Natsume Sōseki

Born Natsume Kinnosuke on February 9, 1867, in Edo (soon to be renamed Tokyo) at the very dawn of the Meiji Restoration, he was the unwanted eighth child of a family of declining local gentry, given up for adoption twice before the age of nine , a turbulent childhood that instilled the themes of loneliness and displacement running through all his mature fiction. He excelled at classical Chinese literature before turning to English studies at Tokyo Imperial University, where he graduated at the top of his class. In 1900 the Japanese government sent him to study English literature in London, where he spent two miserable years in cramped lodgings, marked by poverty, racial isolation, and a nervous breakdown so severe his friends reported him to the Japanese embassy. Upon his return, he succeeded Lafcadio Hearn as lecturer in English literature at Tokyo Imperial University. In 1905, almost on a dare, he published I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa Neko de Aru), a satirical novel narrated by a sardonic house cat observing the absurdities of Meiji intellectuals, which made him famous overnight. Botchan (1906), a comic novel of youthful defiance, became one of the most beloved books in Japan. He left academia in 1907 to write full-time for the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, producing a remarkable series of novels , Sanshirō (1908), And Then (1909), The Gate (1910), and above all Kokoro (1914), a devastating study of guilt, betrayal, and the spiritual crisis of modern Japan that is perhaps the most widely read novel in the country. His final, unfinished work, Light and Dark (Meian, 1916), was moving toward a new psychological realism when he died on December 9, 1916, of a stomach ulcer, at the age of forty-nine. His face appears on the Japanese thousand-yen note.

In the winter of 1894, unhappy in his teaching posts and hunting for some peace of mind, Sōseki shut himself away for two weeks at Engaku-ji, a Zen temple in Kamakura, sitting in meditation. The clarity he came for never arrived. Years later he handed that same futile retreat to the lost protagonist of The Gate.