Three Cornered World

Literature & Fiction

Sōseki, Natsume

Contemporary

Arena Arrow

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 years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Sanshiro (Penguin Classics)

United States

Penguin Classics

One of Japan's most treasured novels—new to Penguin Classics A hilarious tale about a young man's rebellion against "the system" in a country school, Natsume Soseki's Botchan has enjoyed a timeless popularity in Japan. The setting is Japan's deep south, where the author himself spent some time teaching English in a boys' school. Into this conservative world, with its social proprieties and established pecking order, breezes Botchan, down from the big city and with scant respect for either his elders or his noisy young charges. The result is a light, funny, fast-paced novel. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Botchan (Penguin Classics)

Reference

A stunning new English translation—the first in more than forty years—of a major novel by the father of modern Japanese fiction Natsume Soseki's Kusamakura—meaning “grass pillow”—follows its nameless young artist-narrator on a meandering walking tour of the mountains. At the inn at a hot spring resort, he has a series of mysterious encounters with Nami, the lovely young daughter of the establishment. Nami, or "beauty," is the center of this elegant novel, the still point around which the artist moves and the enigmatic subject of Soseki's word painting. In the author's words, Kusamakura is "a haiku-style novel, that lives through beauty." Written at a time when Japan was opening its doors to the rest of the world, Kusamakura turns inward, to the pristine mountain idyll and the taciturn lyricism of its courtship scenes, enshrining the essence of old Japan in a work of enchanting literary nostalgia.

Kusamakura (Penguin Classics)

The great Japanese author’s most famous novel, in its first new English translation in half a century No collection of Japanese literature is complete without Natsume Soseki's Kokoro, his most famous novel and the last he completed before his death. Published here in the first new translation in more than fifty years, Kokoro—meaning "heart"—is the story of a subtle and poignant friendship between two unnamed characters, a young man and an enigmatic elder whom he calls "Sensei." Haunted by tragic secrets that have cast a long shadow over his life, Sensei slowly opens up to his young disciple, confessing indiscretions from his own student days that have left him reeling with guilt, and revealing, in the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between his moral anguish and his student's struggle to understand it, the profound cultural shift from one generation to the next that characterized Japan in the early twentieth century.

Kokoro (Penguin Classics)

Grass on the Wayside (Michikusa) (UNESCO Collection of Representative Works: Japanese Series) (A Phoenix Book P620)

World Literature

University of Chicago Press

'Even bigger than Japan is the inside of your head. Don't ever surrender yourself - not to Japan, not to anything' A shy, unworldly young student has his eyes opened to Tokyo's bustling metropolis, in this delicate, bitter-sweet work of innocence and experience from Japan's foremost modern novelist. Ten new titles in the colourful, small-format, portable new Pocket Penguins series

Sanshiro (Pocket Penguins)

Classics

Penguin Classic

The shortcomings and pretensions of individuals in Japanese society during the Meiji era are viewed through feline eyes

I Am a Cat (UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. Japanese Series.)

History & Criticism

Perigee Trade

Nagai Daisuke, son of a wealthy industrialist, realizes that Westernization is sweeping away Japan's traditions, but feels powerless to find new values

And Then: Natsume Soseki's Novel Sorekara (UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. Japanese Series.) (English and Japanese Edition)

Natsume, Sōseki

Putnam Pub. Group

A strange relationship develops between Ichiro, his wife Onao, and his brother Jiro as a result of Ichiro's and Onao's incompatibility

Wayfarer

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Books by Sōseki, Natsume