Kokoro

Some books I close the cover on and I could tell you that minute exactly what I think of them, what they were trying to convey, and whether they have done it well. This isn’t one of those books. I finished it. I sat a while. I pondered. I wondered even then if there was something about our narrator and Sensei’s relationship that I had missed, something about Sensei and his friend, K’s? Sensei means “teacher”, but what exactly did he wish to teach our young narrator and did he succeed?

I wondered if the main thrust of this novel might not be carpe diem. Our narrator is a procrastinator and seems to operate in a fog of not knowing what he wants or what he should do. He is very attracted to Sensei, who is a man who by his own show more definition does nothing. But Sensei is a man who has lost a great deal, perhaps his one chance at happiness, primarily because he, himself, failed to act or rather acted too late. I could not see that he had set our narrator on a better path than the one he had followed, in fact, I think he might be primarily responsible for a despicable action the narrator takes toward the end of the novel, a purely unforgivable one in my eyes.

Soseki’s writing is lyrical and poetic, with an unmistakable Asian quality to it. I admired the way he wove the story around the lives of these two men about whom we knew actually so little in the end. There were a million things I would have liked to ask, but ultimately none of the answers would have mattered, Soseki has told us all we need to know.

The beautiful sky began slowly to lose its brightness. And before us, the delicate, green maple leaves, which looked like drops of water just about to fall from the branches, seemed to grow darker in color. From the road below, the sound of cart wheels reach our ears. I imagined that a man from the village had loaded his cart with plants or vegetables, and was on his way to some fair to sell them. Sensei stood up, as though the sound had roused him from his meditation.

Perhaps this is also a novel about betrayal and how the hatred that follows it rots the soul. Perhaps we are meant to see betrayal from both sides, to see in Sensei both the betrayer and the betrayed.

A full day later, I cannot seem to sort this book into any neat category. I did not love it, that is certain, but I did admire the writing and feel there was something very important Soseki wished to say that never fully penetrated my mind. It is not simple to get to “the heart of things”, which is what “kokoro” means, but I must applaud Soseki for trying. 3.5 rounded up for the sheer beauty of the language. show less

I felt like reading Kokoro because the characters in The Great Passage talked about it. Yes, I will take book recommendations from fictional characters now, thank you very much ;)

The writing is like looking at the sea, seeing the waves come and go. The rhythm lulls you and you follow along, almost despite yourself. It feels both light and heavy, simple and very intricate.

This short novel has 110 chapters. The reader can take a breath in between, reading slower, reflecting, letting thoughts settle for a moment. I liked that.

There are three stories here:

📖 The unnamed young narrator who meets and comes to admire an older man he calls Sensei. “Admire” is the wrong word, though, it is more of an intellectual obsession born out of show more loneliness and an undefined youthful longing for “something else”. A very strange, yet compelling, friendship dance follows, with the narrator always wanting more, and with Sensei always drawing back.

“...whenever some unexpected terseness of his shook me, my impulse was to press forward with the friendship. It seemed to me that if I did so, my yearning for the possibilities of all he had to offer would someday be fulfilled.”

There are hints of tragedy and dark secrets in Sensei’s past, and his marriage is a melancholy thing. Sensei seems to fear the young man’s admiration.

“The memory of having sat at someone’s feet will later make you want to trample him underfoot. I am trying to fend off your admiration for me, you see, in order to avoid your future contempt.”

📖 The narrator coming to his parents’ home to be with his dying father. These are harrowing chapters. Young man’s time with Sensei has corrupted him somehow, I feel, made him less of who he should be. The decision he makes at the end of Part 2 is impulsive and rash. We never see its aftermath, making it all the more tragic.

📖 The third story is Sensei’s letter, his confession. The love story has a lovely beginning. “Whenever I saw her face, I felt that I myself had become beautiful.” I found the portrayal of romantic love in a misogynic society interesting. How does a clever, sensitive man reconcile romantic love with his contempt for women in general? (He tries. He doesn’t, not really.)
With the love triangle in place, the story turns ugly. It is about people unable to express their feelings and talk to each other about them. This evolves into an emotional impotence and an inability to act when you need to (it gets tedious for the reader, though).Words said and words unsaid destroy everyone involved.

“Words are not just vibrations in the air, they work more powerfully than that, on more powerful objects.”

Sensei does a vile, dishonourable thing. After that, his life is but an imitation of one.

It’s interesting how things authors don’t show you can still be powerful – we never see the young man’s reaction to the letter, but just thinking about it hits you hard.

