Memory, the burden of

My word this week comes from the book Kokoro by celebrated Japanese writer and scholar Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), first published in 1914 (Edwin McClellan translation published by Tuttle, 1969). His most famous novel, Kokoro, centers around the life of an unhappy university student and the relationship he builds with a reclusive old man he calls “Sensei”, whom one day confides to him the burden of a tragic memory from his youth. As with Soseki’s other late novels, Kokoro deals with themes of alienation, guilt, loneliness and memory set in the context of Japan’s modernization during the final days of the Meiji era.
The character below is Chinese in origin and pronounced xin, for heart. In Japanese it is shin or the more onomatopoetic kokoro, which can also connote mind, spirit, thoughts, feelings, emotions. McClellan explains that the best rendering comes from Lafcadio Hearn, who put it as “the heart of things”.