Kokoro
Soseki is to Japanese literature what Dickens is to English: the central figure. Kokoro (meaning "heart/mind"), published in 1914, is a meditation on loneliness, honor, and the transition from Meiji-era to modern Japan. The Sensei's final letter is a devastating set piece, among the most wrenching in world fiction.
Two of the three parts are a young man observing an older one who will not talk, and readers describe "quite a navel staring book" where nothing happens until the letter arrives. The narrator draws real irritation, "a dull and faintly irritating student" who watches when he should press. Sensei fares worse with some: the wise-mentor billing goes to a man readers find self-centered and "patently without wisdom and thus unworthy of the role." The late revelation is telegraphed well before it lands. And the tone never lifts, "tedious, dripping with pathos," until one reader reports the plain outcome: "by the end I cared about no one in this book."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
