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Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) was the father of the modern novel in Japan, chronicling the plight of bourgeois characters caught between familiar modes of living and the onslaught of Western values and conventions. In this biography, John Nathan provides a lucid and vivid account of a great writer laboring to create a remarkably original oeuvre in spite of the physical and mental illness that plagued him all his life. He traces Soseki's complex and contradictory character, offering rigorous close readings of Soseki's groundbreaking experiments with narrative strategies, irony, and multiple points of view as well as recounting excruciating hospital stays and recurrent attacks of paranoid delusion. Drawing on previously untranslated letters and diaries, published reminiscences, and passages from Soseki's fiction, Nathan renders intimate scenes of the writer's life and distills a portrait of a tormented yet unflaggingly original author
List of contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Beginnings
2. School Days
3. Words
4. The Provinces
5. London
6. Home Again
7. I Am a Cat
8. Smaller Gems
9. The Thursday Salon
10. A Professional Novelist
11. Sanshirō
12. A Pair of Novels
13. Crisis at Shuzenji
14. A Death in the Family
15. Einsamkeit
16. Grass on the Wayside
17. The Final Year
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the author
John Nathan is Koichi Takashima Professor of Japanese Cultural Studies Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Mishima: A Biography (1974) and Sony: The Private Life (1999), among other titles. He is the translator of Sōseki’s last novel, Light and Dark (Columbia, 2014), as well as works by Yukio Mishima and Kenzaburō Ōe. Nathan is also an Emmy Award–winning filmmaker.
Summary
Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) was the father of the modern novel in Japan, chronicling the plight of bourgeois characters caught between familiar modes of living and the onslaught of Western values and conventions. Yet even though generations of Japanese high school students have been expected to memorize passages from his novels and he is routinely voted the most important Japanese writer in national polls, he remains less familiar to Western readers than authors such as Kawabata, Tanizaki, and Mishima.
In this biography, John Nathan provides a lucid and vivid account of a great writer laboring to create a remarkably original oeuvre in spite of the physical and mental illness that plagued him all his life. He traces Sōseki’s complex and contradictory character, offering rigorous close readings of Sōseki’s groundbreaking experiments with narrative strategies, irony, and multiple points of view as well as recounting excruciating hospital stays and recurrent attacks of paranoid delusion. Drawing on previously untranslated letters and diaries, published reminiscences, and passages from Sōseki’s fiction, Nathan renders intimate scenes of the writer’s life and distills a portrait of a tormented yet unflaggingly original author. The first full-length study of Sōseki in fifty years, Nathan’s biography elevates Sōseki to his rightful place as a great synthesizer of literary traditions and a brilliant chronicler of universal experience who, no less than his Western contemporaries, anticipated the modernism of the twentieth century.
Additional text
John Nathan has given us a robust portrayal of Sōseki’s aesthetic practices and what they meant for his life and his work. His thoughtful readings, always grounded in his own aesthetic and emotional response and further honed through translation, provide an inspiring model for the Japanese literary criticism of the future.
Report
It's been half a century since the appearance of the most recent English-language biography of Natsume Soseki, one of the giants of twentieth-century world literature, so the arrival of John Nathan's fine new study is cause for celebration. Soseki's life story often reads like one of his novels, and Nathan captures it in prose worthy of his subject. Michael Bourdaghs, University of Chicago
