"Rich in understanding and insight."--The New Yorker
What is love, and what is friendship? What is the extent of our responsibility to ourselves and to others? Kokoro, signifying "the heart of things," examines these age-old questions in terms of the modern world.
A trilogy of stories that explores the very essence of loneliness, Kokoro opens with "Sensei and I," in which the narrator recounts his relationship with an intellectual who dwells in isolation but maintains a sophisticated worldview. "My Parents and I" brings the reader into the narrator's family circle,...

"A nonchalant string of anecdotes and wisecracks, told by a fellow who doesn't have a name, and has never caught a mouse, and isn't much good for anything except watching human beings in action..." --The New Yorker

Written over the course of 1904-1906, Soseki Natsume's comic masterpiece, I Am a Cat, satirizes the foolishness of upper-middle-class Japanese society during the Meiji era. With acerbic wit and sardonic perspective, it follows the whimsical adventures of a world-weary stray kitten who comments on the follies and foibles of the people around him.

A classic of...

"The subject of 'Kokoro, ' which can be translated as 'the heart of things' or as 'feeling, ' is the delicate matter of the contrast between the meanings the various parties of a relationship attach to it. In the course of this exploration, Soseki brilliantly describes different levels of friendship, family relationships, and the devices by which men attempt to escape from their fundamental loneliness. The novel sustains throughout its length something approaching poetry, and it is rich in understanding and insight. The translation, by Edwin McClellan, is extremely good."

--Anthony West,...

First publication in English of Soseki's travels through Manchuria on the then recently-acquired South Manchurian Railway. 6-week travelogue including boat from Osaka to Dairen, railway up the Liaodong Peninsular to Fushun. Many descriptions of Manchuria. It is a lively, informative and sometimes very funny narrative, which reveals Soseki's wit and Western-style humour in observing the human condition, as well as the literary techniques that characterize his subsequent achievements in shaping the modern Japanese novel. The Introduction by Inger Sigrun Brodey provides both a new perspective on...

Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) was the foremost Japanese novelist of the twentieth century, known for such highly acclaimed works as Kokoro, Sanshiro, and I Am a Cat. Yet he began his career as a literary theorist and scholar of English literature. In 1907, he published Theory of Literature, a remarkably forward-thinking attempt to understand how and why we read. The text anticipates by decades the ideas and concepts of formalism, structuralism, reader-response theory, and postcolonialism, as well as cognitive approaches to literature that are only now gaining...

Natsume Soseki's only coming-of-age novel, Sanshiro depicts the eponymous twenty-three-year-old protagonist as he leaves the sleepy countryside to attend a university in the constantly moving "real world" of Tokyo. Baffled and excited by the traffic, the academics, and-most of all-the women, Sanshiro must find his way among the sophisticates that fill his new life. An incisive social and cultural commentary, Sanshiro is also a subtle portrait of first love, tradition, and modernization, and the idealism of youth against the cynicism of middle age.
For more than seventy...

"A Japanese writer of genius."--Japan Quarterly

Soseki Natsume is considered to be one of Japan's most beloved and respected authors. And Then is ranked as one of his most insightful and stirring novels.

Daisuke, the protagonist, is a man in his twenties who is struggling with his personal purpose and identity as well as the changing social landscape of Meiji-era Japan. As Japan enters the Twentieth Century, ancient customs give way to western ideals, and Daisuke works to resolve his feelings of disconnection and abandonment during this time of change. Thanks to...

In Soseki Natsume's 1906 novel Botchan, the title character moves from the modern Tokyo to the more traditional city of Matsuyama to pursue a position teaching mathematics. Botchan interacts with a scheming colleague and mischievous students, and the reader questions, throughout the novel, whether he will stay true to his moral self or become corrupted by his fellow teacher. The novel alludes to an increasing westernization of Japan, and is an engaging foray into the consequences of such a change.