cultural misunderstandings, of groaning bureaucracy, particularly on the British side, stirred up by a bunch of self-appointed guardians of local amenities, with (oh, surely I am not mistaken?) a nasty little dash of bad old English racial prejudice or xenophobia stirred into the mix.

It began in the early 1980s, when Japanese scholar and businessman Ikuo 'Sammy' Tsunematsu created the a museum in London dedicated to the Japanese author Natsume Soseki, which I wrote about last month. At around the same time he got support for the idea of erecting a statue to Soseki on Clapham Common, a short distance from the flat in which he spent the final 16 months of an unhappy but creatively crucial time in London.

No sooner was the idea out than the combined forces of local worthies, the Tory opposition on the council and the establishment (in the shape of its most deadly weapon, Whitehall bureaucracy), conspired to derail it.

At the time I was so annoyed by the opposition to the statue that I wrote to a local paper. The letter was never published but I am still puzzled by the animosity that the plan to erect a statue of a Japanese author on Clapham Common aroused. So puzzled that a few weeks back I visited the Lambeth Archives in the former Minet Library building on Knatchbull Road, to remind myself of the roots of this Anglo-Japanese co-operation pact that was never consummated.

I say "former" library - in fact, as you enter the Archives, you can see the dormant public library through the windows,  intact and abandoned, books still on shelves, a sort of Marie Celeste of a once much loved local library, a resting place and a refuge.

But thank god the Archive is still operating, and there are friendly staff on hand to help me unravel another little bit of the Soseki in London story - though this is actually about a non-event, and something that happened - sorry, didn't happen -  about 70 years after the great Japanese novelist's death.

I'd found the archive reference online and quoted the reference numbers. Within minutes I was sitting at a table with two neatly laced-up bundles of papers in front of me. I carefully untied the bow and began to go through hundreds of carbon copies, artists' impressions, architect's drawings and photocopies; letters, memos, telegrams, newspaper articles, the lot.

Not being a proper historian, I whizzed through these docs, looking for stories. What follows may not be a precise chronological account, but I hope it captures the spirit of that strange episode.

The idea was first mooted in public, so far as I can tell, at a conference on Soseki held in London in about 1986. It was at the Park Lane Hotel, and among the participants was the noted British poet, translator and Japanese literature expert, Anthony Thwaite.

The idea was fleshed out, and a suitable memorial with statue was designed in Japan. The municipality of Shinjuku, where Soseki was born, were involved and backed the idea, and Lambeth Council was approached for permission.

At the time Lambeth was keen to extend its town twinning programme, and it seems it jumped on this request as a good opportunity to build up a relationship with Shinjuku - which includes the commercial district and transport hub of Tokyo.

So Lambeth quickly gave its approval in priniciple to these plans. Little did it know that an exceedingly long and drawn out struggle was to follow, almost six years of it in all.

The first item I looked at was a set of drawings of the first version of the proposed statue. It depicted a life-size bronze statue of Soseki standing on a stone plinth of almost the same height, with a large bronze relief inscription set into the stone.

This was to be surrounded by a circle of stone benches, the whole thing covering an area of around 10 by 8 metres, to be built on the strip of the Common directly facing the southern end of The Chase.

This was the proposal that was agreed in principle by the Lambeth Amenities committee, but as soon as the agreement was made public, in June 1988,  there was uproar. Opponents of the scheme on the Council were soon joined by the conservationist groups, the Friends of Clapham Common and the The Clapham Antiquarian Society. The local press jumped on the story with glee - what an opportunity to run plenty of nudge-nudge, wink-wink, schoolboyish headlines.

The Evening Standard of 24 June 1988 had a field day: the "left-wing councillors" of Mrs Thatcher's least favourite London Borough had "red faces", it claimed, once they realised they were trying to twin Lambeth with the "famous red-light district of Tokyo".

It couldn't resist the seaside postcard approach: "Too much Eastern promise" ran one headline. Inevitably it got a quote from Lambeth's most famous madame, Cynthia Payne of Streatham.

Lambeth was not initially too bothered by this ridicule ( this was the era of constant attack on the so-called "loony left" politicians of the GLC). The joke was on the press, given how they seemed ignorant of the fact that Shinjuku was the location of  a wealthy and powerful commercial district at the time far outstripping the City of London.

The council regarded the whole plan, including the Soseki monument, as "a tangible demonstration of Lambeth's commitment to and celebration of  the cultural and ethnic diversity of our population".

Soon after this the plans were put out for public consultation.  There were 13 objections to the original proposal, with most of the complaints focusing on the inappropriate size of the memorial. Some were concerned the statue would  be a magnet for vandalism, others wondered whether certain British authors were not more deserving of a memorial here. (OK why not? Wouldn't it be lovely to have statues of Graham Greene, Pamela Hansford Johnson and Angela Carter as well? We could even have a literary sculpture park).

