Kansuke Naka was a student of Natsume Sōseki, and it was Sōseki's influence and support that led to Naka's childhood memoir first being published as a serial in Asahi Shinbun in 1913 (part I) and 1915 (part II). Publication in book form followed in 1922, after Sōseki's death, and from the 1930s on the memoir gradually became established as a Japanese favourite. Sato tells us in his introduction that it reached a cumulative total of a million sales in Japan in 2006. Reading between the lines, it looks as though Sato must be at least partly to blame for the long delay before the appearance of an English translation - he started working on it in the late sixties and first published some excerpts from the work-in-progress in 1972...

Naka writes about his childhood in Meiji-era suburban Tokyo (the 1880s and 90s). His father belonged to the "gentry" class, but was not especially well off - he started off as an estate administrator, and under the new régime went into business with his former feudal lord. Young Kansuke was a sickly child (as he tells us every other page or so, throughout the book), and was obviously rather too much fussed-over by the aunt who acted as his nanny. But he describes very charmingly the life of those times, when popular culture was still struggling to assimilate the changes being imposed on it. There's a lot about Buddhist festivals, fairs, entertainments, street-life, school, and about the normal preoccupations of childhood - toys, games, friends and playmates, etc.

A lot of the emphasis of the book seems to be Naka's desire to undermine the idea that Japaneseness necessarily revolves around nationalism and militarism - we have to laugh at wimpy little Kansuke re-enacting the 16th century sword fights from his story books in desperate hand-to-hand combat with his elderly aunt, and everyone in the book who embodies any kind of macho martial spirit - school bullies, a jingoistic teacher, Kansuke's big brother - is made to seem foolish. Flowers, insects, Buddhism, painting and poetry are clearly much more important. Sumiko Yano's drawings of cute little figures in kimonos flying kites almost manage to push this over into kitsch, but the genuine feeling and modesty of Naka's writing just about manages to save it. ( )

A really beautiful evocation of childhood in newly modernized Japan ( )