Kokoro

No collection of Japanese literature is complete without Natsume Sosekis Kokoro, his most famous novel and the last he complete 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 students struggle to understand it, the profound cultural shift from one generation to the next that characterized Japan in the early twentieth century.