Kokoro [Heart]

By: Natsume Soseki, Meredith McKinney - translator

Narrated by: Kotaro Watanabe, Elizabeth Jasicki

The great Japanese author’s most famous novel, in its first new English translation in half a century.

No collection of Japanese literature is complete without Natsume Soseki's Kokoro, his most famous novel and the last he completed before his death. Published here in the first new translation in more than 50 years, Kokoro - meaning "heart" - is the story of a subtle and poignant friendship between two unnamed characters, a young man and an enigmatic elder whom he calls "Sensei". Haunted by tragic secrets that have cast a long shadow over his life, Sensei slowly opens up to his young disciple, confessing indiscretions from his own student days that have left him reeling with guilt, and revealing, in the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between his moral anguish and his student's struggle to understand it, the profound cultural shift from one generation to the next that characterized Japan in the early 20th century.

Public Domain (P)2021 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"This elegant novel...suffuses the reader with a sense of old Japan." (Los Angeles Times)

"Soseki is the representative modern Japanese novelist, a figure of truly national stature." (Haruki Murakami)