Introduction

On the beach at Kamakura one summer, a young university student meets a middle-aged man he comes to call Sensei. Learned but without employment, Sensei lives almost as a recluse with his beautiful wife, visits a friend's grave at Zōshigaya cemetery alone every month, and harbours a deep distrust of humankind. Drawn to him, the student presses again and again to know his past. Only after the death of the Meiji Emperor and the ritual suicide of General Nogi does the student receive a long letter from Sensei: a testament telling how, as a young man, he betrayed his closest friend K for love. A novel of egoism, loneliness and guilt, it is one of the best-selling novels in Japan.