The anti-Japanese feeling sparked by the treatment of British p-o-w's during World War Two was also there, still bubbling away.

As a result, the Shinjuku team put together a revised and scaled down proposal. But although the new memorial was much smaller, it still provoked a storm of complaints. The Evening Standard excelled itself with the October 4 1989 headline, "Clapham fights the Japanese". In the story the Clapham Society was said to be "preparing to repel a Japanese invasion". The memorial was described as a "ponderous monstrosity" likely to be defaced.

The Minet archives contain a great deal of correspondence between Lambeth council and its equivalents in Shinjuku, all very friendly and civil if rather stilted and often deadly slow. The mayor of Shinjuku, Katsutada Yamamoto,  paid two visits to Lambeth during this time, and he was always eager to praise the beauty of the trees on the Common, comparing them with the beauty of the cherry blossom season in Japan.

He was keen to stress that the statue should  enhance the "beauty of Clapham": it would not be on a grand scale like Nelson's column, but "not so small as to be hidden by the summer shrubbery".

The monument, he said, would become "A lasting symbol of UK- Japanese goodwill and friendship".

Despite these attempts to address the criticisms of the first proposed statue, the complaints did not go away. English Heritage said that while it did not categorically oppose the plan, nor did it wholly approve: it felt the statue was "just too big" and suggested one of its own blue plaques on the house where Soseki stayed would be a more fitting memorial.

The Hon Secretary of the Clapham Antiquarian Society was also a tireless campaigner against the "unwanted memorial".

"I can find no evidence that London played an important part in his life," he wrote. "In fact, quite the opposite, he hated it while he was living here."

Well, yes, perhaps he did. He was certainly depressed for much of his short time in London. But there are plenty of literary experts who maintain that it was the difficult London experience that made all the difference to Soseki's writing style, and set him on the course for greatness. You only have to read his few short pieces set in London to see how his imagination had been sparked by the place. See Soseki's The Tower of London.

Another local luminary, James Watson of the Clapham Society, wrote: "The Common is common land, not the suburb of a foreign city of which the people of Lambeth know little or nothing".

Yes, perhaps his assumption was right, but it seems odd to use ignorance as a good reason for not doing something to alleviate it.  Surely this was an opportunity to allow the people of Lambeth to learn a little bit about this distant land, so different and yet in some ways so similar to our own?

So the debate rumbled on, letters and telegrams and phone calls went back and forth, more official visits were arranged. 1988 became 1989, and then on 18 December the council approved the revised scheme. However the case was referred to the Department for the Environment and it still needed the Secretary of State's seal of approval. And this was not forthcoming.

On February 20 1990 the mayor Lambeth advised his peer in Shinjuku to get the Japanese ambassador in London to appeal directly to Chris Patten.

Events moved on at the ultra-slow pace known only to bureaucratic officials who - if not under instruction to kill a project by the slowest possible method - at least appear to be. Reasons for and against the statue continued to be traded throughout that year and the next.

One letter from a distinguished local resident to the Department of the Environment offered the only genuinely aesthetic objection to the monument that I could find: Mr Norman Marsh, CBE, said that the proposed statue looked like something designed for "a late Victorian or Edwardian cemetery".

Still in use - the Victorian cast-iron post box
50 yards up the street from where Soseki
lived, now a part of the Soseki in London
mythology

Maybe he was right. Who knows. A new enquiry began early in 1992, by which time there had been a mayoral election in Shinjuku. All changed, suddenly. There was a new mayor, and it was his sad duty to inform his Lambeth equivalent that it now seemed that funding was "unlikely to be forthcoming".

And then, yes, both Lambeth and Shinjuku authorities designed it was best to call it a day.

So ends the story of the Soseki statue, although you can see a fine portrait bust of the man in the museum at 80 The Chase.

Also, as is clear whenever a large coach of Japanese students pulls up outside, they have other ways of remebering the great writer. Often I have seen groups of students and even schoolchildren walk up the road to the late Victorian post-box. Many selfies are taken. This is the same box into which Soseki posted his many letters home, 114 years ago.

Then there's the English Heritage blue plaque. The occupants of that (now incredibly expensive) house must chuckle at the way their first floor windows are so often photographed in the summer months. Or maybe they don't notice.

Soseki himself, we can be sure, would have been greatly amused by the whole business.


* As a postscript, it was good to see that the local business website thisisclapham.co.uk has included Soseki in its promotional hoardings up by Clapham Common tube. Perhaps they could help press for a proper celebration of the centenary of his death later this year....?

