Natsume Sōseki

Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916) was one of the great novelists of the Meiji era and is often regarded as Japan's first modern novelist. He wrote in Japanese but trained as a specialist in English literature, and that combination shaped everything he produced. His fiction keeps returning to the tension between traditional Japanese values and the swift Westernization of the country.

He was born in Edo, now Tokyo, in the year the Tokugawa shogunate fell, into a family of samurai descent whose official standing soon collapsed. His parents, who were already older when he arrived, regarded him as an unwelcome burden, and he was handed over for adoption twice. He lived with his adoptive parents until the age of nine, and when he returned to his birth family he learned the truth about his origins in a way he never forgot. That unsettled childhood left him with a lasting wariness toward others.

He studied at Tokyo Imperial University and in 1900 the government sent him to London to improve his English. The two years he spent there were hard. He lived on a meagre allowance, felt like an outsider in a cold society, and suffered a serious nervous breakdown. On his return he took over the English literature chair previously held by Lafcadio Hearn, but he soon found the post oppressive and began devoting more and more of his time to writing.

His literary career began with satirical stories published in serial form. I Am a Cat (1905) made him famous with its biting portrait of the Meiji middle class, and Botchan (1906), drawn from his time teaching in the provincial town of Matsuyama, consolidated his popularity. From then on he published roughly one novel a year. His plots revolve around the clash between Japanese and Western customs, with love triangles, betrayals between friends, and a bittersweet humour alongside a deep pessimism. In 1907 he left the university to write full time for the Asahi Shimbun, a rare step that is often seen as the birth of the professional writer in modern Japan.

His later novels probe character and the human ego with growing subtlety. The Wayfarer (1912-1913) and Kokoro (1914), often considered his masterpiece, show this maturity. He suffered from stomach ulcers and recurring mental illness, including paranoid delusions, that affected both his work and his marriage. He died in Tokyo in 1916, aged 49, leaving his last novel, Light and Dark, unfinished.

His legacy is considerable. He is read in Japanese secondary schools, his portrait appeared on the 1,000-yen note from 1984 to 2004, and he remains one of the most widely read authors in his country. His work offers one of the sharpest accounts of the upheaval that Japanese society underwent as it opened to the West.