In the Library
Kokoro
Natsume Sōseki, 1914
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 5.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by The Daily Canon (2026)
- Original
- Original ja
- Chapters
- Chapters 110
- Length
- Length 78k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
We who were born into this modern age, full of freedom and independence and self, must all taste this loneliness as the price of it, I suppose.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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About the book
Kokoro means the heart, and Sōseki spends the whole novel trying to reach one. A student keeps returning to an older man he calls only Sensei, sitting through long Tokyo afternoons, sensing always some grief sealed off behind the courtesy. Sensei will not say what it is. Then, near the end, it arrives the only way it ever could: a letter, posted as its writer prepares to die, confessing a betrayal decades old. He had wanted a woman, and to win her he deceived the closest friend he had, and that friend killed himself before dawn. What undoes you is the timing: the one full act of intimacy Sensei manages in a lifetime is this confession, exact and unbearable, handed to the person who loved him only after every conversation between them is already over. Loneliness, he writes, is the price we pay for being born in this modern age. The book is that price, itemised.