Kokoro - Softcover

Soseki, Natsume

4.04

32,230 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0720612977 ISBN 13: 9780720612974

Publisher: Peter Owen, 2007

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The best-selling classic of Japanese literature

A young student makes himself the acolyte of an old man he calls 'Sensei'. Bitter, cynical and indolent, Sensei has withdrawn from society. The young student is at once attracted by these qualities and also deeply puzzled. Not even Sensei's wife knows the source of his inconsolable heart. As their friendship grows, the young student becomes more intrigued by the secrets that haunt Sensei, the mysteries of his past that have compromised his relationship with the world. Kokoro, meaning heart in Japanese, is a meditation on the part played by honour, friendship, love and death in Japanese culture. These themes are subtly subverted by the pen of Japan's preeminent author Natsume Soseki.

Kokoro joins the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works, which include The Gate, The Tower of London and the The Three-Cornered World from Peter Owen Publishers as part of an international programme to bring one of Japan's best known authors to a new English-speaking audience.

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Review:

'A brilliant piece of narrative ... Kokoro is exactly what you would ask a novel to be ... its effect is so fresh, so particular to itself ... There is no more exhilarating experience than this sort of discovery ... Soseki manipulates every detail with the same thrilling mastery.' --Spectator

'Sparsely populated, simple but perfect ... it is a melancholy but stoical study in loneliness, guilt and self hatred ... recalls Turgenev both in its economy and perfect symmetry of architecture.' --Sunday Telegraph

'Great sensitivity and insight' --Sunday Times

Synopsis:

Natsume Soseki's importance to Japanese literature can be compared to that of Dickens to Britain or Henry James to America. Like these writers, his work now holds a hugely popular and important place in the literary imagination of his country. Unlike them, his work is only recently coming to the attention of readers from overseas. "Kokoro" joins the recent publications of "The Gate", "The Tower of London" and "the Three Cornered World" from Peter Owen as part of an international programme 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 been given most attention by critics and the public in Japan. On one level, a meditation on the changing face of Japanese culture and its attitudes to honour, friendship, love, death, it is also a sly subversion of all of these things. The novel centres around the friendship between the narrator and the man he calls Sensei, who is haunted by mysterious events in his past. As the friendship grows and the narrator gets to know more about the man he so admires he is increasingly intrigued by this hidden history.

The Sensei, however, refuses to reveal anything until the third part of the book when the narrator is called away to look after his sick father and the truth is revealed in tragic circumstances, etching itself onto the narrator - and the reader's - "Kokoro" : Heart.

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