"The setting is Japan's deep south, where the author himself spent some time teaching English in a boys' school. Into this conservative world, with its social proprieties and established pecking order, breezes Botchan, down from the big city, with scant respect for either his elders or his noisy young charges; and the result is a chain of collisions large and small. Here, in a new translation much better suited to Western tastes than any of its forebears, Botchan's homespun appeal is all the more apparent."--BOOK JACKET