"You have no nerve at all, do you."With those words from a woman he will never see again, Sanshir¿'s journey to Tokyo truly begins. Published in 1908, Natsume S¿seki's Sanshir¿ is one of the most subtly perfect coming-of-age stories ever written.Ogawa Sanshir¿ is twenty-three, fresh out of his provincial college in Kumamoto, and arriving at Tokyo Imperial University with a head full of vague ambitions and no preparation for what he finds in the city. A stranger on the train tells him Japan is doomed. A woman standing by a pond glances at him once, and that one glance changes his life. He has entered, as his fast-talking friend Yojir¿ informs him, three worlds at once-the academic, the real, and the imaginary-and he is not sure which one is the one where he belongs.Sanshir¿ is a novel about the distance between what a young man sees and what he understands. Sanshir¿ watches everything and misses everything. He is observant, earnest, paralyzed at every decisive moment, and so thoroughly out of his depth that the reader grasps what is happening to him long before he does. S¿seki handles his hero with a tenderness that never becomes pity and an irony that never becomes contempt.This new translation by Kenji Weaver, whose acclaimed translation of S¿seki's Kokoro introduced a new generation of English readers to Japan's greatest novelist of the Meiji era, captures the novel's luminous stillness and psychological depth in clean and highly readable English.