Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) is usually voted Japan's greatest writer, and until recently his face even graced his country's currency. His influence within Japan has been enormous and so has his reputation. He is locally included among the world's greatest novelists, and no less an authority than Dr. Takeo Doi pronounced him the equal of Freud "in the sharpness and depth of his psychological observations."
This being so, almost everything considered major by the author has already been translated, often several times over. There remain, however, those works hitherto considered minor. Among these are the three essays (only one of them previously translated) here found in these two new Tuttle collections.
"The Heredity of Taste" ("Shumi no Iden," 1906, earlier translated by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson in 1973) is here called "Soseki's only anti-war work," but it is also an exercise in Soseki's early style, one that has been called "light, even whimsical."