Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki Summary: What Was Sensei Hiding? | Classics in 5 Minutes #08

This article covers the ending and discusses suicide.

Kokoro begins simply: a young student keeps visiting an older man who is kind to him but will not talk about his past. That silence drives the whole novel, and the secret behind it finally comes out in a very long letter.

• The book. Natsume Sōseki's Kokoro was serialized in the Asahi newspaper from April 20 to August 11, 1914. It has three parts: "Sensei and I" (36 chapters), "My Parents and I" (18 chapters), and "Sensei's Testament" (56 chapters).
• The links. Chapter links go to the free Japanese text on Aozora Bunko, and chapter numbers follow that edition.
• The quotations. All quotations from the novel are our translation.
• "Sensei." Sensei is the young man's respectful way of addressing the older man, roughly "teacher." But Sensei is not his teacher: the young man explains that calling older people sensei is just his habit (Part I, ch. 3).

The story in 30 seconds

In Kamakura, a student befriends an older man he calls Sensei and later visits him in Tokyo. Sensei visits a friend's grave every month but never talks about his past. After graduating, the student is caring for his gravely ill father when a thick letter arrives.

In it, Sensei confesses that he and his closest friend, K, loved the same young woman. Sensei turned K's ideals against him and proposed to her mother behind K's back. K took his own life. Sensei married her, but his guilt never faded. At the end of the Meiji era, he resolved to die and wrote his past for the young man alone.

Who's who

The young man. A student who meets Sensei in Kamakura and graduates from university at the end of Part I. His name is never given.

Sensei. A university graduate with no job who lives quietly in Tokyo with his wife.

Shizu, Sensei's wife. The young man usually calls her okusan; her name appears in Part I, ch. 9. She is troubled by how her husband has changed and wants to know why (Part I, ch. 18–19). In Part III she appears as "the young lady," the landlady's daughter.

K. Sensei's childhood friend, born to a temple family and adopted into a doctor's family. He appears only in Sensei's letter, and only as "K" (Part III, ch. 19).

The landlady (Shizu's mother). A soldier's widow who rents a room to young Sensei and lives with her only daughter. She is not Sensei's mother.

The young man's family. His father has a kidney disease that worsens through Part II. His mother assumes Sensei can find her son a job. His older brother works far away in Kyūshū, and there is a married younger sister.

Sensei's uncle. His father's younger brother, who takes charge of Sensei's affairs after his parents die and cheats him (Part III, ch. 3–9).

Tip: "I" is the young man in Parts I and II but Sensei in Part III. Okusan, a polite word for a married woman, means Shizu in Part I but her mother, the landlady, in Part III.

Part I: "Sensei and I"

Part I, ch. 1–4: The beach. At a beach teahouse in Kamakura, the student retrieves an older man's dropped glasses, and soon they are swimming together. The first time he calls the man "Sensei," the name sticks. Back in Tokyo, he calls at Sensei's house and finds him out. Sensei's wife explains that on this day every month he lays flowers at a grave in Zōshigaya.

Part I, ch. 5–7: The grave. The student follows him to the cemetery. Sensei, startled, admits it is a friend's grave that he visits monthly, and says no more. He refuses to let the student come next time, for a reason he says he cannot explain. He calls himself a lonely man and predicts the student will eventually drift away.

Part I, ch. 8–13: Strange remarks. Sensei and his wife seem devoted, yet Sensei jokes that their childlessness is heaven's punishment, and after a quarrel says his wife misunderstands him. She says he was not like this when he was young. Coming home from cherry-blossom viewing, Sensei tells the student that love is a sin, and yet something sacred.

Part I, ch. 14–20: Trusting no one. Sensei says he distrusts human beings in general. Asked whether that includes his wife, he answers:

"I cannot even trust myself." (Part I, ch. 14)

One evening, while the student is house-sitting, Sensei's wife opens up. When Sensei was at university, a close friend of his died suddenly, and she believes he began to change after that. She does not know the real reason, and fears it may be her fault.

Part I, ch. 21–31: A promise. In winter the student's father collapses, and the student makes a brief trip home. In early summer, on a walk outside Tokyo, Sensei speaks with unusual heat: settle your inheritance while your father is alive, because ordinary good people turn bad at the decisive moment, and money is what does it. He himself, he says, was deceived by his own relatives. When the student presses to hear his past, Sensei says he wants to trust just one person before he dies, and promises to tell all when the time is right.

