The little white attic

In an earlier blog post, I wrote “I actually had more trouble trying to understand the characters in The Tale of Genji (about 1,000 years ol...

I finished Sanshiro last night. I don’t have a lot to say—in the end, the characters are still opaque, unlike those in Soseki’s Kokoro and...

Botchan is about a 22-year-old guy from Tokyo coming to a small town to become a teacher. Sanshiro is about a 23-year-old guy from a small ...

2020 somehow became my year of East Asian literature and I’ve just realised that I forgot to put up a list of the works I read. Here it is: ...

1/ Here is the blurb of Some Prefer Nettles by Junichiro Tanizaki:  “Kaname, a young man from Tokyo, escapes from a loveless marriage int...

1/ Shingo, the main character of the novel, is generally portrayed sympathetically but he’s not always likable. He’s not very tactful.  For...

1/ After Kokoro , I read 3 other books, without blogging about them: Sarashina Nikki or As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams by a lady known as T...

1/ A brief summary: on the plot level, Kokoro by Natsume Soseki is about a young unnamed student and his friendship with an older man that...

1/ Let’s talk about metaphors and similes in Kokoro .  “Instinctively I dreamed about women as objects of desire, but these were merely va...

1/ After a short break (Jane Austen’s letters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye), I’m now reading another Japanese novel: Kokoro , the most acclaim...