Soseki Natsume Kokoro
About
A university student encounters an older man he calls Sensei — teacher — and is drawn into an unlikely friendship defined by the older man's mysterious isolation. Sensei and his wife welcome the student into their home, but something is wrong beneath the surface of their domestic life. When Sensei finally reveals his secret, it arrives in a letter so devastating that it redefines everything the student thought he understood about the man, about friendship, and about the capacity of guilt to destroy a life. Sōseki's masterpiece is a novel of exquisite restraint, its power generated by the vast distance between what characters say and what they feel. The final section — Sensei's confession — is among the most quietly shattering passages in world literature. A novel about the secrets we keep to protect the people we love — and the terrible discovery that the protection was always an illusion.
