GajimaruClassics.
KokoroOn the coverLakeside, Kuroda Seiki, 1897
Kokoro
A young student is drawn to an aloof older man he calls Sensei, whose reserve hides a guilt reaching back to a friendship and a betrayal in his youth. A quiet, devastating novel of loneliness and conscience at the birth of modern Japan.
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A still, deep book about the distance between people and the weight of a secret, the finest doorway into modern Japanese fiction. Spare, melancholy, and quietly shattering.
SettingMeiji-era Japan, 1910s
Japan in the Meiji twilight, a generation caught between the loyalties of the old samurai world and the lonely individualism of the new, mourning an emperor and an age as they pass.