[虫] The Japanese “mushi” and the Russian “toska”
There is a special meaning to the word mushi [虫] in Japanese, the nuances of which are lost in its common English translation of “insect” or “bug.” I think it would be most straightforward to quote directly an excerpt from an article called Mushi ga ii [虫がいい] from am insightful book entitled Nihongo Omote to Ura [日本語 表と裏] written by Morimoto Tetsurou [森本哲郎]. Below is my translation:
The Japanese characterize such mysteries of the heart as mushi. The heart is what one desires, what one thinks and what one feels. Nevertheless, there are times when the heart does not work the way one would like it to. In other words, there is another heart within one’s heart. The Japanese call that “second soul” mushi. It is believed that, of the two, mushi is by far closer to the depth of one’s being. The reason for it is that when one loses consciousness and when one’s breathing weakens, the Japanese call that condition “the breath of mushi.” The breath of mushi means that only the mushi within one’s body is left to do the breathing. In other words, mushi is the last thing that supports one’s life. In that sense, the Japanese concept of mushi is close to Freud’s libido.
In addition to “the breath of mushi” [虫の息], Morimoto provided other examples of Japanese idioms that illustrate the Japanese concept of mushi. For example, “mushi‘s notification” [虫の知らせ] means a gut feeling for something inauspicious.”Where mushi lives is bad” [虫の居所が悪い] means you are in a bad mood. “The mushi in one’s stomach cannot be suppressed” [腹の虫が収まらない] means you are out of control with your anger. “Fusagi no muishi” [鬱ぎの虫] means a fit of blues.
Mushi clearly means more than just “insect” or “bug.”
The reason is I mentioned the above is that recently I read some additional information on this subject, so I am just posting my questions here to see if anyone can point me to more relevant sources that may lead to an answer -
The additional information comes from a passage from a very interesting book called Ningen no Kakugo [人間の覚悟] by Itsuki Hiroyuki [五木寛之]. I think it would be easiest for me to translate and quote the passage directly:
In Russia, it is said that “toska” lives without exception in every human soul.
There is a folktale that goes like this. Back in the feudal era, there was a diligent peasant in Siberia who went to work in the fields when the sun rose and went back home tired when the sun set. Then he would pray to an icon, eat a measly meal, and go to sleep. This peasant, who had never raised any doubt about this routine of peasant life, threw away his hoe in the field suddenly one day and began to quickly walk towards somewhere.
And he walked and walked without stopping, crossing mountains, crossing hills and crossing wild fields – until he finally collapsed as if to become fodder for wolves. Whenever there was a case like this, in old Russia people would say that this man was “seized by toska”.
In the Meiji Era, Futaba Teishimei [二葉亭四迷] began to translate many works of Russian literature beginning with Turgenev, which in turn influenced naturalism in Japanese literature. Among his translations was a work of fiction called Toska by Gorky. If you looked up “toska” in a Russo-Japanese dictionary, you would find it defined as “melancholy” [憂鬱]. Futaba interpreted it in his own creative way as “fusagi no mushi” [鬱ぎの虫].
I feel that it is a somewhat vulgar way of translating the word, but in any case “toska” would seem to live in every human soul. People each have one such fusagi no mushi being fed and kept alive in the heart, and somewhere in the course of life, this mushi eats away one’s heart at a gulp.
There are many types of fusagi no mushi. There is a type that begins to do ill not long after one is born and makes one feel tormented. It is possible that poets like Ishikawa Takuboku [石川啄木], Terayama Shuuji [寺山修司], Rimbaud and Nakahara Chuuya [中原中也] began to have their hearts eaten away by this mushi from early youth.
Speaking of this, the really sinister kind of mushi lives quietly like a deep sea fish in the human heart. It hides away without ever leaving a trace of its existence, and finally leaps out to bite at your heart just when you happen to be facing the most severe crisis in your life. With the poison it leaked out, you fall into severe depression that is beyond salvage. The work of fiction Toska is a story about a middle-aged man who was suddenly attacked and destroyed by this. It is a story that is likely to make you feel depressed just by reading it.
However, it is interesting that the Russian people appear to have the resolution [覚悟] that human beings live with toska and it is one’s human fate that one may meet it someday.
Itsuki writes “toska” as トスカ in the book, but I believe the actual Russian word is тоска. Anyway, my questions are:
i) Has anyone else heard of that folklore in Russia? Is it obscure or widely known within Russia? Where can I find out more about that folklore (or similar folklores along that pattern)?
ii) What are some more examples of Russian people having the kakugo [覚悟] (there is no straight English translation of this word but you may think of it as “resolution” or “being mentally prepared”) that it is one’s fate to meet toska someday? The reason I ask is that kakugo [覚悟] is such a Japanese habit of mind that I wonder if it may not be mental projection on Itsuki’s part. Before a samurai goes to a duel, he must have kakugo to face the worst. Before you go to sit a very difficult examination, you must have kakugo to face the worst. Before you get married, you must have kakugo to face the worst. Every time when you encounter some great hurdle in life, the thing you must have is kakugo. The whole book from which the above excerpt is quoted is all about having kakugo. It is never about keeping your fingers crossed and hoping that everything will turn out just fine. It is always about having kakugo that this hurdle could be the very end of you, or “game over.” Do Russians really live with the realization that the day one meets toska is also “game over”?
