NATSUME SOSEKI is widely recognised to be Japan's greatest modern novelist. Born Natsume Kinnosukein Edo in 1867, the year before the city was renamed Tokyo, he survived a lonely childhood, being traded between foster and biological parents. At the age of twenty-two, Natsume chose from a Chinese source the defiantly playful pen name Soseki ("Garglestone") to signify his own sense of eccentricity. Though hoping to become a writer as early as the age of fourteen, Soseki chose the more respectable path of English literature scholar, and was sent to London by the Ministry of Education in 1900 for two years. In 1907, Soseki took to writing full time. His early works relied on a freewheeling sense of humour, but they darkened as Soseki wrestled with increasingly debilitating bouts of depression and illness. He died in 1916 with his last and longest novel still unfinished.Each new generation of Japanese readers rediscovers Soseki, while Western readers find in him a modern intellect doing battle in familiar territory, a truly original voice among those artists of the world who have most fully grasped the modern experience.