Postwar readers, for instance, immediately turned in large numbers to the greatest of their modern writers, Natsume Sōseki, who died in 1916. Sōseki’s collected works, issued in several new editions, remained on the “top ten” lists through 1948. Much of his attractiveness during these uncertain years lay in the unflinching candor with which his fiction explored intimate personal relationships. Affairs of the heart constituted the essence of Sōseki’s many novels, including the revered Kokoro (Heart and Soul). The Sōseki boom seems to have reflected not so much nostalgia for a period in modern
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