Soseki

Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) was the father of the modern novel in Japan, chronicling the plight of bourgeois characters caught between familiar modes of living and the onslaught of Western values and conventions. In this biography, John Nathan provides a lucid and vivid account of a great writer laboring to create a remarkably original oeuvre in spite of the physical and mental illness that plagued him all his life. He traces Soseki's complex and contradictory character, offering rigorous close readings of Soseki's groundbreaking experiments with narrative strategies, irony, and multiple points of view as well as recounting excruciating hospital stays and recurrent attacks of paranoid delusion. Drawing on previously untranslated letters and diaries, published reminiscences, and passages from Soseki's fiction, Nathan renders intimate scenes of the writer's life and distills a portrait of a tormented yet unflaggingly original author