“You have no nerve at all, do you.”
With those words from a woman he will never see again, Sanshirō’s journey to Tokyo truly begins. Published in 1908, Natsume Sōseki’s Sanshirō is one of the most subtly perfect coming-of-age stories ever written.
Ogawa Sanshirō is twenty-three, fresh out of his provincial college in Kumamoto, and arriving at Tokyo Imperial University with a head full of vague ambitions and no preparation for what he finds in the city. A stranger on the train tells him Japan is doomed. A woman standing by a pond glances at him once, and that one glance changes his life. He has entered, as his fast-talking friend Yojirō informs him, three worlds at once — the academic, the real, and the imaginary — and he is not sure which world is the one where he belongs.
Sanshirō is a novel about the distance between what a young man sees and what he understands. Sanshirō watches everything and misses everything. He is observant, earnest, paralyzed at every decisive moment, and so thoroughly out of his depth that the reader grasps what is happening to him long before he does. Sōseki handles his hero with a tenderness that never becomes pity and an irony that never becomes contempt.
This new translation by Kenji Weaver, whose acclaimed translation of Sōseki’s Kokoro introduced a new generation of English readers to Japan’s greatest novelist of the Meiji era, captures the novel’s luminous stillness and psychological depth in clean and highly readable English.
This was a more difficult work to translate satisfactorily, since unlike Botchan and Kokoro, Sanshirō already had been translated very well by Jay Rubin, who is best known for translating Haruki Murakami. However, improvements to our translation system and the heroic efforts of Kenji Weaver did, on the fourth attempt, manage to reach the high level of quality we deemed necessary to justify releasing a new translation of the classic 1908 coming-of-age novel.
As I mentioned yesterday, we have now officially launched the weekly translation subscription at Castalia Library. So, if you are either a) a voracious reader or b) interested in supporting what may be the most ambitious program of bringing untranslated works to the English language ever proposed, you can support Castalia’s efforts and receive a newly translated ebook every Monday by signing up for a paid subscription to the Library site.
Of course, we’re just as happy if you prefer to simply buy whichever books happen to appeal to you as they come out. Because I can assure you that the next two series of translations, by Yoshikawa Eiji and Benito Pérez Galdós, can legitimately be described as absolute bangers. Sanshirō is available in Kindle, KU, and audiobook formats.