Botchan

Botchan is Natsume Soseki's beloved comic masterpiece—a sharp-tongued, irreverent tale of a brash young Tokyo man adrift in provincial Japan. First published in 1906, it remains one of the most popular novels in Japanese literature, celebrated for its wit, its memorable characters, and its skewering of social hypocrisy.
The narrator, known only as Botchan ("Master Darling"—his old nurse's affectionate name for him), is an honest, hot-tempered young man with a gift for getting into trouble. After graduating from a Tokyo technical school, he takes a teaching position at a middle school in rural Shikoku, expecting to find the simple country life a refreshing change from the city.
Instead, he discovers a world of petty politics, scheming colleagues, and infuriating duplicity. His fellow teachers earn his contemptuous nicknames: Red Shirt, the silver-tongued schemer; Porcupine, the deceptively loyal; Clown, the sycophantic toady. As Botchan navigates the treacherous waters of school politics, his blunt honesty and quick temper repeatedly land him in hot water.
Soseki crafts a hilarious critique of Meiji-era society—its pretensions to Western sophistication, its suffocating conformity, its gap between public virtue and private vice. Yet beneath the comedy lies genuine moral seriousness: Botchan's refusal to compromise his principles, however clumsily expressed, represents an authentic rebellion against a corrupt social order.
The novel's enduring popularity in Japan stems from Botchan himself—impulsive, prideful, frequently wrong-headed, but fundamentally decent. He is the eternal outsider who speaks the truths everyone else is too polite to utter.
This LibriHouse.com edition presents all eleven chapters with the translator's note.