I do not know much about Slavic culture beyond books and films in translation, but I am most interested to learn more.
(I can read some simple Russian now and don’t mind if you point me to Russian sources. Thanks in advance.)
I’m afraid I don’t know enough about either Japanese or Russian culture/literature be of much help, but another place I’ve seen toska mentioned is in Vladimir Nabokov’s commentary on Pushkin’s novel “Eugene Onegin” (Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse: Commentary).
Nabokov: “Tosca is the generic term for a feeing of physical or metaphysical dissatisfaction, a sense of longing, a dull anguish, a preying misery, a gnawing mental ache” (p. 337 of the Princeton University Press edition – parts of it can be found on Google Books).
The “gnawing” strikes me as suggestive of some of the mushi-related vocabuluary given above. But my general understanding of toska from Nabokov was that it was more of an aesthetic/ethos in certain kinds of classic Russian literature (sorry I can’t remember much more than that!).
I have to add though that personally I am always leery of statements that generalize about national characteristics.
Tan:
Now that you posted Nabokov’s quote, I think I have read it before too when I was reading “Eugene Onegin” (but forgotten it because it was too many years ago). Many kind thanks.
Also, to clarify on the point of “national characteristics” – I am not interested in talks like “people in nation X are all good at math” or “people in nation Y are all drunk and lazy”. I am interested in the worldview underlying a language. One of my Japanese profs used to say that you cannot speak Japanese with native fluency unless you also learn to think like Japanese. Just by way of example – there can be ten different ways to say the same thing in Japanese depending on who you are and who you are talking to. When you learn a new language, you also get “infected” by another way of looking at the world, quite in spite of yourself. Earlier I made a post about how there are definitely more shades of sadness expressible in the Chinese language. That is the sort of thing I am interested to find out – how the world is perceived and expressed differently when you speak a given language. I have doubts about questions ii) above, but then it’s not like I know enough to decide either way, so that is why I solicit opinion from others who may know more.
Oh, that makes sense, thank you for your clarification!
Tan:
By the way, may I ask how did you find “Eugene Onegin”?
The reason I asked is that I cried like a pig when I first read it. It was one of very few books that ever did that to me. I was eighteen or nineteen at the time.
I think the titular character should really be Tatyana instead of Onegin.
I’ve always been interested in Russian literature, so I read some of the ‘classic’ stuff when I was younger. I still haven’t read many titles, but sadly don’t have a lot of free time nowadays!
As for me, I rather appreciate Eugene, but I do think the book really sings during the parts that are from her POV. The narrative parts with Eugene in it is like the trellis, imo, and Tatyana is like breathing & flowering vines. She really brings the whole thing to life.
I’d love to learn some Russian, if only I had the time…. Good luck with your study!
While researching the word “Toska” on the web, I came across a short research paper that discussed the concept in relation to Post-Soviet Russia. The paper was fascinating not only for the experiences it related from various people the writer interviewed, but it also talked about the structure of Russian society – for all intents and purposes, there is none. It explains this much better in the paper – but the idea of a country that is as old as Russia does not have a sense of “nationality”, that it’s purpose on this earth is to spread “universal brotherhood” whether by the Tsar, or the Party, is very interesting. The link to the article is here: http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache:iVCZZcSj26oJ:www.georgefox.edu/academics/undergrad/departments/soc-swk/ree/Washburn_Toska_Nov%25202008.pdf+Toska+-+Russian&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjN9zp79e62XvV-yT1oUI8rxoegInR-aFrgIW1MUMuwnt8LZfbcNbH3PL7twskx8ETOKDIUmblLuMqyeREnizHnEzqNhbzyKsKbObqbyVDdpijtnZGjwADbqpwsOpMVe_DPK_tK&sig=AFQjCNFOBBcVkecP1OV2iq6iRowdb9UaNA
Please forgive the clumsy direct link.
This article raised some interesting questions for me about different world views; fueled, I might add, by several of your entries – this one and the one on the many words for sadness in Chinese. One of the real joys of reading your blog is that I come away thinking of something new and interesting each time.
Heya!
I happen to read your posts occasionally. But normally I enjoy doing it as I always learn something new from them. So, since I’m a native Russian, I thought I might help you a bit with your questions this time.
