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This article examines the inner workings of intermediary consciousness as a locus of insight in the novels of Henry James and Natsume Sôseki. Both authors use motifs of liminality to fashion and explore rituals of social intercourse, marriage, and dying—not to mention the passage from ignorance to insight. In both, we find traces of a cultural exchange between East and West. James’s Japan (as portrayed, for example, in The Portrait of a Lady) is at once fascinating and disturbing, charged with sentiments that gained a foothold in the West when, halfway through the nineteenth century, Japan opened up and things Japanese became fashionable. By contrast, the image of the West present in Sôseki’s work owes much to William James’s notions of consciousness, which Sôseki pursued during a two-year stay in England, on a government grant, during the Meiji era.