246. KOKORO.   Natsume Soseki’s novel Kokoro, published in 1914, bears some resemblance, in its small cast of characters and intense observation, to Jane Austen, or to Henry James; its tragic tone and movement is much like some of the shorter Russian novels.  It’s an orderly and patient work, like a hike from point A to point B, at the end of which we look back from a slight height, seeing clearly; it’s only then we can sense its masterly construction.  Its title, in Lafcadio Hearn’s rendering, means “the heart of things,” and it maintains a pensive quietude throughout.  Its publication in 1914 followed the death of the Emperor Meiji by two years: personal as the story is, it connects not just to the era but to the era’s end.  It reminds us, also true to the time, of how the Japanese preoccupation with honor can stand very near to a sense of despair and death.  The narrator, a college student, becomes friendly with an older man, whom he installs emotionally as “Sensei” (that untranslatable term, as in “teacher” or the French “maître”), but who puzzles him with a mixture of kindness and aloofness.  We see the student struggling to please his family but himself as well; his father is as aloof as his older friend.  All of this, he comes to realize, mirrors Sensei’s own past, in which a very Jamesian mixture of hesitance, duplicity and scruple leads to tragedy.  Soseki never urges or melodramatizes; this beautifully shaped and seen novel leaves us not so much devastated as saddened and thoughtful.  Edward McClellan’s translation (Gateway, 1957) retains the simplicity of Soseki’s prose and is still in print.