Kokoro cover art

Kokoro

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Unlimited access to our all-you-can-listen catalogue of 15K+ audiobooks and podcasts
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Kokoro

By: Natsume Soseki, Meredith McKinney - translator, Meredith McKinney - introduction, Meredith McKinney
Narrated by: Kotaro Watanabe, Elizabeth Jasicki
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

About this listen

 “Soseki is the representative modern Japanese novelist, a figure of truly national stature.”—Haruki Murakami

The father of modern Japanese literature's best-loved novel, in its first new English translation in half a century

No collection of Japanese literature is complete without Natsume Soseki's Kokoro, his most famous novel and the last he completed before his death. Published here in the first new translation in more than fifty years, Kokoro—meaning "heart"—is the story of a subtle and poignant friendship between two unnamed characters, a young man and an enigmatic elder whom he calls "Sensei." Haunted by tragic secrets that have cast a long shadow over his life, Sensei slowly opens up to his young disciple, confessing indiscretions from his own student days that have left him reeling with guilt, and revealing, in the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between his moral anguish and his student's struggle to understand it, the profound cultural shift from one generation to the next that characterized Japan in the early twentieth century. Classics Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction World Literature

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Kojiki cover art
Sanshiro cover art
I Am a Cat cover art
Spark of Defiance cover art
The Tale of Genji, Volume 1 cover art
The Flowers of Buffoonery cover art
Eye of the Oracle cover art
Early Light cover art
The Legacy of Shadow cover art
The Legacy Human cover art
The Storm Siren Trilogy cover art
The Hard Choice cover art
There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job cover art
The Woman in the Dunes cover art
Magitech Chronicles Omnibus cover art
William Wilde and the Necrosed cover art

Critic reviews

"This elegant novel...suffuses the reader with a sense of old Japan." —Los Angeles Times

"Soseki is the representative modern Japanese novelist, a figure of truly national stature." —Haruki Murakami
All stars
Most relevant
It is an interesting novel full of melancholy and simple but powerful writing. Unfortunately, the narrator was kind of weak as a performer and didn’t manage to draw me into the story. It is a shame.

Nice book , Weak Narration

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
love this author and narrator wonderful book wonderfully read a story of love lose and regrets

great writing

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I dont have much to say its just a very good book im writing to fill the word limit to leave a rating and dont want to spoil anything

My 2nd favourite book ever

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.