Botchan

Botchan (1906) is Natsume Sōseki’s comic novel. A young man from Tokyo—nicknamed “Botchan” (Master Darling) by his family’s maid—takes a teaching job in a provincial town on Shikoku. Naive and hot-tempered, he clashes with scheming colleagues and unruly students in a series of misadventures that have made the book a classic of Japanese literature. One of Sōseki’s most popular works, it is often read in Japanese schools and has been translated into many languages.