Another AskMe recommendation was Kokoro by Natsume Soseki. As far as I can remember, I've never read Japanese fiction so this was my first. And what an inspiring beginning. I loved this book pretty much from the very first page. My preference is usually character-based books and Kokoro was nothing but. I loved the simplicity of the language, could relate to the main character almost immediately. Cared about him, about his story, about his feelings towards his mentor. I enjoyed how non-contrived the story felt to me. Even though I was wondering what made the sensei who he was, it wasn't crucial to me. It wasn't like a mystery, it was like an unraveling of a personality. I swallowed the book in a day and thought about it for quite some time afterwards.

I liked it so much that I decided I wanted to read more Japanese books. My impression was that they were more about people and their thoughts, their morals, their ideas as opposed to actual events in their world. Maybe I am way off but I wanted to find out, so I went through the recommendations and put two of the other Japanese books on hold and encouraged my reading group to pick yet a third one as our book of the month for June.