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#JapaneseJune Book #3.

It took me a lot longer to read this book than it really should have, especially as it was on the Kindle. Thank goodness for long train journeys to and from work otherwise I might never have got to the end of this before the end of June!

I thought that Sanshiro would be right up my alley but unfortunately it wasn't. For a classic, I couldn't really understand the hype this time around. It follows the character of Sanshiro, who has moved from the countryside to the big city of Tokyo to study at university. We follow him through his various new experiences, such as riding public transport for the first time, meeting new people, his first experiences with women, intellectual stimulation, etc. Unfortunately I didn't feel like I really got to know Sanshiro, despite being stuck with him the entire book.

For the most part, I found the characters quite uninteresting and devoid of individual personality (apart from Sanshiro's closest friend Yojiro), and didn't particularly warm to any of them. Sanshiro's love interest, Mineko, I also found to be quite unappealing. Her moods irritated me, and I didn't understand Sanshiro's romantic obsession with her. It bored me more than anything else.

Not to say that this is a badly-written book - some of the descriptions and passages were very pretty and lovely to read, and there were points where I did get quite involved with certain events that happened throughout the course of the novel. However, ultimately I felt they didn't really lead to anywhere, and I was more relieved than anything else to find I'd finished the book. I actually prefered the introduction in this volume (written by the one and only Haruki Murakami!)

I wouldn't really recommend this, but I'm sure many others will find a lot more to appreciate in this book than I did.