Catch it while you can: Clapham's Soseki Museum to close in 2017

The front room of the Soseki Museum in London. That harsh fluorescent strip lighting is definitely not 1901 vintage…

Strange, but true, that for the past 30 years I've lived two doors away from a tiny museum dedicated to a  novelist whose books I've enjoyed. I always wanted to visit this museum, but never quite got around to it, for all sorts of stupid reasons. Until last month.

Yes, finally I rounded up the courage to add my fingerprints to that battered but well-labelled buzzer outside number 80 The Chase, Clapham, and gained access to one of London's smallest, least known and least visited museums - the Soseki Museum in London.

And I've spent the last four weeks kicking myself for not visiting before, and for being so foolish. And yet, in a way, not visiting the museum I so much wanted to visit was quite a Sosekian thing. Why? Well, you need to read a bit of the man himself.

Natsume Soseki is usually described as one of Japan's most revered authors, and yet he is hardly known at all in the UK. Translations  of some of his books are in print, and from the few that I have read (I Am A Cat, The Three Cornered World, The Tower of London) ,  they repay any initial difficulty you may find in reading them.

There's a diffidence, a cloak of humility that conceals his extremely sharp perceptions of life around him.  He also has a wonderful habit of mocking himself, and - against all expectation - has the rare ability to make me laugh out loud, time and again. Yet he can evoke deep sadness as well. Rarely have the petty frustrations of a constrained life in a modest London suburb been conveyed with such precision.  You can get a good taste of all this in a collection of the short essays and stories written during his brief stay in five different, all rather squalid lodgings, The Tower of London. I think it's a good starting point, and the Peter Owen edition has a fascinating introduction by the translator, Damian Flanagan.

A slightly worse-for-wear Entryphone buzzer
lets you into the Soseki Museum: why did it take
me nearly 30 years to press that button?

It's a good idea to read a bit before you visit this museum, which is really more like a shrine. It was created and is still funded by a fan, the academic Ikuo Tsunematsu, who bought the first floor two-bedroom flat it occupies. The museum is now run by Mr Tsunematsu's wife, Yoshiko, who is a charming, friendly and ever-helpful curator. She'll answer as many or as few questions as you care to ask.

The museum is directly opposite the house - number 81 - that Soseki actually lived in for the final, deeply troubled 16 months of his stay in England.

It's quite hard, in deeply gentrified 21st century Clapham, to imagine that the well-scrubbed,  polished and immensely expensive four-floor family home on which the Soseki Blue Plaque is affixed was once a modest, rather gloomy boarding house.

But the museum is in the much scruffier old block opposite, a real bit of late Victorian jerrybuilding. I know this from bitter experience: I live in the same crumbling hulk.

Once you are buzzed in, you pass through a cluttered ground-floor hallway, high ceiling, cheap landlord's carpeting on the stairs, bicycles and pushchairs up against the wall, and then suddenly you enter a different world.

All the other flats in this block (apart, I should say, from mine) have been expensively done-up to 21st century yuppie tastes. The Soseki museum, however, is distinctly 20th century, although it's far from a recreation of the sort of decor Soseki himself would have endured in Clapham in 1901.

You pay your £4 entry fee, and are left to wander around, through rooms lined with old photos and prints and copies of documents, all relating to Soseki's time in London and the various people he met, and the places - such as Thomas Carlyle's house in Chelsea - that he visited.

There's a great collection of books and magazines, based mainly on Soseki's own collection (though most of these are not the original copies he owned).

In the back bedroom there's a good library of Soseki's publications in Japanese and English, as well as the many scholarly works devoted to his literature.

There's not much in the way of personal belongings or artefacts. But it doesn't matter: the air in the place belongs to Natsume Soseki, and once you start breathing it the world outside becomes a little darker, and stranger.

There's a very imposing bust of the man, a recent work by a Japanese artist, which presides over the library. This is surrounded by contemporary Japanese editions of some of his novels and poetry, with utterly gorgeous cover art.

He looks quite severe in this portrait: very much the late 19th century gentleman of the Meiji era.
I suppose Soseki can seem almost like our stereotype of a rather timid, socially-anxious, naive Japanese visitor from that era, when Japan was working hard to drag itself into the "modern world", of which London seemed  at that  point, to be the capital.

A portrait bust of Soseki by Hana Taharasako (2010) flanked by some
beautiful recent editions of his work.

He seems a very quiet, restrained writer - the opposite of a  Murakami, perhaps. But he does have the occasional flight into deepest, strangest fantasy, as in the title piece of that collection.

His writing seems to me to get under the skin of ordinary life, and then make us realise just how strange our ordinary lives really are.

If he's known at all in England, it's for this brief, generally miserable two-year residence in London, and what he wrote about this host nation.

One quote in particular: "The two years I spent in London were the most unpleasant years in my life. Among English gentlemen I lived in misery, like a poor dog that had strayed among a pack of wolves."

