Despite Natsume Sōseki's fame and popularity in Japan and Japanese literary studies, works on his writings, at least in English, have been slow in coming. Marvin Marcus's book is the latest addition to the few in existence, one that focuses on Sōseki's shōhin (small works), a series of “personal writings”—most notably Eijitsu shōhin (Spring Miscellany, 1909), Omoidasu koto nado (Recollections, 1911), and Garasudo no uchi (Inside Glass Doors, 1915). The book includes extensive translations of these shōhin works, sandwiched between Marcus's interpretive commentary, which revolves around the themes of memory and melancholy. Marcus does not limit his discussion to the shōhin, however. Throughout the book, he quite liberally moves from fictional works to shōhin as well as memoirs written by those close to Sōseki. Characters such as Kenzō in Michikusa (Grass on the Wayside, 1915) and Sensei in Kokoro (1914) often appear as Sōseki's “fictional alter ego,” “fictional surrogates,” or “proxy” (pp. 4, 41, 114). Ultimately, for Marcus, the texts constitute Sōseki's different voices.

The book comprises seven chapters, each divided thematically. Marcus begins his journey in chapter 1 by tracing Sōseki's rhetoric of melancholy through the retelling of his experiences in England, such as Jitensha nikki (Bicycle Diary, 1903), Rondontō (The Tower of London, 1905), and the famous preface to his literary treaties, Bungakuron (Theory of Literature, 1907). Chapter 2 discusses Sōseki's youthful days and how he reminisces about his school years and childhood friends against the backdrop of Babashita. Chapter 3 further develops Sōseki's personal life, focusing on his memories of his family and unhappy relations with his father, mother, and brothers. Chapter 4 then shifts to Sōseki's adulthood, and his role as a father and husband. Chapter 5 ventures into his life as a writer, his musings on his private space around the desk, and his career. Chapter 6 explores his relationships within the literary world, his protégés, and the bundan, as well as his deteriorating health and engagement with issues of mortality. The seventh and final chapter addresses reminiscences about Sōseki.

In more ways than one, Marcus offers an intensely personal account of Sōseki's shōhin. With his short entries in this book, he seeks to replicate shōhin, as if he were enacting Sōseki. This is more than apparent in his afterword, where the short entries discuss his own travels to Japan, to Zōshigaya, to London, and to St. Louis. He further projects himself onto Sōseki, reading Sōseki's experiences as if they were his own, and seeking, in effect, to universalize Sōseki's experience: “His concerns are ordinary; his anxieties and fears, utterly human. He thinks about what it means to be a writer, a father, a husband. He looks at his world, at the sort of person he has become, and shakes his head, often despairing of making sense of things. On occasion he is moved to laughter, to tears, to some dawning sense of comprehension. And then he moves on. … As a fellow traveler in territories of memory and melancholy, and a fellow trafficker in words, I've come to share the concerns of this Japanese writer, and I've learned much from his attempts at reconciling the past with the insistent and often maddening demands of each day” (p. 198). Here, not only are the boundaries of shōhin and fiction permeated, but also the boundaries of Japan and the United States, Meiji and the present.

On the surface, there appears to be a tension between the urge to write a “scholarly” narrative and the urge to replicate shōhin, which is most obvious in the introduction, where sections such as “Writing the Self in Meiji Japan” and “Romanticism, Naturalism, and Modern Selfhood”—which seek to situate the shōhin in their discursive contexts—are covered in short one-page entries. Moreover, aside from a few works (most of which are relegated to footnotes), Marcus rarely engages with recent literary scholarship on Meiji-period writings, which is quite relevant to such sections. As we see toward the end of the introduction, however, this is a quite deliberate disconnect, a show of his own theoretical stance. “Literary studies have been marked by a certain Balkanization of theoretical positions and ‘discourse domains’ that have effectively excluded the general reader and rankled the specialist. Our quest for the scholarly high ground has tended to obscure the pleasures of reading that beckoned us in the first place and that we presumably try to foster in our students. … It is my hope that this book will be both accessible and enjoyable” (p. 15). He thus disengages with works that examine texts as “discourse domains” in order for the book to be “accessible and enjoyable.”

In effect, the intensely personal narrative of Sōseki's literary vignettes takes form as it disengages with “discourse domains” and only then becomes “accessible and enjoyable” for Marcus. Whether such writing is indeed enjoyable is for each reader to decide.

This book in many ways reminds the reader of Sōseki's brilliance and the capacity of his writings to take on so many different readings.