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[portrait]

Natsume Soseki
(1867-1916)

Natsume Soseki (or SOSEKI Natsume) is considered the Charles Dickens of Japan. This site presents his great novel, Kokoro, in English translation by Edwin McClellan.

Kokoro Table of Contents

This translation of Kokoro is Copyright © 1957 by Regnery Gateway and reprinted here with their kind permission. To order their $11.95 paperback edition (ISBN 0-89526-715-2), call 1-800-462-6420.

McClellan's 1957 translation was selected for the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. McClellan is Professor of Japanese Literature at Yale University. We have retained his spelling of words instead of changing them into the modern American spelling. Note that many library catalogs, unlike our book, list the author's name with the spelling "NATSUME, Soseki."

Page numbers from the Regnery paperback edition are indicated in the HTML source as anchors with attribute values such as "p1". (Thus page numbers do not appear in the browser display.) We have divided the files into the book's parts, which are as large as 224 kilobytes and so may take some time to download to your computer.

As a short introduction, we can do no better than to quote from a review on the back cover of the paperback, by Anthony West in The New Yorker: "The subject of 'Kokoro', which can be translated as 'the heart of things' or as 'feeling', is the delicate matter of the contrast between the meanings the various parties to a relationship attach to it. In the course of this exploration, Soseki brilliantly describes different levels of friendship, family relationships, and the devices by which men attempt to escape from their fundamental loneliness. The novel sustains throughout its length something approaching poetry, and it is rich in understanding and insight. The translation, by Edwin McClellan, is extremely good."


Besides the Foreword, there are some other sources of information in English about Soseki, as seen in a search of the Internet in January, 2000. Some of the links may now be broken--we are not responsible for them--please try to get in touch with the responsible parties:

 


Suggested MLA citations to this web page, HTML code and text.
Use as in ?Help? page citation guide.

Soseki, Natsume. &lt;cite&gt;Kokoro&lt;/cite&gt; <br />
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1957. 21 Jan. 2000. <br />
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &lt;<a href="http://www.eldritchpress.org/ns/soseki.html">http://www.eldritchpress.org/ns/soseki.html</a>&gt;

(<a href="http://www.eldritchpress.org/ns/soseki.html">Soseki</a>)

Soseki, Natsume. Kokoro.

     Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1957. 21 Jan. 2000.

     <http://www.eldritchpress.org/ns/soseki.html>


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© Copyright 1957 by Regnery Gateway and reprinted here with their kind permission.
To order the $11.95 paperback edition (ISBN 0-89526-715-2), call +1-800-462-6420.
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