The gate japanese novel pdf download

To me, it's very easy to see why Soseki is considered, in Japan, the pre-eminent Japanese author. To me, he's one of the pre-eminent authors period. For a detailed review of The Gate with an illuminating Zen slant check Eddie Watkins's piece , which I can't better here.

Meanwhile, here's the neglected early modernist you've been searching for, the well-mannered eastern answer to Kafka and Knut Hamsun's Mysteries , and a conjurer of cathedrals from the dusty loungerooms of the everyman the like of which I doubt have been equalled. Despite yourself, though his books may pass like daydreams, you'll be wiser when they're over, but just how or why I'm still trying to fathom.

A master. View all 9 comments. The Gate reminds me in a way other Japanese novels I had read before. Almost two- thirds of the narrative here is only an evocation of small every day deeds of two main protagonists, Sosuke and Oyone.

Seemingly nothing happens. Sosuke wakes up, goes to his office, walks through six days of a week in kind of dreamy daze thinking of Sunday and how he would spend it. Slow The Gate reminds me in a way other Japanese novels I had read before.

Slowly, very slowly emerges a picture of rather unfulfilled man, undecided and frozen if it comes to undertake any vital decision. But on the other hand Sosuke is a man very devoted to his wife and completely resigned with fate life had offered to them. Only last part of the novel reveals secrets from the past of married couple and sheds light why they live like social outcasts.

Sosuke is such an irritating figure at times. His apathy, his inertia make you yell at him: get a grip, man. You need sometimes to make a choice, there is no sense at all let life to throw you like a leaf in the wind. O my, how I understand Sosuke.

How often I put the moment to make a decision aside. How many times I felt almost paralyzed with fear to change something in my life. How I dreaded to pass that gate. In Sosuke case it is a gate to Buddhist retreat but it has quite metaphorical meaning as well. There are people designed to stay before the gate and never enter it. Due many reasons. Fear, opportunism, cowardice, shame. There are so many factors that restrict us.

Some shackles exist only in our minds, others may be even real. He was someone destined neither to pass through the gate nor to be satisfied with never having passed through it. View all 4 comments. The vicissitudes. I want to re-read before commenting. A dazzling novel though. Aug 26, Inderjit Sanghera rated it really liked it. The ambience which Soseki creates in 'The Gate' reflects the psychological state which the two lead characters, Sosuke and Oyone find themselves in.

The gentle undulations of their interactions and and the leisurely, quotidian way in which Soseki describes their uneventful lives masks a secret for which they have not only been ostracised by their families, but for which both appear to be doing penance throughout the novel; whether it be the loss of Sosuke's sense of exuberance as he settles for The ambience which Soseki creates in 'The Gate' reflects the psychological state which the two lead characters, Sosuke and Oyone find themselves in.

The gentle undulations of their interactions and and the leisurely, quotidian way in which Soseki describes their uneventful lives masks a secret for which they have not only been ostracised by their families, but for which both appear to be doing penance throughout the novel; whether it be the loss of Sosuke's sense of exuberance as he settles for a mundane and mediocre existence is a lowly clerk, or of Oyone's inability to have a child, the emptiness which permeates their lives made up for by the abundance of love which flows between them.

Their love is not a passionate or intense one, but one which is marked with commonplace exchanges; whether Sosuke can buy a new scarf of Oyone a new scarf or what they would eat for dinner that evening, the very ordinariness of their conversations concealing the intensity of the emotional connection which exists between the two.

There is something quintessentially Japanese about Soseki's understated style; from the gradual uncovering of Sosuke and Oyone's secret about how they met and fell in love beneath the surreptitious snowfall of a long winter whilst Oyone was married to Sosuke's friend, to the mysterious robberies which take place in the house of a wealthy neighbour or the spectre of Sosuke's brother who haunts their house and disturbs the gentle rhythm of their lives.

His spiritual crisis takes him to a zen temple, where he engages in a bout of self-reflection before being dismissed by the priest as being spiritually superficial, following which he returns to his life with Oyone and the novel ends as only a Soseki one can; with the protagonist cutting his nails.

