Kokoro (Penguin Classics)
*Starred Review* Kokoro is the great Japanese modern novel. The last its author completed, published in 1914, two years before his death at 48, it voices the spiritual desolation of a society that had deliberately transformed itself from quasi-feudal isolation to determinedly modern player on the world stage in little more than 50 years. The never-named narrator-hero of the novel’s first half is a provincial student in Tokyo who befriends a man some 20 years older whom he meets on a beach that is a favorite student getaway site. Well-mannered, educated, comfortable, ostensibly happily married though childless, the man, whom the narrator regularly visits once they’re both back in the city, yet exudes sadness. In the book’s second half, narrated by Sensei (i.e., mentor), as the student calls him, we learn why: he feels he betrayed a friend by first pressing his suit for the woman both love. Translator McKinney, who makes a completely stylistically modern—verbally and syntactically plain, realistic, personally voiced, intimate in tone—English-language novel of this quietly profound masterpiece, imparts in her introduction all that non-Japanese need to know to appreciate why the book is considered a national treasure. It is an international modernist treasure through sharing the aching, regretful sensibility of such works as Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Ingmar Bergman’s arguably greatest film, Winter Light. --Ray Olson