Botchan
"This rollicking rebel, and the spice and pace of the narrative, will appeal to parent, teacher, and schoolchild alike." -Times Literary Supplement "Soseki's lightest and funniest work." -Donald Keene A hilarious tale about a young man's rebellion against "the system" in a country school, Botchan is a perennial classic in Japan and has occupied a position of great importance in the canon of Japanese literature, one vaguely analogous to Huckleberry Finn or The Catcher in the Rye in American culture. The setting is Japan's deep south, where the author himself spent four years teaching English in a middle school. Into this conservative world, with its social proprieties and established pecking order, breezes Botchan, down from the big city, with scant respect for either his elders or his noisy young charges. The result is a chain of collisions large and small. "The story will be found equally entertaining as a means of studying the peculiar traits of the native of Tokyo which are characterized by their quick temper, dashing spirit, generosity and by their readiness to resist even the lordly personage if convinced of their own justness, or to kneel down even to a child if they acknowledge their own wrong. Incidentally the touching devotion of the old maid servant Kiyo to the hero will prove a standing reproach to the inconstant, unfaithful servants of which the number is ever increasing these days in Tokyo. The story becomes doubly interesting by the fact that Mr. K. Natsume, when quite young, held a position of teacher of English at a middle school somewhere about the same part of the country described in the story, while he himself was born and brought up in Tokyo. It may be added that the original is written in an autobiographical style. It is profusely inter laded with spicy, catchy colloquiums patent to the people of Tokyo for the equals of which we may look to the rattling speeches of notorious Chuck Conners of the Bowery of New York." -Yasotaro Morri