In the last section, we have a long testament or letter from the sensei telling the young man of his own youth, of a tragic friendship, and with the complications of life. The young man goes home in the second section and lives with his parents for a while, considering his future and reckoning with the potential death of this father. But as this first section comes to a close, the young man has long conversations with the sensei’s wife, and begins to understand there’s more under the surface than just placid isolation. As they talk about love, and marriage, and death, the young man seems to consider his own future. Through his persistence, they do in fact become friends and he realizes that this older friend experiences a kind of profound loneliness and isolation in the world, despite their friendship and despite the sensei’s marriage. He decides to befriend him, not out of sympathy or pity, but out of a kind of respect and intended emulation. We begin with a young college “senior” glomming onto a master or sensei character, seeing a life well-lived full of pensiveness, thoughtfulness, simplicity in action and complexity in thought. This is a more complex novel than I thought I was dealing with when I found myself halfway through. So I read a few of his novels, and I realize that he’s constantly referencing his predecessors in the same way that I found his name often referenced in later Japanese novels. Compared to Redshirt, she's far and away the superior person.Natsume Soseki is not an author I know much about but according to brief research he’s often regarded as a transitional author who helped bring the Japanese novel into the 20th century (I feel like almost every literature has a figure like this - Maugham, James, Wharton, etc). She would have been deeply impressed by it.
Kiyo never laughed at me for saying anything like what I said to Redshirt. If people are going to get laughed at for being simpleminded and sincere, there's no hope. Wouldn't their students, and the world at large, be better off that way? Redshirt had laughed at me for being simpleminded. The schools might as well just go ahead and teach you how to tell lies, how to mistrust everybody, and how to take advantage of people. If that's the way it is, it would be better if they didn't have those ethics classes in elementary school and middle school where the teacher is always telling you to be honest and not lie. And then on those rare occasions when they encounter somebody who's honest and pure-hearted, they look down on him and say he's nothing but a kid, a Botchan. They seem to think that if you don't, you'll never get anywhere in the world. “Now that I thought about it, though, I realized that most people actually encourage you to turn bad.
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