Sanshirō — Summary and Characters
"Stray sheep": a young man adrift
- Author
- Natsume Sōseki
- Published
- September 1908
- First appeared in
- Asahi Shimbun
- Form
- Novel
- Genres
- Romance
- Coming of Age
- Setting
- Tokyo
- Length
- 169,778 characters
- Reading time
- About 5 hr 40 min
- Orthography
- Modern script and kana
About this work
The first of Sōseki's early trilogy — Sanshirō, And Then, The Gate — serialized in the Asahi Shimbun from September to December 1908. Ogawa Sanshirō comes up to Tokyo from Kumamoto and, as a student at the Imperial University, meets three worlds — learning, friendship and love — and grows up bewildered among them. Mineko's murmured "stray sheep" is the motif that runs through the whole book. A classic of the Japanese novel of youth.
Summary
Ogawa Sanshirō, having finished at the higher school in Kumamoto, goes up to Tokyo to enter the Imperial University. Through the woman he shares a train with, and the man he talks to in the carriage — later to be Professor Hirota — Sanshirō finds himself at the entrance to a wider world he has not known. In Tokyo he comes to know Nonomiya Sōhachi, a researcher in the science faculty and a senior from his own province; his obliging fellow student Sasaki Yojirō; and Professor Hirota, the higher-school teacher whom Yojirō looks up to as his master; and he takes in something of each of their ways of living. In the middle of it all Sanshirō is strongly drawn to Satomi Mineko, a beautiful woman he meets by the university pond. Mineko is intelligent and does as she likes, and Sanshirō cannot get at what is in her mind. On the day of the chrysanthemum dolls, away from the crowd by the edge of a stream, Mineko murmurs to him the words "stray sheep." Drawn into Yojirō's trouble over a debt and into a campaign on Professor Hirota's behalf, Sanshirō's feelings incline all the while toward Mineko; but without his knowing it she accepts a match with a friend of her brother's. Looking at the picture for which she was the model, "Woman in the Forest," hung at an exhibition, Sanshirō only repeats to himself, stray sheep, stray sheep.
Characters
- Ogawa Sanshirō A new student at the Imperial University, come up from Kumamoto. The protagonist
- Satomi Mineko The intelligent and beautiful woman who draws Sanshirō, and who leaves him the words "stray sheep"
- Nonomiya Sōhachi A senior from Sanshirō's own province, a scientist studying the pressure of light
- Sasaki Yojirō Sanshirō's fellow student. Obliging and glib, he sows the seeds of trouble
- Professor Hirota The higher-school English teacher whom Yojirō serves, a critical spirit known as the Great Darkness
- Yoshiko Nonomiya's sister, an artless girl whom Sanshirō meets at the hospital
Chapter-by-chapter synopsis
The app covers this work chapter by chapter (full text in the app).
- 1. About This Work
- 2. Main Characters
- 3. Main Supporting Characters
- 4. Coming to Tokyo — The Woman on the Train and “It's Going to Perish”
- 5. Three Worlds — The Night of the Death on the Tracks and a Morning at the Hospital
- 6. A Lost Child — Chrysanthemum Dolls and an Autumn Stream
- 7. The Great Darkness — Yojirō's Campaign
- 8. Thirty Yen — What a Borrowed Debt Connects
- 9. Woman in the Forest — The Studio and Before the Chapel
- 10. The Ending — Stray Sheep, Stray Sheep
- 11. Key Motifs and Foreshadowing
The opening (original text)
He dozed off, and when he woke the woman had somehow got into conversation with the old man beside her. This old man was certainly a countryman who had got on two stations before. He had come running aboard just as the train was leaving, letting out an odd cry, and had no sooner stripped to the waist than his back was seen to be covered with moxa scars, so that he had stayed in Sanshirō's memory. Sanshirō had watched him closely enough to see him wipe off his sweat, put his clothes back on, and sit down beside the woman.
Sanshirō by Natsume Sōseki (Aozora Bunko)
The ending (original text)
"The title 'Woman in the Forest' is a bad one." "Then what should it be?" Sanshirō made no answer at all. He only repeated to himself, stray sheep, stray sheep.
Sanshirō by Natsume Sōseki (Aozora Bunko)
Famous passages
“But surely Japan will go on developing from here,” he protested. Whereupon the man, quite unruffled, said, “It will perish.”
A remark from the man (Professor Hirota) sharing his railway carriage on the way to Tokyo. This single dampening word, cast against the exhilaration following the Russo-Japanese War, casts a shadow over young Sanshirō's future and over the novel as a whole.
Even then, he was not alone. Stray sheep. Stray sheep. The clouds are shaped like sheep.
A phrase repeated near the novel's end, when Sanshirō learns of Mineko's marriage. “Stray sheep” translates the English “stray sheep,” and points to Sanshirō himself, unable to decide where he is headed.
Read the original
The original Japanese text is available at Aozora Bunko, and the app downloads the same text for its vertical-text reader.
More by this author
- I Am a Cat January 1905
- Botchan April 1906
- Kusamakura September 1906
- Gubijinsō June 1907
- And Then June 1909
- The Gate March 1910
Related works
- The Grave of the Wild Chrysanthemum January 1906
- Child's Play January 1895
- Onna keizu January 1907
- The Quilt September 1907
- The Wild Geese September 1911
- Tadare March 1913