Letter from New York City
March 2025
Dear Readers,
Though the first day of spring is still a couple of weeks away, it feels like we are getting a jump on the literary season this month. We have lots of events coming up, not to mention several new books: a darkly hilarious novel by Swiss author Markus Werner, a madcap political crime caper by Jean Echenoz, the much-buzzed-about new novel on millennial freelance life by Italian Vincenzo Latronico, new poetry by Ron Padgett, a picture book about a magical watering can, and a new book by Julian Barnes from Notting Hill Editions.
You can learn more about some of these books and find more information about the events happening around NYC all month below.
Happy reading!
The NYRB Staff
Hidden Gems: The Gate
B-sides and other lesser-known books from the NYRB Classics Series
In his introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of Natsume Sōseki’s The Gate, Pico Iyer makes a bold claim: that Japanese literature “is often about nothing happening.” Iyer qualifies this statement by suggesting that the nothingness that characterizes Japanese stories is only “nothing” to the eyes of an inattentive reader. “To live in Japan,” he writes, “to walk through its complex nets of unstatedness, is to receive a rigorous training in attention. You learn to read the small print of life.” The Gate is nothing if not a master class in reading between the lines, of noticing what goes unsaid, what does not happen, who is absent from a scene and what a character chooses not to do. It is even more fitting, then, that The Gate should be included on our list of sleeper hits in the NYRB Classics. It’s a quiet novel, with a quiet but passionate fandom—one that has existed over a hundred years.
Sōseki was born in 1867 in the Ushigome Babashita-Yokomachi neighborhood in the city of Edo, later renamed to Tokyo. His wealthy parents, elderly when he was born, gave Sōseki up for adoption at a year old. He was taken in by a family for the next eight years, only to be returned to his biological family after his adoptive parents divorced. Sōseki began writing in middle school (equivalent to US grades 7–9) after meeting the poet Masaoka Shiki, who introduced him to the art of haiku. Sōseki and Shiki would remain friends until Shiki’s death, a relationship that had a profound influence on Sōseki’s academic and professional life. Sōseki would go on to major in English at College of Letters at Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo), and after graduate school, he went on to be a teacher.
Natsume Sōseki on September 13, 1912, the day of Emperor Meiji’s funeral
Natsume Sōseki’s lodgings in London
In 1900, Sōseki was sent to the UK by the Japanese Ministry of Education to study English literature. Famously, the two years Sōseki spent in London were the most miserable of his life. As Iyer writes in his intro to The Gate, Sōseki found himself bewildered by the London transportation system, offended by patronizing Brits who tried to explain their culture to him despite the fact he’d studied it his whole life, resentful of the awkwardness of his smaller physical stature among the Anglo-Saxon hoards, and displeased by the city’s bleak boarding houses. “Among English gentlemen I lived in misery, like a poor dog that had strayed among a pack of wolves,” he wrote in the preface to one of his novels. Though he made friends and successfully honed his expertise in English literature, he suffered from a “nervous depression” his entire time abroad and, indeed, for the rest of his life.
It wasn’t until Sōseki returned to Japan in 1903, now as a university lecturer in Tokyo, that he began his literary career in earnest. His first published works were haikus and literary sketches picked up by literary magazines, including one edited by his mentor Shiki. His first big success came with his novel I am a Cat, a satire originally published in serial form between 1905 and 1906. Narrated by an anthropomorphized cat, the novel was intended to be a single short story but grew into a longer work, one that is still assigned to Japanese schoolchildren today. The novel depicts middle-class Japanese life through the eyes of its cat hero, who is owned by a middle-school English teacher named Kushami, translated in English editions as “Mr. Sneaze.”
Cover of the 1906 English edition of I am a Cat
Sōseki-Sanbo, the author’s home and site of his popular Thursday salon
Sōseki proved a prolific writer, penning more successful novels, including the celebrated work Botchan (Little Master) and popular short stories. By 1907, just a few years after returning from London, Sōseki was able to retire from his university job to write full-time, publishing as many as four books a year. He also began a literary salon called Mokuyokai out of his home, Sōseki-Sanbo. The salon met every Thursday and became a cultural staple for locals and admirers of Sōseki who came to Tokyo to meet him.
