 Without a doubt, the most important influence in Watsuji’s early years was the brilliant novelist Natsume Sōseki, considered a foremost interpreter of modern Japan. James Kodera writes that Watsuji found in Sōseki “a human being struggling with the human condition in the particularities of early modern Japan, suddenly exposed to the West and yet struggling to sustain his own identity” (Kodera 1987, 6). Sōseki was beginning to abandon his unqualified admiration of Western individualism, and was embarking on a critique of both individualism and the modern culture of the Western world. It was not only a move away from the values which he had come to associate with Western culture, but a move back to the values of his own Japanese cultural tradition. Watsuji never met Sōseki while at the University of Tokyo, but did meet him in 1913 and became a member of a study group that met at Sōseki’s home. Sōseki died three years later, when Watsuji was 27, and upon his death, Watsuji began to compose a lengthy reminiscence of him. His reflections were published in 1918 (in his Gūzo saikō), and they marked Watsuji’s own transformation from advocate of Western ways to critic of the West, turning toward a reconsideration of Japanese and Eastern cultural resources. It is perhaps telling that in a series that Sōseki wrote for a popular Tokyo newspaper during 1912–1913, “Sōseki depicted the plight of the modern individual as one of painful loneliness and helplessness” (Kodera 1987, 6). He saw egoism as the source of the plight, and has Ichirō, the hero of the serially appearing novel Wayfarer, conclude that “there is no bridge leading from one man to another; loneliness, loneliness, thou [are] mine home” (Kodera 1987, 6). A solution to the modern predicament of estrangement, loneliness and helplessness came to be found, for Watsuji, in our social interconnections. What modern Western society was losing with great rapidity, was still evident in Japanese society, where individuality was tempered with a strong social consciousness, and this more balanced sense of self could be found in the earliest of Japanese cultural documents. Sōseki’s proposed solution was to “follow Heaven, forsake the self” (Kodera 1987, 6), but Watsuji’s more humanistic remedy for an egoism which inevitably led to estrangement, was to reinvest in one’s social interconnectedness. We are not only by nature social beings, but we inevitably come into the world already in relationship: with our language and culture, traditions and expectations, parents, caregivers, and teachers. It is a myth of abstraction that we come into the world as isolated egos. 