"Botchan" - Natsume Soseki

Title: Botchan
Author: Natsume Soseki
Translator: Matt Treyvaud
About the Book: Fiction, Japanese, Comedy, Awesomeness.
My rating: 10/10.

I've just mentioned Soseki being one of the few Japanese authors in my bibliography that I could read. Well, this book is definitely one of my favorites - for two reasons.

1. It's awesome.
2. The translation by Matt Treyvaud is more than awesome. (the link is at the bottom of this post)


The story in itself is fast-paced, funny, full of intrigue. The main character is a teacher who stumbles into a small town school to teach maths and falls into the world of students who prank, teachers who intrigue and people who just plainly need nicknames which he offers freely.

The title, Botchan, means 'little master' and it's offered to the main character by his loving old maid, who is certain that he is something special and wonderful and a gift to the world. The reader might be less sure about that, since Botchan is quite flawed, but he happens to be delightfully flawed. There's a very human element to his story, while it still keeps a light-hearted tone.

"I have no idea why, but the old lady just adored me. It was a total mystery. My mother had gotten sick of me three days before she died, my father never knew what to do with me, and the whole town called me devil-boy, but Kiyo thought I was the greatest."

And thus the reckless boy who manages to get through college and then acquire a job continues to be seen through life: something that's not quite within the lines of what he's supposed to be, something a bit out of the usual. Reckless? Devil? Greatest? Non-compromising? Well, I was fond of him, I'll tell you that.

While my colleagues from the same literature class were wading their way through a rough Romanian translation, I found Treyvaud's version and loved it to pieces. It's fresh, it's readable, it sounds English, not English made to break in all the wrong places to imitate Japanese and it's wonderfully full of life. There's a free translation available online, but it doesn't hold a candle to Treyvaud's.

From the translator's introduction:

"I gave Botchan himself the voice of the Platonic Ideal of the Assistant English Teacher in Japan blowing off steam: profane and outraged, hilariously aggrieved. As part of that milieu myself, I decided that too much polish would probably work against what I wanted to do, so I decided to translate the whole book in a month. And finally, I did virtually all of the work while drunk."

And that, my friends, is what gives it its perfection in this English version.

You can get it here.