Sanshiro

About

Twenty-three-year-old Sanshirō leaves his sleepy countryside home for the first time and arrives in Tokyo, where everything moves too fast, the women are bewildering, and the university offers not certainty but a dizzying multiplication of possibilities. His innocence is both his charm and his limitation — he observes everything, understands little, and falls in love with exactly the wrong person. Sōseki's most warmly comic novel captures the experience of being young and overwhelmed with a humor that never condescends to its protagonist. The tension between Sanshirō's rural simplicity and Tokyo's relentless modernity gives the novel its energy; the subtle awareness that his innocence is already doomed gives it its depth. A novel about the first time you realize the world is bigger than you imagined — and the last moment before that realization changes everything.