Part I, ch. 32–36: Graduation. In June the student graduates and dines with Sensei and his wife. Sensei keeps saying "when I'm dead" until his wife begs him to stop. They part expecting to meet in September, and the student goes home.

Part II: "My Parents and I"

Part II, ch. 1–5: A proud father. The father is overjoyed at the graduation, because he never expected to live to see it. The celebration is called off when newspapers report that the Meiji emperor is ill. After the emperor dies, the father, as if seeing his own illness in the emperor's, grows withdrawn.

Part II, ch. 6–11: No reply. Urged by his mother, the young man reluctantly writes to ask Sensei for help finding a position. No answer comes. In September, just before he is due back in Tokyo, his father collapses again, and he stays.

Part II, ch. 12–15: Two telegrams. The father reads in the paper that General Nogi has died. A telegram from Sensei asks, in effect, whether the young man can come to see him. He wires back that he can't and explains in a letter, but a second telegram says he need not come.

Part II, ch. 16–18: The letter and the train. As his father slips in and out of consciousness, his brother silently hands him a thick registered letter from Sensei. Its first page says Sensei can now tell the past he once refused to share. Leafing through it, the young man stops at a line near the end:

"By the time this letter reaches your hands, I will no longer be in this world." (Part II, ch. 18)

He runs to ask the doctor whether his father can last a few more days, but the doctor is out. At the station he scribbles a note to his mother and brother, gives it to the rickshaw man to deliver, and jumps on the Tokyo train. Only in the roaring third-class carriage does he read the letter from beginning to end.

Part III: "Sensei's Testament"

All of Part III is Sensei's letter, and the "I" here is Sensei. The Japanese title uses the word isho, a letter left behind by someone about to die.

Part III, ch. 1–2: Why you? Of all the tens of millions of people in Japan, Sensei writes, he wants to tell his past to this young man alone, because he is in earnest and once said he wanted to learn from life itself.

Part III, ch. 3–9: The uncle. Before he turned twenty, Sensei lost both parents to illness, one soon after the other. The only son, he left his affairs to his uncle and went to school in Tokyo. On visits home the uncle pressed him to marry, and then to marry his own daughter, Sensei's cousin. Sensei refused. In his third summer home he sensed a change in the family, looked into his property, and found that his uncle had cheated him. Sensei took what was left, turned it into money, and vowed never to go back. It was still more than enough to live on as a student, but from then on he could not trust people.

Part III, ch. 10–18: The widow's house. In Tokyo, Sensei lodges with a soldier's widow and her only daughter, and falls in love with the daughter with a feeling close to religious faith. Yet, remembering his uncle, he suspects the mother of scheming to pair them off, and keeps putting off a proposal.

Part III, ch. 19–24: K moves in. K, Sensei's friend from home, was the second son of a temple priest, adopted into a doctor's family that expected him to study medicine. He came to Tokyo determined not to. He loved the word shōjin, single-minded devotion, and said that for the sake of his "path," deceiving his adoptive parents was acceptable. Young Sensei agreed. When K finally confessed, his adoptive family cut him off and his birth family turned against him too. Working while he studied, he wore himself out in body and mind. Over the landlady's objections, Sensei brings him to live in the same house.

Part III, ch. 25–31: Jealousy. Sensei asks the landlady and her daughter to talk with K, and is pleased to see his stiff friend open up. But finding K and the daughter talking alone, he begins to feel jealous. On a summer trip to Bōshū, K lectures Sensei that anyone without spiritual ambition is a fool (Part III, ch. 30). Sensei tries to confess his own feelings, and can't.

Part III, ch. 32–39: K's confession. At New Year, while the landlady and her daughter are out, K haltingly tells Sensei he loves the daughter. Sensei freezes as if turned to stone and says nothing, and the moment to answer with his own confession passes.

