Botchan

“The Boy” is one of the early novellas by the famous Japanese writer Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), which brought him popularity and made his name well known in literary circles of Japan. Written in 1906, this novella is a kind of preface to Sōseki’s famous trilogy—his novels “Sanshirō,” “Then,” and “The Gate”—which address the problem of human existence at a break in an era, the problem of finding existential balance between traditional culture and the new one generated by the country’s modernization.

And this conflict of cultures is felt most sharply in an ordinary school—where knowledge is passed on and learned, where teacher and students relearn how to communicate with each other, where the nobility and fervor of youth come into a clash with dullness, cowardice, and baseness…