• ISBN: 978 0 7206 1297 4
  • Fiction
  • Paperback
  • 256pp
  • £9.95
  • Available

Kokoro

Natsume Soseki

Translated from the Japanese by Edwin McClellen

With a new introduction by Damian Flanagan

Natsume Soseki’s importance to Japanese literature can be compared to that of Dickens to Britain or Henry James to North 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 publicin 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.

‘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 lonliness, guilt and self hatred . . . recalls Turgenev both in its economy and perfect symmetry of architecture.’ – Sunday Telegraph

‘Great sensitivity and insight’ – Sunday Times

‘A fascinating book, written with the most beautiful lucidity: it is subtle, nostalgic and persuasive.’ – Scotsman


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.