Pages from the manuscript for The Gate
Sōseki began work on The Gate, which would be his eleventh novel, in 1909. The final book in a trilogy that includes Sōseki’s other novels Sanshirō and Sorekara, The Gate is a deceptively simple story about a childless middle-aged couple, Sōsuke and Oyone. As Iyer describes in his introduction to the NYRB Classics edition, not much happens in the plot of the novel. We see Sōsuke and Oyone living out their rather humdrum lives in Tokyo, going to work, visiting the bathhouse, shopping on a Sunday, posting letters. There is a definitive sense of stasis, of the characters being trapped in some sort of inertia, one potentially of their own choosing. After all, as Iyer writes, “[Sōseki’s] protagonists are masters of doing nothing at all.” As the novel progresses, however, the reader is made privy to the drama and tragedy at the core of the couple’s life, a past that comes back to haunt Sōsuke.
While writing The Gate, Sōseki began to suffer from painful stomach ulcers and decided to move to Shuzenji in the Izu Peninsula in the hopes that a change of climate would improve his health. Sōseki never returned to full health, however, and died in 1916, at the age of forty-nine. He left his last novel, Meian (Light and Dark), unfinished.
Despite the brevity of Sōseki’s life and career, he became regarded as one of Japan’s foremost writers. He is taught more than almost any other author in Japanese classrooms and, for three decades, his likeness was featured on every newly printed thousand-yen note. In 2016, a century after the author’s death, two Japanese universities collaborated to create an android version of Sōseki capable of delivering lectures on the author’s life and work. A museum was recently established in his honor, the Natsume Sōseki Memorial Museum in Tokyo.
Much of the present-day popularity for Sōseki’s work has been attributed to Haruki Murakami, who has repeatedly named Sōseki his personal favorite among the “Japanese national writers.” Murakami has specifically named The Gate, which Sōseki considered his favorite of his own novels, as one that he feels especially connected to, a sentiment echoed by readers all over the world.
The library at the Natsume Sōseki Memorial Museum
A thousand-yen note featuring Sōseki’s likeness on the back
The Sōseki android at Nishogakusha University
The Gate will be available at 25% off on our website for the next few days.
A New Picture Book Illustrated by Marie Dorléans
This month, NYRB Kids will publish The Watering Can, a new picture book written by the author and musician Julien Baer and illustrated by Marie Dorléans, who wrote and illustrated Our Fort, also published by NYRB Kids. The book, which was originally published in France, follows a girl named Nina who discovers a discarded watering can with hidden magical powers.
Take a peek at the inside of The Watering Can below:
The Watering Can goes on sale March 11 but is available for purchase on our website now.
A Poem by Ron Padgett
A new collection of poetry by Ron Padgett joins the NYRB Poets series on March 11. The collection, Pink Dust, includes poems Padgett wrote during the height of pandemic lockdown, as well as an extensive set of poems meditating on aging (assembled in a section titled “Geezer” in the book). Padgett reflects on themes one can find across his vast body of work—the delight of everyday objects and routine, love, home, the ephemeral. The poems explore memories of Mexico and of dead friends, riff on Proust and William Carlos Williams and Haydn, and celebrate simple pleasures like baking and using an eraser. Below is a poem from the collection about another of those everyday pleasures—one not so everyday for Padgett’s narrator, as it turns out:
As a young adult
I found my heart beating
in odd rhythms
whenever I drank a cup of coffee,
so I stopped.
In those days
it was almost impossible
to get decaffeinated coffee
in Europe, so it was sad
to be in a café in Paris
or a bar in Rome,
though the sadness
had a beauty of its own.
Many decaffeinated years went by,
and I found myself
in Vienna, alone
in the elegant old coffeehouse
of the Hotel Sacher,
and I let go
with a full-bore cup
and a Sacher torte and lit up
like a palace full of sparkling people,
and there was Lenin
over there, and Freud,
and psychoanalysis and history
rising into the air hazy
with the smoke of cognition
and I knew that finally I was in
a world I had been longing for
without even knowing it.
