For Wednesday: Soseki, Kokoro, Part 3 (Chapters 70-94)

NOTE: Since Part 3 is pretty long, you don't have to completely finish it for Wednesday...but try to read the next 30 or so chapters, which for you should start around the time that K comes to live with them, and ends around he passage where he goes to the university library. Or stop wherever you please...just read enough to answer the questions below.

Q1: Sensei offers us contradictory views of his attitude toward K. On the one hand, he insists his goal was to “make him more human,” and to “infuse in him my own living heat.” But on the other, he is deeply jealous of him and becomes bitter when his ‘cure’ starts taking effect. What part of the story do you think he isn’t telling us (or the Narrator)? What might account for these contradictory reactions?

Q2: Why does Sensei never confess his love to Ojosan (or at least ask her mother to marry her)? He claims at one point that “I was very conscious of that Japanese convention forbade such things.” Do you think this is a cultural issue? Would this story be different in France or Russia at the same time? Or is his reluctance a more universal issue that transcends the taboos of Japanese courtship?

Q3: Why might it be significant that Sensei’s friend is not given a name, but an initial “K,” and bears a striking similarity of Sensei himself? And why do you think Sense is (apparently) unable to see this likeness himself? Or is his goal to make the Narrator see it?

Q4: How do Okusan and Ojosan begin acting differently around K? In other words, how does K’s arrival seem to help explain their relationship with Sensei? Are they as devious as he begins to suspect? Or is he the one manipulating them?