The narrator, young and naïve as he is, pieces together a few things, both from Sensei and his attractive and devoted wife. Being close to this younger man allows him to open up, maybe because through him he's reminded of his younger and more vulnerable self. This 'Sensei', as the narrator refers to him, has suffered some great wound at the seat of his soul, one he cannot bring himself to talk about even with his beloved wife of years. A young student - 'Watashi', or 'I', the narrator of the first half of the story - befriends a withdrawn, misanthropic older man while at college. Kokoro is not a complex story on the face of it, but in ways that only make it all the tougher to adapt properly it's a story of depths, not surfaces. Of the latter, I've assembled four that are worth putting side by side - one that sabotages the book's aims two that preserve those aims but without doing anything discernibly transformative with them and a fourth that both effortlessly embodies the timelessness of the story and adds more by, paradoxically, taking things away. With Sōseki Natsume's Kokoro - arguably one of the finest novels of the 20th century in any language - there was the Aoi Bungaku anime adaptation, as artful as it was also woefully incomplete.īut a story as well-known and widely loved as this was bound to see incarnations in other media, and sure enough it did - at least two live-action films (something for me to delve into later), and multiple manga versions.

The ones that work complement everything about the original material that mattered, and allow us to see them in a new light. There is no wrong way to adapt something, except in the sense that there are adaptations that work, and adaptations that don't.

Kokoro 1914 by natsume soseki