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.
