J-Wednesdays 水曜日だ！: Botchan by Natsume Soseki

I am quite ashamed of myself for having recycled one of my book reports when I was in college. I am a little bit busy because I'm preparing for my interview for graduate school tomorrow, when in fact I'm also busy watching some Korean drama series with my mother. I'm trying to take my mind off the interview tomorrow yet I know that I still have to prepare for it vigorously. Half of my mind encourages me to relax yet half of it tells me to panic! I don't know what to do anymore. Nonetheless, I bring you Natsume Soseki's Botchan.

This book called Botchan by Natsume Soseki was one of my book reports in my Japanese Literature class in college. It was a required report but I also had fun reading it. Some say that this book is an equivalent of "The Catcher in the Rye" or "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" in Japan because the book is also widely read by Japanese people during their childhood. The term "Botchan" is used to call boys or young men of respectable families or can also be used to call someone (an adult male) who has not quite managed to "grow up" yet.

PLOT:

The story is about Botchan’s life as a middle school teacher in the country-side. Since Botchan was born and raised in Tokyo, he was ‘culture-shocked’ by how the people there behaved. At first he experienced the pranks of his students which made him really irritated because he hadn’t expected that even in a town so small, all of his moves were being monitored against his will. As the story moves forward, he learns more about the small town and he grows more hatred for it. Many unfortunate things happen to him and he eventually learns that some of his co-workers were responsible for it. The ‘evil’ co-workers made schemes in order to ruin Botchan’s reputation. Many secrets arise as Botchan becomes more involved in the happenings in the town.

The book's theme is on morality, and how the main character, Botchan, questions it. Especially in Japan, where there are certain types of "usual Japanese behavior" that Botchan doesn't seem to understand. In an attempt to bring you something from the book that I found amusing, I present you this excerpt.

".. what Redshirt had to say made perfect sense, but splendid as it sounded, that still didn’t give it the power to seduce you deep down in your heart. If you could really win people’s hearts over with the power of money, authority, or reason, then moneylenders, policemen, and college professors would be more popular than anybody else. There was no way that my heart was going to be swayed by the logic of some middle school Assistant Principal (Redshirt). People operate on their likes and dislikes, not on logic."

- excerpt from Chapter VIII of Botchan

The snippet above was one of Botchan's musings and it definitely shows his outlook in life. I definitely learned from Botchan's way of thinking, which also reflects the writer, Natsume Soseki's, way of thinking. He pointed out something that we might not know or might have not thought about yet, and that is no matter how we think that something is supposedly "logically right," if we don't agree with it, we will not accept it. People have feelings, and that's what makes us a more unique being, and because of that, we usually utilize our feelings in order to live.

I hope that by reading this sort of review of mine, you get inspired to read this book. It's definitely worth reading and it's also light-hearted and will leave you thinking about things in life that we don't usually think about everyday.