For pages this book moved along at its minimalist pace, the protagonist and his wife making do in a quotidian existence. Add a talking cat, some explicit sex and a few Western pop culture references, you get Murakami; add a laugh-track, you get Seinfeld. Turn the page, and the protagonist is off on a Zen vacation. He is given a koan to think on: What was his original face before his parents were born? Taking this gate literally assures a meditative failure. Not that I'm any kind of Zen expert.

But I think we are meant to think about the pages of our lives, how there was always this river, but waters change course. May 21, Mariel rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: you couldn't keep the great unknown from making you mad. Realizing that both this Sunday and the fine weather that had accompanied it had drawn to a close, a certain mood came over him: a sense that such things did not last for long, and that this was a great pity.

Do you ever feel like you're a better person alone? When Sosuke bows out of meetings not avoided this time it is said about him that he looks much older than his years. The sad sack flat line of a life line read by cold palm bows. On your knees, look up and grateful. It must get you down to Realizing that both this Sunday and the fine weather that had accompanied it had drawn to a close, a certain mood came over him: a sense that such things did not last for long, and that this was a great pity.

It must get you down to be so grateful. I know the feeling of listening to the nice person you listen to because it was easy at first that they never asked you to explain the life detail stuff you never want to explain. Smile, hope you are nodding in the appropriate places. Hey, you just bought two more games for your new console.

Actually, my name isn't Marie Never mind. You don't have any friends. University drop outs Sosuke and I. Start the timer no the tick tock of I still have time to do what I wanted to do. Just don't ask me to explain what I have been doing all of this time. He probably didn't need to tell me that he dreads running into someone he knew from his past. I understand. Sosuke runs tired on the bottom of the hamster conversational wheel.

It can't go this way forever. Well, things have to get better than they are now. You look forward to Sunday. You don't have to go to work on Sundays. Do you know that feeling of freedom when you wake up and right when you catch yourself checking the alarm clock with dread you remember that you are off that day and can sleep in?

Sosuke is torn between that feeling and having the time for a really good hot bath. That poor bastard.

That poor bastard catches himself having time to read advertisements on the daily commute. The poor bastard isn't too anxious to notice them, this time I wish he had had something better to read. If only he hadn't given up reading with his school days. When he's living every day for his one day and then that one day isn't big enough to fit in everything good he sags a little more.

I was so happy when Sosuke allows himself to spend his spare change on a little inflatable kids toy. It sounded really cool though I had no idea what it is. I like stupid little toys too. Not too long ago I read the comic Falling Words and one of the strips was about a man who takes his son he can't say no to to one of these markets.

Sosuke would love to have a little kid he couldn't say no to. His wife Oyone smiles in bemusement and says but we don't have any children. She doesn't understand. Sosuke will do what he can't help and make another remark that life would be different if there were children. When his happy reverie of imagining buying his wife some new clothing is spoiled by remembering that he should have done such a nice thing a long time ago Well, damn but he probably didn't need to tell me for I already knew what he was talking about.

Oyone and Sosuke have each other, they are lucky to have each other. They say the wrong thing and walk on each other's soul egg shells or is it hot coals to try and say the right thing that's never the right thing. It would make all of the difference if they were the reason to smile.

Things will get better. If he didn't have to work every day and if she had a room in the house to herself after his entitled younger brother moves in thinking about this Koroku even now makes me feel anxious for her lost personal space and his additional anxiety.

Jim Carrey delivered a moving speech in Dumb and Dumber about this. It is when he turns to the window with tears in his eyes to set the scene they've just found their parakeet with the missing head and all of their booze was stolen and confesses to his not quite as dumb but still dumb friend played by Jeff Daniels that he is sick and tired of having to eek his way through life.

But most of all? He's sick and tired of having nobody. Those are the truest words ever spoken. You could tell Jim Carrey to cheer up and point out that spending their life savings on a van to make it look like a dog wasn't so stupid because chicks love it. Fat lot of good that does when you're having a bad day of one thing after another. If you point out when things have improved after they've slightly improved then you're not annoying and missing the point.

