Depicts the twenty-three-year-old Sanshiro leaving the sleepy countryside for the first time in his life to experience the constantly moving "real world" of Tokyo, its women, and university.
One of Soseki's most beloved works of fiction, the novel depicts the 23-year-old Sanshiro leaving the sleepy countryside for the first time in his life to experience the constantly moving 'real world' of Tokyo, its women and university. In the subtle tension between our appreciation of Soseki's lively humour and our awareness of Sanshiro's doomed innocence, the novel comes to life. Sanshiro is also penetrating social and cultural commentary.
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.
Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) is often considered the greatest modern Japanese novelist. In 1900, his government sent him to England for two years as 'Japan's first Japanese English literary scholar', but he had a miserable time there. Returning to Japan, he wrote his greatest novels, including Botchan, Sanshiro and Kokoro, as well as essays, haiku, and kanshi. Jay Rubin is an American translator and academic. He is the translator of several of Haruki Murakami's major works, including Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Natsume Soseki's The Miner and Sanshiro and Ryunosuke Akutagawa's Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories. He is the author of Making Sense of Japanese, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words and a novel, The Sun Gods.
