Natsume Soseki - Botchan

About

A hot-headed, honest young man from Tokyo is sent to teach at a provincial school in rural Japan, where he promptly collides with every form of pettiness, corruption, and small-town politics imaginable. Botchan has no patience for injustice, no talent for diplomacy, and no ability to keep his mouth shut. His tenure at the school is brief, spectacular, and deeply satisfying to witness. Natsume Sōseki's 1906 novel is among the most beloved in Japanese literature — read by nearly every Japanese person during childhood, and re-read in adulthood for entirely different reasons. Botchan's uncompromising integrity is comic in youth and heroic in retrospect. The novel's central question — whether honesty is a virtue or a liability — has never gone out of date. The novel that taught Japan to laugh at itself — and the character who proved that sometimes the most radical thing you can do is refuse to play along.