First of all, ‘toska’ is not simply a melancholy, of course. In Russian dictionaries ‘toska’ is normally represented with two main meanings:
1. melancholy, despondency, ennui, yearning, and even anguish of mind
2. (colloquial) boredom, tedium, boredom caused by dullness/dreariness
A good example to describe ‘toska’ would be a feeling of homesickness: if you are forced to leave your country for political reasons, for example, so that you have to live in another country, with a totally different culture and attitude to life, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You realize you can’t go back no matter how much you want. You realize you’ll never be able to enjoy something you got used to since your childhood. It makes you depressing, and, as a result, it borns the feeling of ‘toska’ within you.
Homesickness is a good example because it depicts the nature of ‘toska’ (meaning #1, see above). It shows how ‘toska’ is born from obedience/limitations and being unable to fix it.
For example, you may feel ‘toska’ when you’re imprisoned. You may feel ‘toska’ when you have to study abroad and miss your boyfriend/girlfriend/parents/friends.
Whatever the reason of the obedience/limitations is, whether it’s natural or forced by someone, more important is the outcome feeling – ‘toska’. It’s born because you lost something important and you can’t return it.
Another cause of ‘toska’ is derived from the word’s more colloquial meaning #2. I.e. ‘toska’ is caused by boredom. For example one might say: “Blah, I hate it when the electricity’s gone… such a ‘toska’… and even my cell phone’s batteries died!”. OR “Such a ‘toska’ around this place, let’s go to another club! Hopefully it’s more lively and cheerful there.” But, still, in such situations this is more common to hear a word ‘boredom’ rather than ‘toska’
So, now let’s switch to the folktale about the Siberian peasant. Let me state it clearly first, it’s not really a wide-spread and common folktale here. I was born in the 1980′s and I hardly remember if I heard this story myself ever since then. Well, I probably did as something resonated somewhere within my brain when I read it here. And nevertheless, I might probably read or heard it only once or two in my life.
So, why did that man gone wild? First of all, hard, routine work full of massive and unceasing efforts. basically speaking, he’s tired. Both, physically and mentally. Why physically? It’s quite obvious, isn’t it? And why mentally? That’s the collaboration of several factors, but mostly: boredom and inability to change anything. Why boredom? Well, routine work bores many people, especially when it takes lots of physical efforts. And why inability to change anything? Because as a peasant he can’t do anything else. From his very first day on Earth he was never taught writing and perhaps even reading. From his very first day on Earth he’s a peasant, he’s a THING that belongs to someone else. He has no freedom. The only thing he’s ever been taught is to work in fields. And he is probably smart enough to understand that an uprising won’t change it too. He’ll either get killed by the government or won’t even find other peasants to support him and initiate the uprising. Of course, there might have been other daily troubles to cause such a mental disease.
Now, if you ask me, if people are born with depressing bugs (fusagi no mushi) that live within you and can attack you once with a strong melancholy… I don’t think I can give you an answer. This is a more a psychological or even philosophical question about depression, its roots, and development in people’s mind. But one thing I’m definitely sure of – once these bugs appear and start being parasitic of human brain, it’s very hard to exterminate and get rid of them. So yeah, I think “fusagi no mushi” is a well-thought metaphor for a mental disease, its nature, and its consequences. By the way, in those days of 19th century, is was also possible to call the melancholy/depression disease by the word ‘toska’.
As for Russians and that ‘resolution to meet toska’… I think it’s a bit different here. It’s rather a resolution to meet all kind of difficulties at any time up to the point where resolution becomes desire. To my mind this is something that is simply a part of the Russian genes these days.
Just a couple of facts:
- The serfage was only cancelled in Russia in 1861.
- Afterwards people were treated like hellish litter by Stalin and communism in general.
- Add to this the sorrowfulness of the World War I, followed by a Civil War and World War II.
- Not to mention the Tatar yoke, the sadistic Tsars like Ivan IV the Great, etc
So, Russians are genetically used to being patient and indecisive when it comes to dealing with the authorities. This is one of the reasons the country is buried with corruption today – people got used to searching for workarounds when they need something from the government. This is also the reasons why Russians are quite aggressive when it comes to dealing with interpersonal relationships, especially with foreigners. This is the way to reduce stress of the daily life difficulties.
What’s even worse, most of the people here misses the powerful Tsar/Imperator/Fuehrer/Ruler. They are so used to being slaves waiting for the inevitable troubles that they are longing for such a leader (That’s why Putin is so popular – he’s like a strong Tsar who cares for his slaves and protects from the international aggression). One might call it a resolution. But I prefer to call it stupidity and masochism. Of course all people are different. And as time goes by and people grow in a post-Soviet environment the whole nation mentality slightly changes. And maybe the time will come when Russians become a totally different nation. But it’s a long, extremely long way and we’re just at its beginning.
