Kokoro

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.