Kokoro

The importance of Natsume Soseki for Japanese literature can be compared to that of Dickens for Great Britain or that of Henry James for the United States. Like these writers, his work now occupies a very popular and important place in the literary imagination of his country. Unlike them, his work has only recently attracted the attention of foreign readers. "Kokoro" joins the recent publications of Peter Owen's "The Gate," "The Tower of London" and "the Three Cornered World" as part of an international program to bring one of Japan's best-known authors to a new English-speaking audience. As Damian Flanagan says in his new critical introduction, "Kokoro" is the Soseki novel that has received the most attention from critics and audiences in Japan. On one level, a meditation on the changing face of Japanese culture and its attitudes toward honor, friendship, love, death, it is also a clever subversion of all these things. The novel focuses on the friendship between the narrator and the man he calls Sensei, who is tormented by mysterious events from his past. As the friendship grows and the narrator learns more about the man he admires so much, he becomes increasingly intrigued by this hidden story. The Sensei, however, refuses to reveal anything until the third part of the book, when the narrator is called to care for his sick father and the truth is revealed in tragic circumstances, being recorded in the narrator's (and the reader's) "Kokoro": Heart.

Previews available in: English Japanese

Subjects

English translations, Fiction, Japan, Social conditions, Roman japonais, Traductions anglaises, Fiction, short stories (single author), Near and Far Eastern fiction (fictional works by a single author), Natsume, soseki, 1867-1916, Japanese literature, Historical fiction, Psychological fiction, Japan, history, Literature, Fiction, general, Fiction, historical, general, Friendship, History, Friendship--fiction, Pl812.a8 k613 2010, 895.6/342, Teacher-student relations, Language and languages, Friendship, fiction, Japan, fiction, French translationsPeople

Sōseki Natsume (1867-1916) Showing 7 featured editions. See all 84 editions?

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Translated from Japanese.

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No collection of Japanese literature is complete without Natsume Soseki's Kokoro, his most famous novel and the last one he completed before his death. Published here in the first new translation in over fifty years, Kokoro, meaning "heart," is the story of a subtle and touching friendship between two unnamed characters, a young man and an enigmatic old man whom he calls "Sensei." Haunted by tragic secrets that have cast a long shadow over his life, Sensei slowly opens up to his young disciple, confessing indiscretions from his own student days that have left him reeling with guilt and revealing, in the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between his moral anguish and his student's struggle to understand it, the profound cultural shift from one generation to the next that characterized Japan in the early 20th century.