Aventuras y desventuras de un profesor novato destinado a un instituto rural.

El humor japones es complicado de captar, pero la novela es francamente buena, con personajes muy conseguidos, especialmente el narrador que termina cayendo bien pese (o gracias) a la gran cantidad de defectos que manifiesta. ( )

Aventuras y desventuras de un profesor novato destinado a un instituto rural.

El humor japones es complicado de captar, pero la novela es francamente buena, con personajes muy conseguidos, especialmente el narrador que termina cayendo bien pese (o gracias) a la gran cantidad de defectos que manifiesta. ( )

Story: 3 / 10
Characters: 6
Setting: 6
Prose: 5

Certainly feels like the "Catcher in the Rye" of Japan. Luckily this was markedly better than Salinger's. Hopefully will someday meet a fan that can explain why this book is so famous (other than its brevity). ( )

Apparently this book is read by students in Japanese high schools, so a lot of people here remember it with that strange mixture of fondness and annoyance that I'm familiar with from reading the equivalents in English. For me, it marks the first time I finally dragged myself to the public libraries near me. The English selection isn't huge, but it's reasonably-sized, and I'll have to keep going.

The style of the novel, at least in this translation (I found a worse one on Project Gutenberg...), is quite chipper, and thus it reads fast-paced and excitingly. I enjoyed it - I identified somewhat with the fish-out-of-water feeling of the main character, and I found it funny to hear prices having wildly different meanings to what they have now (the yen did a bit of hyper-inflation after the war). I think one yen was roughly equivalent to 1,000 of today's yen - the one that Natsume Soseki used to adorn the front of, although he's been replaced by some philosopher dude for about 15 years. It was like hearing about shillings in old British novels. ( )

[Note: this very well-known author's name is old-school Japanese, so 'Natsume' is his surname.]

I had a moment of delight while reading this. I was re-watching a favorite anime series when I noticed this author, likely this very book, was called out in the dialogue ("Given," episode 11)! Two high school students complaining about having to read Natsume Soseki describing stupid people a long time ago. I can't think of a more clear expression of how familiar this is in Japanese culture, both as a near-universally assigned reading and as a total drag to generations of teens. Reading it, I can see both positions clearly.

Natsume's narrator, the titular Botchan, is young, inexperienced, entitled, and callow, venturing into his first big adventure; in RPG terms, he's a First-Level PC. He's NOT a Japanese Holden Caulfield or Huck Finn, he's a young adult finding out how adult he really isn't yet. Full of self-assurance with no chops to back it up, he picks confrontation after confrontation that anyone with more on their resume would know to avoid. What keeps him interesting and entertaining, though, is his self-awareness that he is impatient and green. While much is made of the city-mouse/country-mouse nature of the story (a Tokyo boy out in the boonies), what's more relevant than the setting is the cast; he enters a Small Pond inhabited by a couple of pretenders to Big Fish status. Hilarity ensues.

What is undeniably neat to me is that Natsume's tale is very much set in a Japan of over a century ago but every step of the way, every character and conversation could be set today, or in Wisconsin.

"You'd think they'd be able to walk in a straight line without saying anything, but Japanese people are born mouth first, ..."

Has any teacher, manager, or employee anywhere ever NOT looked around and thought that of their colleagues or students? This would make a brilliant Netflix movie. ( )