Sanshirō

Summary

Sanshirō follows Ogawa Sanshirō, a young graduate of the higher school in Kumamoto, through his first autumn and winter as a student at Tokyo Imperial University in the late Meiji period. The novel opens on the long train journey from Kyushu. A woman traveling alone, whose husband is working in Manchuria, shares his inn room in Nagoya when no other is available; he is too timid to respond to her, and at parting she remarks on his lack of courage, a comment that stings him for days. On the train he also meets a sardonic man with a moustache who eats peaches, mocks Japan's pride in its recent victories, and remarks that the country will perish; this is later revealed to be Hirota, an unmarried English teacher at a higher school. In Tokyo Sanshirō feels lost amid streetcars, crowds and lectures. His mother's acquaintance Nonomiya Sōhachi, a quiet physicist measuring the pressure of light in a basement laboratory, introduces him to the life of research. By the campus pond he sees a young woman holding a fan, Satomi Mineko, who drops a flower near him as she passes; the moment stays with him for the rest of the book. Through the cheerful schemer Sasaki Yojirō, who lodges with Hirota, Sanshirō enters a circle that includes Hirota, Nonomiya, Nonomiya's younger sister Yoshiko, Mineko, and the painter Haraguchi. Sanshirō comes to think of his life as divided among three worlds: the old world of his mother and home in Kyushu, where a girl named Omitsu is hoped to be his bride; the calm world of learning represented by Hirota and Nonomiya; and the bright, unsettling world of fashionable society and Mineko. On an outing to see chrysanthemum dolls, Mineko and Sanshirō leave the group and sit by a stream, where she calls them stray sheep. Yojirō loses money he was to repay, Sanshirō lends him his own, and Mineko lends Sanshirō money in turn, tying them in small obligations. Yojirō anonymously publishes an essay praising Hirota in hope of winning him a university post; when the authorship is wrongly pinned on Sanshirō, the scheme collapses and Yojirō must confess to Hirota. Haraguchi paints Mineko's portrait in the pose of the day by the pond. Before Sanshirō declares himself, Mineko becomes engaged by arrangement to another man; when Sanshirō returns her money outside her church, she murmurs a verse of confession from the Psalms. He falls ill with influenza. In the last chapter, after her wedding, the friends visit the exhibition where the portrait hangs, and Sanshirō, looking at it, can only murmur the words stray sheep. The novel was serialized in the Asahi Shimbun from September to December 1908 and published as a book in 1909.

Top Lessons

• Leaving home is harder than it looks

  Sanshirō arrives in Tokyo believing the university will open the world to him, but finds himself bewildered by crowds, streetcars and confident people. His sense of three worlds, home, learning and society, shows a young person trying to belong to all of them and fully belonging to none.

• Hesitation has consequences

  From the inn in Nagoya to his last meeting with Mineko, Sanshirō waits, wonders and never acts. Sōseki shows that indecision is itself a choice: by the time he understands what he feels, Mineko is engaged to another man.

• Learning and wisdom

  Nonomiya measures the pressure of light with patient devotion, and Hirota reads widely and gives sharp judgments while refusing to seek advancement. Yojirō, by contrast, schemes for his teacher's promotion. The novel asks what learning is for and what it can and cannot give a person.

• Stray sheep

  Mineko's phrase stray sheep, spoken by the stream and repeated by Sanshirō at the end, names the drift of two young people between old customs and new freedoms. The biblical image, which Mineko knows from her Christian upbringing, gives the comedy of the novel an undertone of longing.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Medical material is incidental. Staying overnight at Nonomiya's house on the city's edge, Sanshirō hears a cry and then sees the body of a young woman killed by a train, a death the novel presents as apparently self-inflicted and which haunts him. Nonomiya's sister Yoshiko is a hospital patient when Sanshirō first meets her, and he himself falls ill with influenza near the end, his fever coinciding with the loss of Mineko. Hirota's account of a dream in which he meets a girl he glimpsed long before, unchanged by time, is a quiet study of memory and longing.

• Early chapters (night at Nonomiya's house)

  Sanshirō hears a voice near the railway line and then sees the body of a young woman struck by a train.

• Later chapters (Hirota's dream)

  Hirota tells Sanshirō of dreaming that he met a girl from his youth who had not aged.

• Final chapters

  Sanshirō takes to his bed with influenza after returning Mineko's money.