Finally, one thing you should keep in mind when you build your view and opinion about Russians – don’t be fooled by Turgenev and other Russian writers of that time. It’s good to learn the history and understand the development of Russian culture. But don’t forget today is not the 19th century, and not even the 20th. People have already drastically changed. The Soviet period itself had a huge impact.
Tan:
> I’ve always been interested in Russian literature, so I read some of the ‘classic’ stuff when I was younger. I still haven’t read many titles, but sadly don’t have a lot of free time nowadays!
That is why I love smartphones. I used to use a Treo phone and now use an iPhone to read downloaded texts from online libraries like Gutenberg or Aozora Bunko, whenever I have a few minutes of downtime standing in a lineup or waiting for a meeting to start. A spare minute here and a spare minute there, and before I know it I have finished reading an entire book.
I also must commend the small size of Japanese books – they are light to carry and perfect for reading on a packed train during rush hour. I polish off a lot of Japanese books that way.
> As for me, I rather appreciate Eugene, but I do think the book really sings during the parts that are from her POV. The narrative parts with Eugene in it is like the trellis, imo, and Tatyana is like breathing & flowering vines. She really brings the whole thing to life.
Well, Eugene… I guess he is the type that young and inexperienced girls would fall for. (For the record, he is not really my type.)
One of the highlights of the story is that people grow at different speeds. Eugene is just same old same old when he meets Tatyana again in St. Petersburg society. But what amazing transformation that Tatyana had undergone…
Mosuke:
I really appreciate the link – I have read it and it is full of interesting and useful information. Many thanks for that!
> One of the real joys of reading your blog is that I come away thinking of something new and interesting each time.
Thank you for your kind words. That is what this blog is for indeed.
Elle:
> I happen to read your posts occasionally. But normally I enjoy doing it as I always learn something new from them. So, since I’m a native Russian, I thought I might help you a bit with your questions this time.
First of all, let me thank you for your kind help and express some appreciation for your very long comment!
> Another cause of ‘toska’ is derived from the word’s more colloquial meaning #2. I.e. ‘toska’ is caused by boredom.
I think “toska” in this meaning would be similar to “tsumaranai (つまらない)” in Japanese or “wu liao (無聊)” in Chinese.
> Finally, one thing you should keep in mind when you build your view and opinion about Russians – don’t be fooled by Turgenev and other Russian writers of that time. It’s good to learn the history and understand the development of Russian culture. But don’t forget today is not the 19th century, and not even the 20th. People have already drastically changed. The Soviet period itself had a huge impact.
Of course I am aware of that, but for some reason it is only the 19th century cultural stuff that gets trickled down to my world. Rachmaninov was my “gateway drug” to classical music. I still remember listening to a radio broadcast of his works one fine spring evening when I was teenager. I felt like an atomic bomb had just been dropped on me. I rushed off to buy CDs of his works the next day.
Speaking of that, I have another story to tell. A while ago, I had my Russian tutor correcting some sentences I translated from English to Russian. He pointed at a sentence where I translated “mom” as “mamushka” and frowned: “Where did you get that from?” I was stuck for an answer (though I suspect it was probably from one of those 19th century Russian stories that I read). He laughed for five minutes and said “but that is just so… 19th century!” and laughed some more…
So what do you recommend for reading in the post-Soviet era? I am really not familiar in that area and would like to try out something humorous. I need more exposure to the Russian sense of humour. Perhaps something in the style of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. Every page of “The Golovlyov Family” was sprinkled with an unfailing sense of humour. I enjoyed that book immensely and wonder if there are living humorists like that in Russia.
Rather OT (and late), but just throwing in my $0.02:
I can’t really speak for ‘mushi’ or toska’, but on the topic of ‘無聊’, I think it would be more or less equivalent to the French ‘ennui’ (Being bron in Canada, my French is probably better than my Chinese ^^;)
From my understanding, it’s used to express:
1) boredom (i.e. ‘Je m’ennuie’ -> ‘I am bored’, literally ‘I bore myself’)
2) melancholy or listlessness
3) missing something, usually a person (‘Je m’ennuie de vous’ -> ‘I am missing you’)
In the case of #1 & #2, it describes a passive state of being rather than an active, passing feeling. The first two meanings are not really mutually exclusive, but can be taken to mean either one or the other. All three meanings do bring to mind a sense of longing, though.
somelurker:
I can see that your nickname is meant to be self-effacing, but I wish people would not lurk so much. I always welcome comments.
Anyway, noted with thanks about the $0.02. I should add that ‘無聊’ also has the meaning of silliness. When you call someone ‘無聊’, you may be indicating that he is so silly as to have nothing better to do.
:] I shall keep that in mind.
Oh! Now that I think about it, I have heard relatives use ‘無聊’ like this. I had always assumed they were being facetious.
exlurker:
Noted with thanks.
(Now that’s a better nickname!)