He needed to cry and Sosuke pushes his head closer to the grindstone by not allowing himself to admit what he's truly feeling. Sosuke finally takes ten days off from work he's never missed a day to attend a retreat on zen. Oh, the poor bastard. He was one of those unfortunate souls fated to stand in the gate's shadow, frozen in his tracks, until the day was done. If you suffer, if you meditate long enough Blah blah blah. The monks have the secrets of if you find it out for yourself.

That kind of enlightenment for a guy who is lonely. Some of them mock Sosuke publicly for admitting privately that he was no closer to the answers than on the day he arrived. I wanted to give those monks a very zen knuckle sandwich at this point. If you find self acceptance you will be happier. I have had this feeling when confronted with some obvious self help method. When I was a teenager I watched this film Search and Destroy starring Dennis Hopper as this guru complete with instructional video tapes.

I sat in front of the television set with wide eyes and open mouthed murmured his fist pointy pumping. I don't have to do that. Fast forward to my thirties and I'm still a nitwit and I still apologize for being who I am even though I know I shouldn't. I know all about screw anyone who doesn't like me. I know how Sosuke felt when he went to that retreat for help and how he felt when the meager mental trains that got him through his bleak life broke down. What he wanted was to not do it alone. If those monks hadn't been so lofty they could have talked to him like a human being.

It was really damned cold and hard. I read when his wife confesses to him about that day she drooped home after a meeting with a spiritualist of course he asks her how much she paid for this visit. It is your fault you had those miscarriages and you will never have a baby, you terrible person!

She looks to outside help to feel better and what she pays for is to get shit on. I felt for when she's telling her husband about this all of these years later, in the dark because she can't tell it to his face, and all she needs is to hear it isn't her fault. Sosuke understands nothing of this. Oyone understands nothing of why her husband needs help beyond it will get better, some day. The couple have lived their lives in solitude. Running away from the world.

Perhaps at first to each other, to get comfortable with someone else. I don't know what that is like to not have awkward silences myself. If Sosuke hadn't been ashamed that his friend and her brother happened to leave school my money is on him dropping out anyway. It looked it was going that way after their premarital affair.

If they hadn't drooped their heads in fear of conversations of what are you going to do with your life, why aren't you truly happy, what comes next. It is that kind of solitude. Solitude isn't hard to come by for me these days.

I couldn't live without it but I also wish I could talk to people about stuff I like. I know how Sosuke feels, all right. I know how Oyone feels eating her meals alone, for sure.

If she knows about the world she gleaned it from a newspaper clipping in his pocket to have something to talk about with her husband over meals. They make me sigh. I feel it was because they are not the good thing in anyone's life more than anything else because time stopped and shame set in.

If Sosuke made his wife smile it is partly out of pity. Pity is no good. They are not synchronized in their sympathies, anyway. It felt true to me that they were not and I wish it wasn't this way.

What is there to be ashamed of if you aren't happy every moment of your life? They were not seeking misery they were only looking around at their lives and feeling lonely in it because it was too quiet. It doesn't have to be that kind of quiet. I know you don't have to be like those monks and mock a guy who is asking you for help.

Hey, I understand and it is nothing to be ashamed of. Something like that to get you back on the path of making your own mental fabrics to hang moons on and light up with hey, it is a pretty night out tonight and tomorrow I don't have to work. I thought it was about the perfect ending I've read in a book that it is a bright sunny day.

But it will be winter soon, he goes. That was perfect to the spirit of this book. You can't trick yourself mentally to accept part and parcel something that can be exhausting to live with every day. It is quite possible to feel good sometimes. It drives me a bit nuts sometimes that I can feel pretty good rereading Paterson the part about the guy diving off the waterfall is so incredibly good and other times I wish I had that mental capability to be happy like William Carlos Williams.

Because it feels so simple and if you were right wouldn't you be like that too? The Gate is so true to that feeling that you can't always do it. Maybe you feel pathetic when the girl at work who has two other jobs nags you for not being super cheerful today and you really, really don't want to explain again that you haven't slept in three days and faking happy just isn't worth the effort today.

