The man called K, the young Sensei’s friend, who precipitates the crisis with which the novel culminates, in many ways embodies the old world’s strict code of values and ethics, which was coming into such painful conflict with the new Western concepts of individual rights and the primacy of the ego. K’s self-elected death foreshadows the ultimate death of that old world, a world Sōseki himself had inherited and whose unattainable and rapidly vanishing certainties preoccupied him. K’s death by his own hand, shocking and pointless from the perspective of the new values, is nevertheless a crucial
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