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  • Published: 15 January 2013
  • ISBN: 9781590175873
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $35.00

The Gate



A novel of tribulation in love throughout the years, all in the understated style that made Soseki so celebrated. Soseki, widely considered the greatest Japanese novelist of the Meiji era, believed The Gate was his best work.

An NYRB Classics Original

A humble clerk and his loving wife scrape out a quiet existence on the margins of Tokyo. Resigned, following years of exile and misfortune, to the bitter consequences of having married without their families’ consent, and unable to have children of their own, Sōsuke and Oyone find the delicate equilibrium of their household upset by a new obligation to meet the educational expenses of Sōsuke’s brash younger brother. While an unlikely new friendship appears to offer a way out of this bind, it also soon threatens to dredge up a past that could once again force them to flee the capital. Desperate and torn, Sōsuke finally resolves to travel to a remote Zen mountain monastery to see if perhaps there, through meditation, he can find a way out of his predicament.
      
This moving and deceptively simple story, a melancholy tale shot through with glimmers of joy, beauty, and gentle wit, is an understated masterpiece by one of Japan’s greatest writers. At the end of his life, Natsume Sōseki declared The Gate, originally published in 1910, to be his favorite among all his novels. This new translation captures the oblique grace of the original while correcting numerous errors and omissions that marred the first English version.

  • Published: 15 January 2013
  • ISBN: 9781590175873
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $35.00

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Praise for The Gate

  • "Released in 1910, The Gate is among top Japanese novelist Soseki's best-know works. A man suddenly abandons his loving wife to enter a life of contemplation in a Zen temple. He goes looking for answers but finds only more questions." - Library Journal

  • "A sensitive, skillfully written novel by the most widely read Japanese author of modern times." - The Guardian

  • "Soseki's prose is so delicate that each page is like looking at a set of dreamy watercolors.' - Sunday Telegraph

  • "The Gate is not so much tragic or comic as a graceful balance between the dispiriting and the humorous . . . The Gate is surely the kind of writing we need - a masterpiece of taste and clarity." - New Statesman