The Japanese novelist and essayist Soseki Natsume (1867-1916) was one of the greatest Japanese novelists of the modern period. In his fiction and essays he displays keen psychological insight into the personality of man undergoing the transition from...

Natsume Sseki is probably the most well known and widely read novelist in Japan; so well known is he that his portrait is currently featured on the 1,000-yen bill. Near the end of the Meiji Period writers who were masters of Western literary form began...

(1867–1916), novelist and scholar. Natsume Soseki was born in Tokyo under the name of Natsume Kinosuke but adopted the pseudonym Natsume Soseki as a writer. Soseki and Mori Rintaro (1862–1922), who wrote under the pen name of Mori Ogai,...

SUICIDAL HONOR: General Nogi and the Writings of Mori Ogai and Natsume Soseki. By Doris G. Bargen. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2006. xiv, 289 pp. (B & W photos.) US$42.00, cloth. ISBN0-8248-2998-0. The ritual suicides of General Nogi Maresuke and his...

I No argument is possible in matters of taste, and nowhere does this maxim seem more evident than in matters literary. We assume as a matter of course that the people unlucky enough to have lived in eras prior to our own were...