Youth

Koizumi Jun’ichi comes to Tokyo hoping to become a writer. He visits established authors, finds a modest room and encounters people whose words and gestures unsettle the ideas he brought from home.

A medical student becomes his companion in conversations about individualism, convention, art and the claims of everyday life. Other encounters draw him toward desires he cannot comfortably name: a neighboring girl’s visits, a geisha’s card and a widow’s invitation to Hakone. His diary records the distance between the explanations he gives himself and the impulses that move him.

Mori Ōgai’s novel moves from Tokyo streets and literary gatherings to theaters, railway compartments and hot-spring inns. Argument and observation share its pages with embarrassment, loneliness and the uncertain beginnings of artistic purpose.