The Innocent

A landmark in modern Japanese literature, The Innocent marks the first-ever complete English translation of Saneatsu Mushanokoji's Omedetaki Hito (1911), also referenced as "The Good-Natured Person". This compact literary masterpiece delves deeply into themes of identity and self-expression in the context of Japan's Meiji Restoration - a time that ended 265 years of national seclusion and ushered in an era of Western influences in art, culture, and thought. A quintessential example of the 'I-novel', this work offers a profound exploration of the revolutionary concept of the 'modern self'.

 

The story centers on a young man's obsessive infatuation with Tsuru, a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl whom he idealizes and longs to marry, yet never speaks to. She becomes, for him, an unattainable symbol, a phantasm of purity. As his emotions blur the line between reality and imagination, the narrative spirals inward, unraveling into an intense introspective journey about love, desire, and the cultivation of the individual self. Mushanokoji's work not only provides a vivid reflection of Japan's cultural transformation but also anticipates preoccupations that later became central to modernist literature worldwide. This edition includes a translator's preface incorporating its historical context.