But then Soseki is hardly famous for his cheerful take on the world around him. The opening paragraph of one of his most celebrated and poetic works, The Three-Cornered World, concludes with the line: "It is not a very agreeable place to live in, this world of ours".

There's also the suggestion that Soseki was clinically depressed by the end of his time in London, and contemporary reports that his landlady, Miss Leale, and her other lodgers showed a great deal of concern and kindness towards this poor, lonely Japanese scholar.

At the time he was unknown, a poorly-paid academic on a government scholarship, here to deepen his understanding of English literature. His stipend was so measly that he couldn't, as he had hoped, afford to study at Cambridge University. Instead he retreated to a series of cheap lodging houses in gloomy London suburbs - Clapham being the final straw - and did some gentle exploring, and a great deal of book-buying.

But he also had some interesting times. His visits to the Shakespeare scholar, W J Craig, at UCL, and Thomas Carlyle's House in Chelsea, seemed to inspire him. His account of trying and failing to learn to ride a bicycle on the local streets are hilarious.

Some of his visionary walks through the unfriendly city make you think that Soseki was not just a great Japanese novelist, but also a precursor of some of the fundamental movements of 20th century art and literature - the surrealists, the flaneurs, and even the psycho-geographers of the later  20th century. Echoes can be detected in the writings of many big names, from Virginia Woolf right up to Iain Sinclair.

Soon after I moved into this area, there was a story in the local paper. Some self-appointed guardians of local amenities and history had blocked plans to erect a statue of the writer on Clapham Common, way back. I think that was quite soon after the museum opened.

 Whatever the reasons for the ultimate rejection,  it seemed to me to be a mean-minded
response to a proposal that was offered with only the very best of intentions. But it made me want to read his work.

It's hard to imagine that any such memorial could detract from this distinctly unlovely tract of south London common land. (There is said to be a file of correspondence relating to this, between the City of Shinjuku, Lambeth Council and Clapham Antiquarian Society, in the Lambeth Archives. I'm going to try to dig it out when I have a chance).

About 10 years later - I think it was in 2002 - Soseki finally got some local recognition with the

unveiling of an English Heritage Blue Plaque next to the first floor window on number 81 The Chase.

I happened to be in that day and saw the ceremony as it took place. Quite a few dignitaries turned up, including I think the Japanese ambassador, who presumably pulled the cord (or whatever it is you do), as well as the Lambeth mayor, etc. There were a few TV crews, presumably from Japanese broadcasters, as I never saw anything on UK tv.


Since then, the museum has been visited by a constant stream of Japanese tourists, whom I often notice from my lonely eyrie. They come in couples, or little groups, usually but not always middle-aged, some lone student types, couples in anoraks. They often seem bemused: how could their great national treasure have lived in such a dull street, they must be thinking. It's not even picturesquely scruffy any more.

They usually find the blue plaque on number 81 first, photograph it, then find the front door of 80.

Visitors have apparently included former prime minister of Japan and even  - at least according to this article in The Japan Times - the crown prince Naruhito. The article also explains why the museum is to close: the declining trickle of visitors is simply no longer enough to sustain a flat which must, after all, now be worth about half a million. They probably paid around £35,000 for it back in the early 1980s.

Soseki pilgrims reach their goal, 81 The
Chase. The museum is directly opposite
this house

Odd, that in an era when Japanese culture is increasingly popular in the UK - whether the novels of Haruki Murakami, the animated movies of the Studio Ghibli, or all the various shades of manga - that this touching tribute to one of the nation's biggest literary names cannot find a new backer. But maybe there are other plans.

Meanwhile, Clapham will become even drearier, and with even less in it to detain anyone with any interest in anything other than jogging, physical jerks on the common, dog-walking, sport, food, showing off  their wealth, royalty, cramming onto the Northern Line for the plum job in the city, revving up the Maserati or Aston Martin, and expensive boozing.

Meanwhile, for a more literary, highly thought-provoking account of a visit to this museum, read this fascinating entry on Dougal McNeill's blog, Nae Hauf-way Hoose .

Oh and by the way. Maybe the residents of this street - who seem to be so keen to hold expensive parties to honour people even richer themselves - should take note that on December 9th, 2016, we might be observing the 100th anniversary of Soseki's death. Perhaps a time to reconsider that statue?

More photos from the Soseki museum

Hundreds of framed photos line the walls, including these (in the entrance hall - note the 1970s Entryphone)  of visits to the museum by various dignitaries over the past two decades. 

Another shot of the Blue Plaque unveiling on a suitably miserable day early in 2002

Last but not least: the delightful curator of the Soseki Museum in London, Yoshi,
who has deep knowledge of the author and his time in London, and will patiently answer even
dumbest of questions from clueless neighbours like myself.