It isn't your fault she has three jobs, after all, and you don't expect her to smile for you. If they smiled because they just liked you that would be entirely different. That would be the best thing ever. So Sosuke is mildly celebrating that he wasn't among the layoffs at work and how lucky he is that his promised raise is so much lower than was promised because how lucky to get anything at all. It is sunny and he is home again with his wife. It is like when you have a day off on Sunday and your mind is starting to count down the hours until Monday, even if you don't want to count down the hours.

I sometimes felt like Sosuke and Oyone would be better off if they hadn't met but I don't really mean that. It's about not having to trick yourself to not feel what you really feel, right? I feel less pressure to do that if I'm not around other people just telling people I meet what town I live in seems to be an immediate invitation for the university drop out discussion and so often judgmental expression.

But it's not really about that. I don't know how to get into The Gate either for self acceptance and I hope I figure it out some day.

It felt really good to read this book that understood what that is like. Did you know that I owned this book for two years and didn't read it? It's my sixth Soseki. Kokoro and Kusamakura are two of my favorite books ever, also. I was "saving it". I could have had this wonderful read that consoled me. Oh well, I was really happy to have it when I did. View 1 comment.

Shelves: fiction , , nyrb , japan. Sibley fairly enjoyable because I knew there was still another translation from his biography. In fact, they come from the same Japanese text, somewhere informs me the Japanese word mon means gate. So I decided to read it again, from another translator, to see if I could follow the story and to what extent I could enjoy it.

Surprisingly, I could keep going with its 23 chapters with arguable enjoyment; some a bit lengthy on a family comprising Sosuke, his wife Oyone, his brother Koroku and their maid Kiyo. Presumably typical of an ordinary Japanese middle-class family, the characters' dialogues and actions help and guide the readers to better understand their concerns, viewpoints, solutions, etc.

Taken each translated text in terms of its tone and readability into account, two opening paragraphs from Chapter 12 as follows are for you to compare and make your choice to read: Sibley Text THAT MORNING at the office Sosuke commenced the day's tasks in his usual fashion, but his natural concern for the ailing Oyone, exacerbated by vivid recollections of scenes from the previous night by her sickbed that kept flashing before his mind's eye, prevented any satisfactory performance.

He made one bungling effort after another. Then, having waited until noon, he resolved to leave the office. In this state, the work did not go very smoothly, and he made a number of errors. He persevered till noon, then decided to go home. Apr 28, J. Soseki is the master of the slow-burn literary pay-off, more so than his immediate descendant Kawabata.

People apparently like to call this novel a novel about absolutely nothing or doing nothing or various shades of nothingness, which makes no sense when you think about it. It is however, more about the spaces between what isn't happening than what you're actually seeing on the page and that is part of his genius. Pico Iyer's introduction read this afterwards! Spoilers, goddamn you introduction Soseki is the master of the slow-burn literary pay-off, more so than his immediate descendant Kawabata.

Spoilers, goddamn you introduction writers! In the same way that Kawabata said he never really ends his novels, Soseki never really ends a thought or action, it just resolves itself outside the reader's scope and often strings along, like this one, until the last few chapters.

So stick it out. Oyone and Sosuke live a quiet life doing nothing and exchanging pleasantries on a variety of subjects. All is well, until you start to actually learn about them and then the entire tone shifts, and then shifts again! By the end, you're like what the What the Sosuke and Oyone are a middle-aged couple who live a quiet and isolated life. They have no children and barely manage on Sosuke's meager salary. Their days seem uneventful and their relationship routine, but you learn over the course of the book that when they were young they fell in love and sacrificed everything to be together.

In fact, Sosuke took Oyone from his best friend and they have suffered as social outcasts ever since. They feel that their circumstances, especially their childlessness Sosuke and Oyone are a middle-aged couple who live a quiet and isolated life. They feel that their circumstances, especially their childlessness, are the consequence of giving way to youthful passion, the fate of those who dare to act according to their own wishes.

I think another way of looking at it is that they live in a society that does not tolerate missteps, a society in which it is never possible to redeem yourself or change the way you are judged by others. I can see how that might translate into fate. I'm glad I read the introduction after finishing the book rather than before. I appreciated the analysis and I realize there's more to the book than my first impression of it, but I also think it would have skewed my expectations.

