Soseki Natsume is Japanese novelist and essayist, and a master of psychological fiction. He was regarded as one of the great literary figures of the Meiji and Taisho periods in Japan. Soseki is still widely read and his major works of fiction have been translated into English. Soseki lived in the midst of rapidly accelerating Westernization. Traditional Japanese value and way of life were disappearing, especially in big cities such as Tokyo. Major themes in Soseki's works includes problems of modernization of Japan which lead to conflicts of all sorts: loyalty and group mentality versus freedom and individuality, personal isolation and estrangement, duty and desire. My challenge was to compile images of conflicts (people, histories, locations, etc.), and identify who the writer, Soseki, was.
I had an idea of half western and half Japan scenery as a background. But I was not sure how to put the foreground images together. When I placed the scanned cat image to this page, it appeared so large because of the original image size. It was totally not expected - I was actually thinking a small cat image on the side or so. But this surprise perfected the layout.