We will be celebrating the publication of Pink Dust with a launch reading at The Poetry Project in New York City on Wednesday, March 12. More details in the events roundup below.
Photo: Ron Padgett © John Sarsgard
Upcoming Events
Monday, March 10, 7pm ET at The 92nd Street Y, NYC: Join a panel of writers and Tove Jansson enthusiasts—Alexander Chee, Rivka Galchen, Leanne Shapton, and Kate Zambreno—for a discussion and celebration of the beloved Finnish author, moderated by author Makenna Goodman. Tickets available here.
Tuesday, March 11, 7pm ET at Community Bookstore, Brooklyn: Mark Polizzotti, the translator of the NYRB Classics edition of Jean Echenoz’s Command Performance, will discuss the book with writer and critic Christian Lorentzen at Community Bookstore. More information here.
Tuesday, March 11, 6:30pm ET at NYU Casa Italiana, NYC: Maurizio Serra will discuss his new book, Malaparte: A Biography, with translator Stephen Twilley, Andrea Capra, and Franco Baldassi. RSVP here.
Wednesday, March 12, 7:30pm ET at The Poetry Project, NYC: Ron Padgett reads from his new poetry collection, Pink Dust. Tickets available here.
Monday, March 17, 6:30pm ET at the Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History: A discussion between two Beyond Architecture essayists, architect Vishaan Chakrabarti and landscape architect Lisa Switkin, moderated by Jorge Otero-Pailos. More information here.
March with Thoreau
Our monthly foray into Henry David Thoreau’s The Journal: 1837–1861. This month, we have an entry from March 21, 1853. Thoreau was thirty-five and shaking off the frost.
March 21. Morning along the river.
Might not my Journal be called “Field Notes?”
I see a honey-bee about my boat, apparently attracted by the beeswax (if there is any) in the grafting-wax with which I have luted it. There are many; one is caught and killed in it.
P.M.—To Kibbe Place.
It is a genial and reassuring day; the mere warmth of the west wind amounts almost to balminess. The softness of the air mollifies our own dry and congealed substance. I sit down by a wall to see if I can muse again. We are affected like the earth, and yield to the elemental tenderness; winter breaks up within us; the frost is coming out of me, and I am heaved like the road; accumulated masses of ice and snow dissolve, and thoughts like a freshet pour down unwonted channels. Roads lead elsewhither than to Carlisle and Sudbury. Our experience does not wear upon us. It is seen to be fabulous or symbolical, and the future is worth expecting. In all my walking I have not reached the top of the earth yet.
Painting: Spring Thaw, Jindřich Prucha, ~1909.
March Books
THE FROG IN THE THROAT
by Markus Werner
COMMAND PERFORMANCE
by Jean Echenoz
PERFECTION
by Vincenzo Latronico
PINK DUST
by Ron Padgett
WATERING CAN
by Julien Baer
illustrated by Marie Dorléans
OUTRAGE
by Ian Nairn
CHANGING MY MIND
by Julian Barnes
The March selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club is Sun City by Tove Jansson. If you join the NYRB Classics Book Club by Wednesday, March 12, Sun City will be your first selection.
In the Press
“And now for something completely madcap… if a whip-smart escape is what you’re looking for—along with some tips on how to dress—you won’t want to miss Command Performance.” —Kai Maristed, World Literature Today, on Command Performance by Jean Echenoz
“Sun City is not a story in which we see old ladies get their groove back, but one in which Jansson tries to envision what a good life might look like in these circumstances, in an artificial community whose sole purpose is to give you a place to wait out the time you have left.” —B. D. McClay, The Washington Post, on Sun City by Tove Jansson
“But where is reality, Latronico asks in this sharp, deliciously pessimistic novel…. Perfection transcends its satire of 2010s hipsterdom through the depth of Latronico’s sociological observations.” —Thomas McMullan, The Guardian, on Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
Image at top of newsletter: Spot art from The Watering Can by Julien Baer, illustrated by Marie Dorléans
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