Part III, ch. 40–43: Ueno Park. On a walk in Ueno Park, K asks Sensei what he thinks of him now. K says he cannot tell whether to advance or retreat, and that he is suffering. Sensei throws K's own words back at him:

"Anyone who does not strive to better himself spiritually is a fool." (Part III, ch. 41)

K's first principle, Sensei explains, was that everything must be sacrificed for the path, even love. This was K's personal conviction; Sensei notes that on matters of men and women it was not close to the teachings of the sect K was born into. Sensei admits he aimed the words at K's love purely out of self-interest. K calls himself a fool. When Sensei pushes him on whether he has the resolve to give up his love in his heart, not just in words, K answers as if to himself:

"Resolve. It's not that I have no resolve." (Part III, ch. 42)

That night K slides open the door between their rooms and calls Sensei's name, waking him. In the morning he will not say why.

Part III, ch. 44–47: The proposal. Sensei takes K's "resolve" to mean K is about to pursue the daughter. Determined to move first, he feigns illness a week later, and while K and the daughter are out, asks the landlady for her daughter's hand. She agrees at once, saying she would never give her daughter where the daughter was unwilling. When Sensei returns, K, still unaware, asks if he is feeling better, and Sensei feels a sudden urge to bow down and apologize. Others are in the house, and the impulse dies. A few days later K hears of the engagement, not from Sensei but from the landlady. By her account, K took it calmly and offered his congratulations.

Part III, ch. 48–50: The night. K's manner toward Sensei does not change, and Sensei feels he has won by strategy but lost as a human being. Unsure whether to face K, he decides to wait at least until the next day. That Saturday night, K takes his own life; it is not the night he learned of the engagement. Near dawn, Sensei wakes to find the door between their rooms open and a dim lamp burning in K's room. On the desk is a letter addressed to him. It says briefly that K is weak-willed and has no hope for the future, thanks Sensei, asks a few favors, and adds a line to the effect that he should have died sooner. The daughter's name appears nowhere. Sensei confesses that his first feeling, finding nothing that exposed him, was relief. K is buried in Zōshigaya, a place he loved, and Sensei resolves to renew his repentance at the grave every month.

Part III, ch. 51–54: A marriage under a shadow. Within half a year of graduating, Sensei marries the daughter. At her suggestion they visit K's grave together; beside his wife, who knows nothing, he can only repeat to himself that the fault was his, and he never goes there with her again. He often tries to tell her everything, but cannot bear to leave a dark stain on her memories. He also realizes that he, who hated his uncle, is no better than his uncle, and losing faith in himself leaves him unable to act. After his mother-in-law dies, he resolves to live as though already dead. Still, he writes, he and his wife were not unhappy. They were happy.

The ending (spoilers)

Spoiler warning: this section covers the last chapters of Sensei's letter (Part III, ch. 55–56) and how the novel ends.

Part III, ch. 55–56: The end of Meiji. For years, Sensei writes, a mysterious force blocked every path except the road to death, and only the thought of his wife kept him from taking it. Then, at the height of summer, the Meiji emperor dies. Sensei feels that the "spirit of Meiji" began and ended with the emperor, and that people like himself, shaped most strongly by it, are out of step with the times by living on. His wife jokes that he should commit junshi, following one's lord in death. Also joking, he replies that if he did, it would be for the spirit of Meiji.

About a month later, on the night of the imperial funeral, a signal cannon sounds. It also marks the death of General Nogi, an army officer (see the National Diet Library's portrait entry, in Japanese). In the newspaper, Sensei reads what Nogi left behind: ever since losing a flag to the enemy in the Seinan War, he had meant to die to atone, yet had lived on. Counting thirty-five years, Sensei concludes that Nogi seems to have spent them waiting for a chance to die, and wonders which was more painful: those years, or the final moment. This is Sensei's reading of Nogi, and Sensei admits he does not really understand why Nogi died. Two or three days later, Sensei decides to take his own life. The young man may not fully understand his reasons either, he writes, perhaps because of the change of eras, or simply differences of character.

The last request. Sensei says he will leave the world without his wife knowing, sparing her any horror. He has spent most of the ten-plus days since his decision on this letter, and not only to keep his promise:

"More than half of it was driven by a need of my own." (Part III, ch. 56)

He offers his past, good and bad, for others to learn from, with one exception:

"But please understand that my wife alone is the exception." (Part III, ch. 56)

He wants her memory of her own past kept as pure as possible, so as long as she lives, even after his death, the young man must keep it all to himself. The letter ends there, and so does the novel.

