Five-minute digest
Botchan
Summary
Botchan is a comic first-person novel about a hot-tempered, stubbornly honest young man from Tokyo who spends a few months teaching mathematics in a provincial middle school and cannot bear the scheming he finds there. The narrator is never named; the old family servant Kiyo calls him Botchan, roughly 'young master', which this translation renders as Master Darling. He opens by confessing an inherited recklessness: as a schoolboy he jumped from a second-floor window on a dare and cut his own thumb to prove a knife was sharp. His parents favour his older brother, and only Kiyo, a servant from a fallen samurai family, dotes on him and praises his straight nature. After both parents die, his brother sells the house and gives him 600 yen, which he spends on three years at a school of physics. On graduating he accepts the first post offered, forty yen a month at a middle school in Shikoku, and leaves Kiyo behind with her nephew. In the little town he gives the staff nicknames: Badger, the principal; Red Shirt, the suave head teacher with a literature degree; Porcupine (Hotta), the blunt head of mathematics; Clown (Yoshikawa), the drawing teacher who flatters Red Shirt; and Hubbard Squash (Koga), the pale, gentle English teacher. The boarding students mock him by writing on the blackboard about the tempura noodles and rice dumplings he eats in town, and on his night duty they fill his bed with grasshoppers and stamp on the floor above him. Red Shirt and Clown invite him fishing and hint that Porcupine has stirred the boys against him. Botchan quarrels with Porcupine over the price of a glass of ice water, which he insists on repaying, and later learns that Red Shirt has taken Madonna, the beautiful daughter of the Toyama family, from her fiancé Koga, and is arranging Koga's transfer to Nobeoka in Kyushu. Offered a raise out of Koga's salary, Botchan goes to Red Shirt at night to refuse it. When a celebration of a military victory turns into a brawl between the middle-school boys and the students of the normal school, Botchan and Porcupine wade in to stop it and are blamed in the local newspaper; Porcupine is forced to resign. The two keep watch for nights from a room opposite the Kadoya inn, catch Red Shirt and Clown leaving after a night with a geisha, pelt Clown with eggs and thrash them both, then leave town by the evening steamer. Back in Tokyo Botchan takes a job as an assistant engineer with the tram company and keeps house with Kiyo until she dies of pneumonia, asking to be buried in his family's temple. Sōseki published the novel in the magazine Hototogisu in April 1906, drawing loosely on his own year as a teacher in Matsuyama. Yasotaro Mori's English version appeared in Tokyo in 1918.
Top Lessons
Honesty without tact
Botchan is right about Red Shirt and nearly always wrong about how to deal with him. Sōseki lets the reader laugh at the narrator's rashness while still siding with his refusal to lie, so the novel holds up plain honesty as precious and also shows its cost when it lacks prudence.
Small debts and large principles
Botchan insists on repaying one and a half sen for a glass of ice water and walks to Red Shirt's house at night to refuse a raise taken from Koga's salary. The comedy of tiny sums carries a serious point: a person who will not be bought cheaply will not be bought at all.
Kiyo's love as the measure
The book opens and closes with Kiyo. Away from her, Botchan realises she has better qualities than the man she praises. Her unearned affection is the standard against which the polished double-dealing of the staff room is judged.
Surface manners and real character
Red Shirt is gentle, refined and soft-spoken; Porcupine is rough and loud. Botchan's mistake is to trust the first and suspect the second. The novel teaches readers to judge by deeds over manners.
Verified Quotes
“Because of an hereditary recklessness, I have been playing always a losing game since my childhood.”
“Kiyo has been praising me as unselfish and straight, but she is a person of sterling qualities far more than I whom she praises.”
“Just think,—if the honest does not win, what else is there in this world that will win?”
“They seem to believe that one must do wrong in order to succeed.”
“Master Darling is simple and straight like a split bamboo by disposition,” it says, “only too explosive.”
“A man deserves no confidence unless he is as straight as the bamboo.”
“So Kiyo’s grave is in the Yogen temple at Kobinata.”
Medical Lens
Medicine is incidental. The narrator dislocates bones in his boyhood jump, eats raw eggs for nourishment in his lodgings, and in the closing pages Kiyo dies of pneumonia, then a common cause of death among the elderly before antibiotics. Red Shirt's claim that he wears red flannel for his health is played for comedy. The novel offers no sustained portrait of illness or of physicians.
- Chapter I
The boyhood jump from the second floor, which lays him up for a week, and his father's scorn at bones dislocated by so short a fall.
- Chapter XI
Kiyo's death from pneumonia in February and her deathbed request about her grave.