ISBN 0 7206 1249 7
Paperback
216mm x 138mm
224pp
Fiction
£9.95
Available

Botchan

Natsume Soseki

Translated by Alan Turney With a new introduction by Damian Flanagan

One of the world’s great comic stories, Botchan is perhaps the best-loved novel in the whole of Japanese literature.

An impetuous young graduate, born and bred in Tokyo, sets off from the capital to assume a teaching position at a provincial school only to find himself embroiled in every kind of small-town shenanigans and the machinations of the teaching staff themselves. The deputy headmaster has schemes to lay his hands on the local beauty, Madonna, and does battle with his arch-enemy Hotta, while the bewildered narrator dreams only of being reunited with his faithful servant Kiyo. Written with enormous verve and panache, Botchan is by turns deeply moving and deceptively complex. The novel is here accompanied for the first time with a comprehensive critical introduction by Dr Damian Flanagan.

Botchan follows the publication of an important new translation of Soseki’s The Tower of London. Published in co-operation with the Japan Foundation and the Sasakawa Foundation, it is part of an international programme to bring Japan’s most popular author to a new international audience.

‘A great comic masterpiece of modern Japanese literature.’ – Sunday Times

‘It’s cheering to find Japanese attitudes and humour so like our own – except that ours were not nearly so unstuffy in 1906 . . . a delight.’ – Guardian

‘Soseki has been compared both to the Mark Twain of Huckleberry Finn and the Dickens of The Pickwick Papers, but in this little masterpiece he comes closest, of all Western writers, to Jane Austen.’ – Francis King, Sunday Telegraph

‘Soseki was an extraordinarily varied and accomplished writer. Bochan is his chief popular success, a broadly comic, ruefully truculent prefiguring of Lucky Jim Dixon . . . Altogether Botchan is a marvellous invention.’ – Observer.


NATSUME SOSEKI (1867–1916) is one of the great writers of the modern world. Educated at Tokyo Imperial University, he was sent to England in 1900 as a government scholar. As one of the first Japanese writers to be influenced by Western culture, his various works are read by virtually all Japanese, and contemporary authors in Japan continue to be influenced by his œuvre.

ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR. THE TOWER OF LONDON. THE GATE.THE THREE-CORNERED WORLD