McClellan's translation of Kokoro is not only the definitive English translation of Soseki's novel and the version most widely read in the English-speaking world, it is also considered a first-rate work of English-language literature in its own right. Of these four men, only McClellan is alive today. The characters of the story that unfolds below are Friedrich Hayek, Austrian émigré and winner of the Nobel Prize for economics Edwin McClellan, professor emeritus of Japanese literature at Yale University Russell Kirk, who helped define the postwar American conservative intellectual movement and the great Japanese cultural and literary critic Jun Eto. In the following I would like to familiarize readers with this drama, which illuminates the impact that this novel, a work embodying the soul of the Japanese people in the modern era, had on some of the core figures in postwar American intellectual history.

This is the context in which the United States became the stage for a fascinating drama centered around Soseki Natsume's (see note 1) masterpiece Kokoro. At least during the second half of the twentieth century, the immigrants and refugees who converged on the United States turned the nation into the center of a kind of intellectual whirlpool. What few people know is that his maternal grandfather was one of the polemicists associated with Hajime Kawakami and Soho Tokutomi during the Taisho and early Showa eras. Though still in his fifties, Fukuyama, a third-generation Japanese American, already has a number of important works to his credit, and has played a key role in Western political discourse. Take Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which entered the neoconservative canon soon after its publication. intellectual community a distinctly international flavor that persists today.

Since then, as the world's most powerful nation, the United States has continued to attract talent not only from Europe but from other parts of the world as well. His masterpiece Kokoro (1914) has had a profound impact on intellectual giants in Europe and the U.S., including Friedrich Hayek, Nobel laureate in economics.ĭuring and immediately after World War II, European intellectuals (particularly Jews) crossed the Atlantic in large numbers, stimulating new currents of thought in the United States. Renowned Japanese novelist Soseki Natsume, who witnessed Japan's rapid modernization starting in the late nineteenth century, depicted the lives of intelligentsia in this period.

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