Kokoro in the High School Textbook

The best-known version of Natsume Sōseki’s novel Kokoro (1914) is nine chapters long. I make this statement on the basis that students in Japanese high schools most often read Chapters 40 through 48 of the last part of the novel. Since other readers who read the novel in its entirety also read these chapters, we can say that the cultural knowledge about Kokoro, held by the greatest number of readers, converges upon this nine-chapter span. If canonicity involves the inclusion of a text in the “institutional forms of syllabus and curriculum,” as the literary scholar John Guillory argues in his influential study of canon formation,1 then there is no doubt that Kokoro occupies a central place in the canon. Along with a handful of other works,2 it has achieved the status of a “standard work” (teiban) in high school kokugo (national language) textbooks. A teacher’s manual explains Kokoro’s inclusion as follows: