Sōseki

John Nathan provides a lucid and vivid account of Natsume Sōseki, the father of the modern novel in Japan. This biography elevates Sōseki to his rightful place as a great synthesizer of literary traditions and a brilliant chronicler of universal experience who, no less than his Western contemporaries, anticipated twentieth-century modernism.

John Nathan is the Takashima Professor of Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Mishima: A Biography (1974) and Sony: The Private Life (1999), among others. He is the translator of Sōseki’s last novel, Light and Dark (Columbia, 2014), as well as of works by Yukio Mishima and Kenzaburō Ōe. Nathan is also an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker.

Michael Bourdaghs, University of Chicago:
It’s been half a century since the appearance of the most recent English-language biography of Natsume Sōseki, one of the giants of twentieth-century world literature, so the arrival of John Nathan’s fine new study is cause for celebration. Sōseki's life story often reads like one of his novels, and Nathan captures it in prose worthy of his subject.

Alan Tansman, University of California, Berkeley:
Nathan offers a lucid view of the life and works of the writer many consider to be Japan’s most important, and best, novelist. He deftly shows how Sōseki's life reflects the many social and intellectual changes that occurred over the tumultuous decades of his lifetime—decades of Japan’s transformation into a modern nation.

[An] illuminating biography. . . . Nathan’s incisive portrait of Sōseki as a troubled yet widely celebrated literary game changer—his image adorned the ¥1,000 banknote in 1984—will likely drive new readers to his fiction.

Minae Mizumura, author of Inheritance from Mother:
Sōseki captures the soul of Japan’s greatest modern writer in the best tradition of biography. Here the venerated figure comes fully alive with his infuriating failings and astounding intelligence, his maddening ambitions and biting self-deprecations. The book also offers a vibrant portrayal of Japan’s rapidly transforming society—an extraordinary feast.

Comprehensive and discerning. . . . A revealing portrait of a writer who deserves a new audience.