A review by fruity_basil
And Then by Natsume Sōseki

reflective slow-paced

4.25

A story that makes one deeply lonely and makes a person want to find an isolated spot high up in a mountain and sink into the earth. 

spoilers below;  tried to use the spoiler tags but somehow they don't work on the big chunk

Alienation

• the tension of living as an outcast in a society who, despite not belonging to the masses, still relies on society for your continued existence
• watching everyone around you pass you by as they find their way in life, knowing what to do, how to live, while you yourself drift by waiting for the end. Even as everyone urges Daisuke to do something, get a job, get a wife, none of it is something he particularly wants or needs. Unlike the people around him, without the immediate need to make a living, or any particularly strong interest in any work, what is there left for him, except to reflect on the difference between himself and the world? There is a banality to everything, and with nothing to truly hunger for, Daisuke is just left waiting for things to happen and fade away. Or so it seems to me anyway.

Random thoughts:
Michiyo is not so much a person in her own right (moreso than other non-Daisuke characters) as she is an object, a personification of Daisuke. Their relationship reads more like a vehicle through which the story drives Daisuke away from the view connections he has left to society, as well as his sources of sustenance. 

Notable pages:

• 21-22
• 63-67

• "What's wrong with you is that you've never had to worry about money. You don't feel like working because you don't have to in order to make ends meet."
  ...
  "It's fine to work, but as long as you're going to work, it ought to be for more than subsistence, else it won't be to your credit. All toil that is sacred transcends the realm of bread... Why? Because toil for the sake of subsistence is not toil for its own sake... it's hard to work sincerely at a job that you're doing just to eat."
  "I think it's just the opposite. It's because you're working to eat that you feel like working furiously."
  "Maybe you can work furiously, but it's hard to work sincerely. If you're working in order to eat, which do you think is the main object – work or food?"
  "Food, of course"
  "See? If food's the object and work the means, then it stands to reason that you'll adjust your work to make it easier to eat. In that case, it won't matter what you do or how you do it as long as you can get bread – that's what it's bound to come down to. As long as the content and the direction, or the procedure of a given endeavor are circumscribed by external conditions, then that endeavor is degenerate endeavor."
  "But why should it matter?"
  ...
  "Unless you're a man without worries about food and clothing, doing something on a whim as it were, it's impossible to do any serious work."
  "So that means only a man in your position is capable of sacred toil. Then it's your duty all the more to do something

• 115-116
• 129-130
• 161-162
• 169-170: 

• "no matter whom we find, she wouldn't suit you, so what I want to say is that it really doesn't make a difference whom you marry. No matter whom we show you, it doesn't do any good. There's not a single person alive in this world who would suit you. That's why you should just accept that a wife isn't meant to be pleasing in the first place, and get married – what other choice is there? If you'd just quietly marry the one we think is best, then everything would be nicely settled"

• --> individual vs society. The alienation one feels of no one truly understanding them, of being alone in the world, yet being pressured to conform to societal norms because even as individuals one does not exist in a vacuum and must still rely on others to live. 
• 187-188
• 193-195
• 197-198

• Daisuke thought that as a first step, he should seek an occupation. But in his mind there was only the word occupation, and it failed to appear in its fleshly reality. Since he had never before been interested in any occupation, regardless of what he tried to imagine, his mind would only slide over its surface and refuse to break in to consider the internal reality. Society appeared to him like a flat surface partitioned according to a complex colour scheme. And he could only think that he himself had no colour whatsoever.

• 211-216
• 223-224