He receives an affirmative, though less enthusiastic than hoped for, response. On parting in Kamakura, as Sensei prepares to return home to Tokyo, the narrator asks if he can call on Sensei at his home sometime. As they grow closer, he comes to refer to the man as “Sensei.” After some days, he finds occasion to make the man's acquaintance.

He sees the same man each day thereafter, though no longer with his foreign companion. One day, after finishing his usual swim in the sea, he takes notice of a man in the changing house who's there with a foreign guest, preparing to head for the water. The narrator has been left on his own in Kamakura after his friend, who invited him to vacation there, is called home by his family. In this letter Sensei reveals, in keeping with an earlier promise, the full story of his past. Part three, which makes up the latter half of the novel, is a long confessional letter written by Sensei to the narrator. The first two are told from the perspective of the narrator, relating his memories of Sensei, an older man who was a friend and mentor during his university days. Other important themes in the novel include the changing times (particularly the modernization of Japan in the Meiji era), the changing roles and ideals of women, and intergenerational change in values, the role of family, the importance of the self versus the group, the cost of weakness, and identity. It continues the theme of isolation developed in Natsume's immediately preceding works, here in the context of interwoven strands of egotism and guilt, as opposed to shame. The work deals with the transition from the Japanese Meiji society to the modern era, by exploring the friendship between a young man and an older man he calls ' Sensei' ('teacher' or 'master'). Īlong with Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, Kokoro is one of the best-selling novels of all time in Japan, having sold more than seven million copies in the country as of 2016. When later published in novel form by Iwanami Shoten, its title was shortened to Kokoro the rendering of the word 'kokoro' itself was also changed from kanji (心) to hiragana (こころ). During the novel's initial serial run, from April 20 to August 11, 1914, it was printed under the title Kokoro: Sensei no Isho ( 心先生の遺書, Kokoro: Sensei's Testament).

The word contains shades of meaning-notions of the heart and also of mind-and can be translated as 'affection', 'spirit', 'resolve', 'courage', 'sentiment', or 'the heart of things'.

The title translated literally means 'heart'. It was first published in 1914 in serial form in the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun. Kokoro ( こゝろ, or in post-war orthography こころ) is a novel by the Japanese author Natsume Sōseki.

Kokoro soseki