I feel melancholy after finishing, but I liked the experience of reading this classic. show less

a novel written in a linear, highly continuous fashion, it's really a story of the blind leading the blind. a young man on vacation in the midst of his college years finds an old man from whom he finds himself impossible to extricate. according to our narrator, his sensei teaches him more than any of his formal studies could, but in truth, whatever his unoccupied and largely silent "mentor" imparts onto the little freak who's latched himself to him is rarely transmitted to the reader. it's only when the sensei emerges from his lifelong stupor to pen his testament in light of his imminent suicide that the reader understands why he's as stoic as he is. the narrator is hilariously stupid; he graduates from college unsure of what he wants show more to do in life, and balks at his family's inability to understand that his sensei isn't some wise mentor under whose wing he's been taken but rather another bum that he just kicks it with. all in all, it's a rather humorous story about a couple of guys who've fallen victim to convention and as products of a bygone era, see no place in the world for themselves any longer. show less

I have a feeling that Kokoro is a book that will make more and more sense the more I know about modern Japanese culture. On one level it's a simple story about friendship and betrayal, but on another level it's a working-out of the cultural tensions set up in the minds of Japanese intellectuals who lived through the opening-up of Japan to western ideas during the Meiji period (Sōseki was born in the year of Meiji's accession to the imperial throne). The foreground story of Kokoro takes place in the months around the emperor's death, and its main character, Sensei (teacher), is an older man - a contemporary of the author - whose life has been messed up by his inability to resolve the existential conflict between the demands of the two show more threads of his upbringing, the requirement to subsume himself into the traditional, collective family values of middle-class Japanese society setting itself against the western need for intellectual self-determination. The narrator of the first part of the book is a man of a younger generation who gets into a similar ethical tangle, but with different dimensions and results.

It's all very carefully, delicately built up, with a lot of everyday detail about the rapidly-changing face of Japan in the decades before 1914 used to reflect and explain the development of the conflicts the characters are dealing with. Very much a book about male friendships (what used to be called "homosocial" relationships in the good old days of literary theory), where the women rarely speak and don't have all that much to do apart from arranging flowers and cooking (is that why Penguin coincidentally put a brush-stroke across the woman's eyes in the cover design?). But that's an accusation that would be equally true of a lot of western novels of the same period.

Very interesting, and McKinnon's translation reads very naturally and transparently. show less

This novel is blow-me-away kind of gorgeous. It's my first novel by Natsume Soseki who has been considered to be Japan's finest contemporary novelist. I think that most Japanese fiction, in its simplicity of voice is beautiful, but this story has a grace in a class by itself.

It's a story about friendship, love, and betrayal. It's strength lies in the last part of the book in which we hear directly from Sensei, a friend of the university student who narrates the beginning of this book, as Sensei reveals how one important decision he makes during his life causes him unending guilt and deep spiritual pain.

I sincerely want to delve into more work by this amazing Japanese writer. I can't believe it took me so long to remove this book from show more my bookshelf and finally read it. What a treasure! show less

Tras haber leído "Soy un gato" y haber fallecido de aburrimiento después de los primeros tres capítulos, le tenía fobia a este libro. En cambio me encontré con una reflexión hermosa, cruel y nostálgica de un cambio generacional (que Sōseki de hecho escribió antes de morir), en una correlación casi Durkheimiana con tantas otras novelas de individuos que se reflexionan a sí mismos como si fueran sociedades cerca de la primera guerra mundial. Una especie de "Demian" polifacético, mucho más emotivo que filosófico, que clausura una lágrima tardía sobre el Japón del siglo XIX.

This gentle, atmospheric book is more about an existential feeling than it is about plot. It reminded me of Le Grand Meaulnes, and also the story The Judgment by Kafka. I’m going to go ahead and spoil such plot as there is. A university student makes friends with an older man his father’s age, whom he calls Sensei. Sensei is not very demonstrative and likes to keep his personal business to himself. I saw the character Sensei as a very realistic portrayal of a person who has been depressed for a long time, but the young man just sees Sensei as enigmatic and fascinating. It felt to me like the university student was practicing for being in love or making friends with his peers by trying to get close to Sensei, and also looking for a show more father figure because it turns out his own father is terminally ill. The young man goes home to be with his family. I thought the description of the father’s illness and the varied ways that everyone involved tried to avoid or deny what’s happening was incredibly realistic and timeless and this alone makes this book a masterpiece. However, during his father’s final hours, the young man receives a by-the-time-you-get-this-I-will-be-dead letter from Sensei. He rushes off the to the train station to go to Sensei. The rest of the book is Sensei’s long suicide letter, explaining what happened to him when he was young and why he’s going to end his life. So, when Sensei was a young man, he fell in love with the daughter of the family he was boarding with, but he was completely stalled and unable to declare his love. Then he asked his friend to live in the house too. This man falls in love with the same woman, although it takes Sensei a while to figure this out because no one ever has a straightforward conversation with anyone in this book. But the friend has deep spiritual/philosophical beliefs that involve asceticism and renouncing love, so he feels like a terrible hypocrite. Sensei basically tells his friend, “Yes, you are a terrible hypocrite,” and then immediately asks the young woman’s mother for her daughter’s hand. After the friend finds out, he stabs himself to death in the nighttime. Sensei feels responsible for his friend’s suicide and is wracked with guilt for decades, but he never explains anything to his wife because he doesn’t want to spoil her flowerlike purity. I don’t know if this was cultural, generational, the author’s own life view, or something else, but no one in this book has any get-up-and-go. It’s very hard for the characters to take any actions whatsoever and so they can never solve their problems; they just sink deeper into despond. The one thing they are able to do with great gusto and resolve is die by suicide. According to the introduction, the title of this book means “the heart of things.” I bought this book online, and it arrived with a yellow post-it note recommending further reading, which I found very touching. show less