Kokoro soseki7/8/2023 ![]() ![]() It is an international modernist treasure through sharing the aching, regretful sensibility of such works as Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Ingmar Bergman’s arguably greatest film, Winter Light. Translator McKinney, who makes a completely stylistically modern-verbally and syntactically plain, realistic, personally voiced, intimate in tone-English-language novel of this quietly profound masterpiece, imparts in her introduction all that non-Japanese need to know to appreciate why the book is considered a national treasure. In the book’s second half, narrated by Sensei (i.e., mentor), as the student calls him, we learn why: he feels he betrayed a friend by first pressing his suit for the woman both love. Well-mannered, educated, comfortable, ostensibly happily married though childless, the man, whom the narrator regularly visits once they’re both back in the city, yet exudes sadness. The never-named narrator-hero of the novel’s first half is a provincial student in Tokyo who befriends a man some 20 years older whom he meets on a beach that is a favorite student getaway site. The last its author completed, published in 1914, two years before his death at 48, it voices the spiritual desolation of a society that had deliberately transformed itself from quasi-feudal isolation to determinedly modern player on the world stage in little more than 50 years. ![]() *Starred Review* Kokoro is the great Japanese modern novel. ![]()
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