Natsume Soseki

Natsume Soseki (1867–1916) is the most beloved and most widely read author in Japanese literary history — the figure whose face appeared on the thousand-yen note, whose works appear in every Japanese high school curriculum, and whose fiction defined the psychological and moral concerns of Japanese literary modernity. Born Kinnosuke Natsume in Edo (Tokyo) in 1867, he studied English literature at Tokyo Imperial University and spent two miserable years in London on a government scholarship before returning to Japan and turning to fiction.

His novels — I Am a Cat, Botchan, Sanshiro, And Then, The Gate, Kokoro, Light and Darkness — chart the experience of Japanese modernity with an unparalleled depth: the loneliness of the individual in a society undergoing rapid transformation, the gap between Westernisation and Japanese inner life, and above all egoism — the crisis of the self that he saw as modernity's defining psychological wound. Kokoro (1914), his masterwork, is one of the great novels of guilt and friendship, and it remains a living text for Japanese readers. He died from a stomach ulcer in 1916 at forty-nine, leaving his final novel unfinished.