Current Japanese literature reaches the West, always led by the dazzling Murakami at odds with the Nobel Prize for Literature despite its millions of enthusiastic readers. But many other Japanese authors awaken that magnetism by the particular rhythm, spirituality and beauty that everything Japanese it is written as goldsmiths made letters in any of its themes.
kawabata is one of those twentieth century writers who began to sew between eastern and western cultures to offer his novels as a synthesis of increasingly interactive worlds. Natsume Soseki It was undoubtedly, as a result of Kawabata's works with inspiration between the spiritual and the tragicomic, one of his most absolute references in that existentialism loaded with lyricism between the allegorical, if not directly with the fabulous.
With his unattainable mastery, Soseki is an innovative spirit in the far eastern literature of his time. Currents such as surrealism or the renewing effort of modernism were already explored, according to his theoretical bases, by this writer from the other side of the world who made his novels imperishable works.
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Natsume Soseki
Kokoro
The disciple and the teacher found in the least imagined way. The friendship between characters from very distant generations in whose interaction we get closer to a richness that will serve more to those who still have a good bag of time. And precisely for this reason, we soon discover that the purpose of Sensei, the teacher, is none other than to give his time to the human being to do. Self-denial with the double face of iron friendship. A novel made within a short time of the author's own life.
And with that notion of the imminent departure from the scene, Soseki seems to have left his soul in this story with his two characters that surpass everything.With exciting scenes that also awaken that point of humor that Soseki always knew how to handle, we open ourselves to confession as a teaching by example. Sensei's brutal sincerity as a confession with a young man who represents the life that is already leaving him.
Because among the teachings we also find the need to free oneself from the guilt of the old man. More than anything because the wise man that he is now, he is also the naive one lost in the middle of the road.
I am a cat
A novel in which the narrator, made into a cat, moves through the scenes with the naturalness of an animal that passes by as unremarkable as a cat but that in the end serves the cause of the story behind closed doors for the starkest classist parody. Because the cat sees everything and speaks to us about everything, with the hilarious sensation of his thoughts directed at the manifestation of the ridiculousness of humanity. The Kushami are a family recognized in their environment.
But like any family, and even more so in a bourgeois environment adorned with tinsel, the washed rags inside dot the conscience of all its characters with feelings of guilt, the ridiculous selfishness that moves them and unspeakable passions.The imperial Japan in which the plot moves becomes the scene on which the cat also theorizes. In order to end up finding the forced fit of the grotesque behavior of each other in a society full of formulas, conventions and unsettling formalisms for the individual.
botchan
A character who, in his remoteness, nevertheless ends up connecting with some of the great characters of modern Western literature (and there are already too many coincidences not to consider direct influence). From Ignatius reilly via Holden caulfield but also Chinese. Everything subversive in our literary imagination can find a mirror in the previous Botchan, surely with a greater touch of adventure than the indicated replicas but with the same controversial character. Because Professor Botchan should show that faith in teaching, that vocation to enlighten the students.
And yet, his particular diatribes, his vision of the world and his acid humor, end up emerging in front of some kids who will soon detect in him the disenchanted guy who is there without any motivation. As happens on so many occasions, in this type of characters on the verge of nihilism, we end up discovering that overflowing humanity under the mask of stoicism.