Japanese Literature Summaries
日本語

Kokoro — Summary and Characters

A teacher's loneliness and confession

Author
Natsume Sōseki
Published
April 1914
First appeared in
Asahi Shimbun
Form
Novel
Genres
  • Romance
  • Psychological
Setting
  • Tokyo
  • Kanagawa
Length
161,028 characters
Reading time
About 5 hr 22 min
Orthography
Modern script and kana

About this work

The last of Natsume Sōseki's late trilogy, serialized in the Asahi Shimbun in 1914. Told in three parts — "Sensei and I," "My Parents and I," and "Sensei's Testament" — it traces the loneliness and buried guilt of a man who lived by the spirit of the Meiji era, seen first through the eyes of a young admirer and then through Sensei's own long letter. Its themes of egoism and conscience, and of friendship set against love, have kept it among the most widely read works of modern Japanese literature.

Summary

A university student, "I," meets a man he calls Sensei on the beach at Kamakura and, drawn to him, deepens the acquaintance. Sensei lives quietly at a distance from the world, and behind his weariness with life the narrator senses some dark past. Later, called home by his father's illness, the narrator receives a long letter from Sensei — a testament. In it Sensei sets down his past. As a student he had fallen in love with the daughter of his boarding house, and so had K, his closest friend. When K confessed his feelings, Sensei moved first and arranged the marriage for himself. K, learning of the betrayal, took his own life, and Sensei lived out his years carrying that guilt. Then, with the death of the Meiji Emperor and General Nogi's suicide to follow his lord, Sensei too chooses death, following the spirit of Meiji to the grave.

Characters

Chapter-by-chapter synopsis

The app covers this work chapter by chapter (full text in the app).

  1. 1. About This Work
  2. 2. Main Characters
  3. 3. Main Supporting Characters
  4. 4. Sensei and I (1) — The Sea at Kamakura and the Grave at Zōshigaya
  5. 5. Sensei and I (2) — "Love Is a Sin"
  6. 6. My Parents and I — Father's Illness and the Thick Letter That Arrived
  7. 7. Sensei's Testament (1) — A Young Man Deceived by His Uncle
  8. 8. Sensei's Testament (2) — The House in Koishikawa, the Young Lady, and K
  9. 9. Sensei's Testament (3) — K's Confession and "Resolve" at Ueno
  10. 10. Sensei's Testament (4) — Blood on the Sliding Door
  11. 11. The Ending — Dying for the Spirit of Meiji
  12. 12. Key Motifs and Foreshadowing

The opening (original text)

I always called him Sensei, and so here too I will write only Sensei and not disclose his real name. This is less out of any deference to the world than because it comes more naturally to me. Whenever I call the man to mind, the word "Sensei" rises at once to my lips. It is the same when I take up my pen. I could not bring myself to use some cold and distant initial.

Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki (Aozora Bunko)

The ending (original text)

I cannot bear to set a black mark upon my wife's memory. My one wish is that the memory she keeps of her own past should be preserved as nearly spotless as it can be. So even after I am dead, so long as she is living, keep it all within you — my secret, confided to you and to no one else.

Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki (Aozora Bunko)

Famous passages

I always called him Sensei.

An opening that quietly begins with a remembrance of the man he called Sensei. This is the tone that carries through the whole novel, one of Sōseki's late masterworks on human solitude and egoism.

I began by flatly declaring, “Anyone with no ambition to better himself spiritually is a fool.” These were the very words K had once used to me, while the two of us were traveling together in Bōshū.

A scene in which he throws K's own words straight back at him, now that K has become his rival in love. This single remark drives his friend to the brink, and becomes Sensei's lifelong burden of guilt.

“Ma'am — please give me your daughter's hand.”

The scene in which Sensei proposes marriage to his landlady. Spoken without a word to K, who loved the same woman, this single line summons his friend's death and a lifetime of regret.

At that moment I felt as though the spirit of Meiji had begun with the Emperor and ended with the Emperor.

Sensei's reflection on the death of the Meiji Emperor. Together with the news of General Nogi's ritual suicide that follows, he comes to layer his own death over the ending of an entire era.

Read the original

The original Japanese text is available at Aozora Bunko, and the app downloads the same text for its vertical-text reader.

Aozora Bunko library card

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