Kokoro (novel)

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Cover of the first edition 1914 (book and slipcase)

Kokoro ( Japanese こ ゝ ろ , today's spelling こ こ ろ, on the slipcase for the first edition also as 心, in German about "heart / soul") is a late novel by the Japanese writer Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916). It first appeared as a serial in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper in the summer of 1914 and then as a book by Iwanami in November .

content

Natsume Sōseki divided the novel into three parts:

  • Chapter 1, "The Sensei and I":

The first-person narrator, a young student, meets an elderly gentleman on Kamakura Beach. The acquaintance continues in Tōkyō, the young man is invited to his home by the older man, commonly called "Sensei" in Japan, where he lives alone with his wife, the couple is childless. Something troubles the sensei he doesn't want to talk about. He occasionally visits a grave in the Zōshigaya cemetery , and does not want to talk about it either. “Love is a crime,” he says.

  • Chapter 2, "My Parents and I":

The young man is called home, the father is sick. He drives home, drives to the village in the country, finds everything left there. He is there when Emperor Meiji dies and learns from the newspaper that General Nogi and his wife followed him to death according to an old but no longer up-to-date custom. The young man asks the Sensei for help in finding work, but receives no answer. He decides to go back to Tōkyō, despite the sick father. A long letter arrives from Sensei shortly before departure.

  • Chapter 3, "The Sensei and His Legacy":

At the beginning of the chapter, which takes up about half of the book, the sensei describes how he was largely disinherited by his uncle, but still has enough to build or buy a house. Since he got stuck with the search, he finally moved in with an officer's widow and found the daughter to be very nice, "although she was clumsy at arranging flowers and playing the koto". When he notices that his melancholy friend "K" needs help, he arranges with the lady of the house that she too can move in.

It turns out that K, having a difficult relationship with the adoptive parents, has a hard time coping with life. The two young people attend the same law school, but have different curricula and are not always at home at the same time. When the young student notices that something is looming between his friend and daughter, he acts and asks the mother for the daughter's hand, which she approves. One morning you find K dead, he had committed suicide.

The sensei then goes on to say that he married the daughter and that he also took the mother into the house in which he now lives. The mother has since died. But his egoism continues to oppress him (Natsume uses the English word). He closes the letter with the remark that he will be dead if the young man read it and that he has a request: he should not tell his wife about the contents. She should remember him as pure as possible.

Appreciations

After the new edition was published in the FAZ on October 27, 2016, the Japanologist Hijiya-Kirschnereit wrote that the novel was about questions of trust and betrayal, friendship, responsibility and guilt. Whereby the author does not judge, but allows the reader to participate in the explorations of the two interlocutors from different generations and value systems. - The translator of the English edition, Edwin McClellan (1925–2009), states in his foreword that Natsume conveyed by describing the death of Emperor Meiji that his own time was also coming to an end. - Etō Jun (1932–1999) also writes in the afterword to the Japanese edition, which was published in the Bunshun Bunko, that Natsume is probably about saying goodbye to the happy Meiji period.

Used book editions

  • Kokoro . Translated and with an afterword by Oscar Benl. Manesse Library of World Literature, 1976.
    • Kokoro . 1976 Translated and with an afterword by Oscar Benl. Annotated new edition of the Manesse Library of World Literature, 2016, ISBN 978-3-7175-2418-2 .
  • Kokoro . English, translated by Edwin McClellan. Tuttle, 1969. (33rd edition. 1993, ISBN 4-8053-0161-9 )
  • Kokoro . Japanese. In: Kokoro - Botchan. Bunshun Bunko, 1996. (20th edition. 2020, ISBN 978-4-16-715802-6 )

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ One can translate “Sensei” with “teacher”, but Sensei (先生) is literally the “born before me”, generally the experienced one.
  2. ↑ Natsume was later buried there himself.