And I believe it is in the attempt of understanding that one may fully comprehend the main message behind Kokoro. And if used in its transitive form (i.e., 心得る), it also means understanding. Though Kokoro in its raw Japanese form means heart, it also means spirit and mind. It is a story of a young graduate’s journey with an unnamed man called Sensei (teacher) as he navigates the chaos of cosmopolitan Tokyo and the simplicity of country life. Kokoro is a testament to humanity, shame and guilt, and a reckoning with transitions. One may ask, what exactly is Kokoro ?įor Soseki, I believe it is his way of reckoning with a transitory society, where the infatuation with the West and the phenomena of Westernisation had shaken the very foundations of a deep-seated Japanese traditionality.
Soseki eventually goes on to write Kokoro (心), once known as Kokoro: Sensei’s Statement (心:先生の遺書), and again simplified to its native hiragana form, (こころ). A prominent writer who emerges from this transitional era is Natsumi Soseki (夏目礎石).
By the time the Taisho ( 大正) era rolled around, Japan had become the most advanced country in the East, on par with the West’s technology and ideology. Many years prior, Japan had undergone one of the fastest transitions to modernisation the world has ever seen, and what took the Western Powers centuries took Japan a mere four decades to achieve.
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