Of course, to translate from these languages into English is notoriously difficult. Maybe there is another reason. A few years ago, one of our distinguished translators, Meredith McKinney, who has lately been translating medieval and modern Japanese for the Penguin Classics series, made a cheeky suggestion: it was that the translator has to be a better writer than the author she is translating. This because a translator not only has to have mastered every nuance of the original text, but also be able to play all manner of melodies with her native language. How many Australian academics are maestros in English?

McKinney’s finesse was first evident with that feline classic The Pillow Book (2006), by the court diarist Sei Shonagon, a contemporary of Lady Murasaki, the author of The Tale of Genji. In another key entirely, she has also translated the formidable contemporary writer Furui Yoshikichi – his stories, Ravine (Stone Bridge Press, 1997), and his brooding novel White-Haired Melody (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, 2007), the long sentences of which must have been like scaling an Alpine rock face to render. Yoshikichi was once a professor of German, and his books, after McKinney has handled them, read with the intensities of a Thomas Bernhard.

Now we have another kettle of fish – renditions of the famous early modernist Natsume Soseki, a lightly textured writer of sustained subtleties. The key to Soseki was his aplomb as a traveller between the new and the old Japan. As McKinney points out in her deft introduction, Soseki’s life began in 1868 with the tumultuous overthrow of the old Tokugawa shogunate, and ended in 1916, soon after the death of Emperor Meiji. By then the professor of English at the University of Tokyo was a full-time writer widely acknowledged as Japan’s leading novelist.

Soseki began on a light note. I am a Cat (1905), serialised in a magazine, made him instantly popular. He wrote several other novels in a humorous vein, but serious themes were creeping in. His Kusamakura (1906) – ‘Grass Pillow’ is a literal translation – which McKinney translated in 2008, is a bridge between the comic and the tragic themes that were to preoccupy him. Soseki described it as ‘a haiku-style novel, that lives through beauty’, but it was much more than that. It is a play-lette, an almost self-mocking parody of the aesthetic sensibility confronted with the advent of the steam engine. A wonder of the translated text is the sense you get of West meeting East in an impossible prism of sensibilities.

Soseki sensed that the new age was, even for the reclusive, dreaming artist, never far from the battlefield. Kusamakura was published the year Japan defeated Russia in war, a victory that went to the heads of many a nationalist in the East. Still, in the confines of this endlessly literary book, the foppish narrator wishes to hang onto ‘a kind of slowed serenity of deportment not to be found in the real world’. A homicidal, mechanised modernity is rushing towards him, but he will go on, refining himself at the risk of narcissistic absurdity.

Tone is everything in such a work of art. Drollery pirouettes between bathos and pathos. I imagine McKinney worked long and hard to enter Soseki’s Japanese on the right side of the English ledger. I don’t know enough Japanese to judge how well she has done, except to say that you come to feel that in Kusamakura Soseki was shaping the voice of a narrator who would become very useful to his ‘historic themes’: one that is infinitely introspective, isolated, hesitant yet calculatingly passive, as the traditional sources of authority within him seem to melt into the air. Tone is everything here, too: a matter of transmitting a consciousness that is both razor-sharp and hapless, if not impotent.

And so with Kokoro (1914), Soseki’s penultimate novel and generally regarded as his masterpiece. It has two male narrators. One is young: a student, a country boy strangely diffident towards his ailing, Confucian father. The other is a sensei in Tokyo, a cultivated man old enough to be the seeker’s father: indeed the young man adopts the latter as his mentor, ingratiating himself and intruding upon the man’s privacy. For the first half of the book, we are inducted into the young one’s quiet desperation – miserably poised as he is between ‘the images of these twomen, so opposite in social standing, education and character’.

Character is the key term here: the further we read, the less of it the young fellow appears to have. He does not have it in him to thrive in the bright lights of Tokyo. Nor does he have the gumption to consult his own father about the possibility of inheriting the family house and making a decent, civilised life in the country. It is tempting to say of Soseki that he has a Jamesian gift for subverting the essence of the ‘true self’. But you also get the feeling that, rather than penetrate the abyss of the ego, as Westerners might conceive it, Soseki is subtly sketching the social structures that will make of it a nothing. His text keeps putting a burning question before his contemporary readers: what, in this new day and age, is truly worthy of respect?

Still, the young protagonist is fixated on the idea that his mentor can help. Sensei is intelligent, well read; he has a diligent, apparently loyal, wife: surely he possesses some of the ‘truths’ of ‘life’?

It is when we get to ‘Sensei’s Testament’, the last movement of the book, that the structural delicacy of Kokoro reveals itself. This second first-person narrative takes over, and before long we are caught up in the shadowlands of another young heart (Kokoro means ‘heart’, which is also inseparable from ‘mind’).

At the centre of the Sensei’s confession there is a love triangle. Soseki male protagonists tend to be tremulous about sex, their cogitations aflutter in the presence of an available woman. It will be some time yet before modern Japanese society fosters women with minds of their own; but the change is in the air as Kokoro’s men scheme and vacillate, especially when a friend must compete with a friend for the hand of a woman. Dramatically, the Sensei’s tale turns on such a rivalry as he recounts the tragic life of another bright, introverted man estranged from, and dispossessed by, his father.

You can feel what is coming, but nothing quite prepares you for the crater the novel finally excavates: at the bottom of it lie not one but various corpses of Japanese self-worth. The historical resonance is magnified by reference to the famous public figure General Nogi, who committed ritual suicide following the death of Emperor Meiji. The official version was that Nogi, supposedly a warlord in the Russo-Japanese war, had decided to ‘die with his lord’. Thus the grand scene is set for Sensei’s friend, and Sensei himself. Kokoro left me with a sense of untold bitterness and futility – the untoldness reliant, I imagine, on the deadly stealth of Soseki’s Japanese, so cunningly crafted here into English.