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It's not that you've done something wrong! It's that you haven't done anything. The critical moment in this book will seem so familiar to you: you've not done something like it hundreds of times, or realized you were in danger of not doing it. A conversation must be had. You gotta break up with someone, or tell them you're in love with them. It's scary. You don't do it. These moments don't usually become crucial turning points in your life. You just move on, maybe a few degrees less happy than you might have been.

But this is what Soseki is getting into, in this landmark Japanese novel from 1914. What if that was the crucial moment? What if it changed everything? (view spoiler)[Sensei fails to ask a woman to marry him. (One senses a certain lack of urgency, one has to admit.) He fails to tell his friend that he's even thinking about it. Finally, in the nick of time, he asks the woman - but it's too late, now it seems like a betrayal to his friend, who was also into the woman, and who now commits suicide. The tragedy poisons Sensei's arid marriage, and he finally decides to put everyone out of his misery and kill himself. (hide spoiler)] He says all this in one of those "Just thought I'd explain a few things" 80-page letters that only happen in books. In real life it would stop mid-sentence on page two as the recipient lost interest. The letter is to his protege, and what even is he proteging? Like, what do any of these people do? They do nothing. They're "scholars," which, true, is a thing people legitimately used to say, but not because it wasn't bullshit.

Listen, these are a lot of awfully strong feelings these men are having about each other and not the woman, who's barely a character at all. When the student hears that Sensei is in trouble, he (view spoiler)[just gets up and walks out of the room his father is dying in, just in case he might be in time to watch Sensei die instead. This is a deeply weird moment. (hide spoiler)] How gay is it? I can't really get a read on it. Some online research indicates that no one else can either but I'm definitely not the first person to ask the question.

Soseki was the first great novelist of the Meiji Restoration, when Japan sortof opened up to the world and a new era of Japanese novels began. Kokoro is a subtle, anguished book. It opens up this whole aching underground river of memories for me - things I could have said, or said sooner, or said better. The one (sentence) that got away. Are there things you should be saying right now to someone? I'm seriously asking! I'm nosy! Tell me about your buried angst! And then maybe go have that talk with that person, before everyone ends up dead.