What the novel leaves out. We never see the young man reach Tokyo, or learn how his father's illness ends. But Part I has already told us that Sensei died (ch. 4) and that his wife still does not know the tragedy (ch. 12).

Questions to think about

Why does Sensei tell only the young man? Compare Part I, ch. 31 (wanting to trust one person before he dies), Part III, ch. 2 (choosing him because he is in earnest), and Part III, ch. 56 (writing more than half for himself).

What did "resolve" mean to each of them? Read K's answer in Part III, ch. 42, the night he calls Sensei's name (ch. 43), and the passage where Sensei admits he was looking with only one eye (ch. 44). Then compare K's letter (ch. 48).

Did the secret protect Shizu, or shut her out? Set Shizu's tearful questions in Part I, ch. 18–19 beside Sensei's reason for silence (Part III, ch. 52), his sense that his secret looked like a dark spot to her (ch. 54), and the final request (ch. 56).

Is Sensei's death about an era, or about Sensei? He offers both explanations in Part III, ch. 55–56. Compare his remark in Part I, ch. 14 that people born into this modern age of freedom and independence must all pay for it with loneliness.

Frequently asked questions

Who is Sensei in Kokoro?

Sensei is the older man the narrator meets in Kamakura and keeps visiting in Tokyo. He is not a teacher; "Sensei" is a respectful form of address, roughly "teacher," that the narrator uses out of habit for older people (Part I, ch. 3). He lives quietly with his wife, Shizu, and tells his own story in Part III.

Do we ever learn Sensei's or the narrator's real name?

No. In the first chapter the narrator says he will not reveal Sensei's real name. When the letter arrives (Part II, ch. 16), Sensei's name is written on it, but the text never says what it is. The narrator's name never appears either; when someone calls him, the book just says they called "my name."

Who is K?

K is Sensei's closest childhood friend. Adopted into a doctor's family, he refused to study medicine and followed his own path, which set him against both his adoptive and birth families (Part III, ch. 19–22). "K" is simply what Sensei chooses to call him in the letter (Part III, ch. 19); his real name is never given.

Why does K die?

The novel does not settle on one reason. K's farewell letter says he is weak-willed and has no hope for the future, and it never mentions the daughter (Part III, ch. 48). Newspapers blamed his being disowned, or madness (Part III, ch. 51). Sensei first assumed disappointed love, then a clash between ideals and reality, and finally suspected that K had become unbearably lonely (Part III, ch. 53). These are all Sensei's guesses.

Does Shizu ever learn the truth?

According to the text, no. The narrator says in Part I, ch. 12 that Sensei hid the tragedy from his wife until his death and that she still does not know, and Sensei's letter asks the young man to keep the secret as long as she lives (Part III, ch. 56). Shizu even suggests that they visit K's grave together after the wedding, without knowing what happened (Part III, ch. 51).

Where does "Anyone who does not strive to better himself spiritually is a fool" appear?

Twice. First on the trip to Bōshū, where Sensei recounts K using it against him, in slightly different wording (Part III, ch. 30). Then in Ueno Park, where Sensei throws it back at K, repeating it twice (Part III, ch. 41).

How many chapters are there, and where should I start?

The Aozora Bunko edition has 110 chapters: 36 in Part I, 18 in Part II, and 56 in Part III. If you are new to the book, start at the beginning: Part I sets up the mysteries of the grave and of Sensei's change, and Part III answers them. If you already know the plot, try reading the end of the letter first and then returning to Part I, ch. 14.

Reading the original

The full Japanese text is free on Aozora Bunko:

• Start at the beginning: Part I, ch. 1
• Read the end of Sensei's letter: Part III, ch. 56
• Book information: Aozora Bunko catalog card

Two suggested routes:

1. The full journey. Read in order from Part I, ch. 1.
2. The key passages. Part I, ch. 14 (the man who trusts no one), Part II, ch. 16–18 (the letter arrives), Part III, ch. 36–49 (from K's confession to his death), then Part III, ch. 56 (the end of the letter).

Source: Natsume Sōseki, Kokoro (こころ), Aozora Bunko edition, based on the Shūeisha Bunko paperback; input by j.utiyama, proofread by Itō Tokiya.