In the letter, the older man fulfills his role to the younger man as sage in the ways of the world by telling him what no other man has, or ever will, hear. The wall around Sensei's heart has finally fallen, but for the sake of confession and not healing. Then, just as his father is near death, he receives a giant missive from Sensei - a "testament" that is the entire second half of the novel - and rushes back to Tokyo despite his father's condition after glimpsing the chilling last few pages of the manuscript. His parents, especially his ailing father, are his own flesh and blood, but feel all the more distant to him now that he has found someone else who seems to speak the same language of his heart.
Growing closer to Sensei puts a rift in the young man's life. Most of what the younger man learns comes in fragments: that Sensei was not always like this (as his loving and long-suffering wife admits) that it was some great hurt, visited by others, that caused him to close up to the world like a flower in the cold that the worldly wisdom the younger man seeks from the elder may only come by way of pain. He only wants to do right by this (in his eyes) great figure, and so over time compels Sensei, if only by way of his presence, to open up that much more.
It's Sensei's very reticence, I think, that makes him attractive to the younger man. For the first time in his life, the young man has a figure, both spiritual and intellectual, to look up to and learn from in a direct way. The protagonist finds something more compelling about this taciturn older man than any of his own professors or even his chosen field of study. Set in the last years of the Meiji period (around 1912) - with Meiji's own death as the final punctuation mark on Japan's transition from a feudal to a fully modernized society - it concerns a young man of college age (the "I" of the first half of the story) who encounters an older, professorial type he dubs "Sensei". I've returned to Kokoro countless times through my adult life, in various translations, if only because my love for the story itself is all but unbounded. But you also see all the ways a translation is a compromise, and how some compromises weather better than others.Ī testament to a youth from a former youth Put them side by side, and what emerges is not so much a winner as one that compromises the least and delivers the most. A man can dream.) Lucky, then, is Sōseki Natsume's masterwork Kokoro, among the most famed and beloved of Japanese novels, since it's been brought to English-language readers not once but three times: in 1948 by Ineko Kondo, in 1957 by Edwin McClellan, and in 2010 by Meredith McKinney. (There is still no English version of Kyūsaku Yumeno's surreal horror masterwork Dogura Magura. Any work of Japanese literature is lucky to be translated into English even once.
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