From Oct. 28, 1900, until Dec. 5, 1902, Natsume Soseki lived in Clapham, a district of South London. Ordered to England by the Meiji government, Soseki, without sufficient funds to study formally and with little else to do apart from the occasional cycle ride or part-time tutoring, spent most of this unhappy time in his room, reading and formulating his "Theory of Literature," published in 1907. The stress of life in London, and his unrelenting loneliness, pushed Soseki to the brink of madness.

Born in 1867 and dying from stomach ulcer complications in 1916, Soseki lived almost entirely within the Meiji Era (1868-1912) and is arguably that era's greatest novelist. His complicated upbringing — being raised by servants, the divorce of his foster parents, his return at 9 to his mother and father (whom he had believed to be his grandparents) and the early death of his natural mother — provided Soseki ample material for his later writings. While some of his works, notably the Arthurian "Kairo-ko" and "I Am a Cat," contain elements of fantasy, myth, and satire, it is "Kokoro," "Botchan," and the trilogy comprising "Sanshiro," "And Then" and "The Gate" that draw on these autobiographical sources.

"Sanshiro," first published in serial form in Asahi Shimbun in 1908, tells the story of the 23-year-old eponymous hero, who has left his home in rural Kyushu to study at the Imperial University. Traveling on various trains from Saigawa to Tokyo by way of Kyoto and Nagoya (in his translator's notes, Jay Rubin provides a trainspotter's breakdown of the possible route and timetable), Sanshiro, homesick and sleepy, meets a strange woman with whom he spends a chaste and somewhat embarrassing night in a cheap inn. The woman calls Sanshiro a coward for not reacting to her obvious advances; later his mother iterates the assessment and Sanshiro grudgingly agrees.