Natsume Soseki

Natsume Soseki is the central novelist of Meiji Japan and wrote about what the modernisation cost the people living through it. He was born in the year before the Meiji Restoration, given away as an infant and taken back, and studied English literature at the Imperial University. The government sent him to London from 1900 to 1902 on a scholarship, and the two years were miserable: poor, isolated, reading alone in lodgings, and near a breakdown, which he later described as the most unpleasant of his life. He came home to teach and then left the university for a newspaper, which was an unusual choice and let him serialise fiction to a mass readership. I Am a Cat, Botchan, Sanshiro, Kokoro. His subject is the isolation produced by a society reorganising itself in a generation: characters educated out of the world their parents lived in and not at home in the one replacing it, obligation and self-interest pulling in different directions, and a persistent loneliness he treated as the price of individualism arriving from outside rather than growing. He suffered from stomach ulcers for years and nearly died of one in 1910. He appeared on the thousand-yen note for two decades. Every Japanese secondary-school student reads Kokoro. He turned down an honorary doctorate from the Ministry of Education in 1911, which was close to unheard of. Kokoro, serialised in 1914, turns on the suicide of General Nogi following the Meiji emperor's death in 1912 - an act of ritual loyalty from an older world that the novel treats as the end of something rather than as an example. He died at forty-nine of a gastric ulcer.

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