As it is, I enjoyed my first reading and I'm prepared to delve deeper now. Dec 12, Dejan rated it really liked it Shelves: classics , japan , fiction , read-in As an elderly couple, they lead a calm yet uneventful life, stoically enduring all their hardship.

Besides fulfilling their basic existential needs, they require nothing else but each other in order to continue living. After nightfall they would sit together, a lamp with a base of dark red bamboo between them, casting elongated shadows in its light.

When their conversation stalled, the only sound to break the silence was the tick-tock of the pendulum clock. However, this is exactly what makes The Gate such an appealing read.

Because, even though the couple leads a life of monotony, the potential to break free from it lies within them. Thus, the ending is no surprise; the couple observes another changing of the seasons on their veranda, gazing through the glass shoji at the sparkling sunlight. May 12, David rated it really liked it Shelves: big-red-circle. Yet I wasn't convinced that the backstories couldn't have been handled with a little more sophistication.

Perhaps less would have been more? It felt a bit "Oh But here's Natsume with ten pages about the deaths of every child they've ever conceived". View 2 comments. Mar 28, Orinoco Womble tidy bag and all rated it it was amazing Shelves: thinking-people-s-books , japanese-authors.

My taste for Japanese literature grows and grows. While the first two of Soseki's novels Botchan and I am a Cat that I found left me unimpressed, this may be because I read them in a Spanish translation I am so glad I did. The main character and his wife first seem like an old married couple of many decades' standing. Further into the text, however, we learn that the My taste for Japanese literature grows and grows. Further into the text, however, we learn that they've only been married for about seven or eight years.

Sosuke seems incredibly passive, letting life just happen to him Oyone, his wife, seems almost an exagerration of the stereotypical Japanese wife of the period early 20th century , always ready with a smile and a cup of tea,seldom expressing an opinion. However, the near-hypnotic quality of the narration draws you in to make discoveries.

Sosuke is not merely a dull paper-pusher with no thoughts of his own beyond mildly cultivating the favour of his wealthy landlord and neighbour. How did this scion of a well-to-do family end up in his tiny house, in his tiny job, with his tiny present and even more miniscule future? Through Oyone's sudden illness and Sosuke's subsequent cogitations, we discover that this passivity is the natural result of decisive, shocking actions in their past, leading them to be only too glad for a quiet, not to say stultified, life.

The narrative itself has a calming effect which makes the issues it reveals all the more powerful. Many such as the central drama are related indirectly, which added to their power when I realised what I'd just read, and what it meant.

Don't publishers realise we want to read for ourselves? We all have "gates" in our lives, and which ones we open and walk through determine which others will be open to us. This novel gave me furiously to think, for which I am profoundly grateful. This is a book which, at first, did nothing for me. It seemed to be an accretion of details of the life of a childless lower middle class couple circa Not until the end of the book does one learn the meaning of the title, The Gate , as the main character, Sosuke goes to a Zen Buddhist temple for ten days to calm his jangled nerves: It was a This is a book which, at first, did nothing for me.

Not until the end of the book does one learn the meaning of the title, The Gate , as the main character, Sosuke goes to a Zen Buddhist temple for ten days to calm his jangled nerves: It was apparent that the telling of such anecdotes was [the monk] Gido's way of trying to fortify Sosuke against renouncing all further pursuit of this path [Zen] as soon as he was back in Tokyo.

He heard the monk out respectfully, but inwardly felt that this great opportunity had already more or less slipped away from him. He had come here expecting the gate to be opened for him. But when he knocked, the gatekeeper, wherever he stood behind the high portals, had not so much as shown his face. Only a disembodied voice could be heard: "It does no good to knock.

Open the gate for yourself and enter. When the friend makes his appearance in Tokyo, Sosuke experiences a massive moral cowardice: But he was left with an ill-defined presentiment that from now on he would have to experience anxious times like this over and over again, to some degree or another. Navigating the site and downloading light novels is fairly easy. A list of available novels is shown when you enter the site, and clicking on one of them will redirect you to a page with the name of the author and a plot summary.

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