The narrator is the audience’s introduction to the world described in Kokoro. Due to the way the novel is structured, the narrator dominates the first half of the story and shapes the world according to his naïve, often misplaced beliefs. The novel is written from his first-person perspective, up until the point when Sensei’s letter becomes the main body of the text. Even when Sensei takes over as narrator, his story is contained within the frame of the narrator’s story. Sensei’s letter is a story inside a story; the overarching nature of the narrator’s story means that he is the ultimate arbiter of identity and reality, choosing who is portrayed and how. This begins with the characters’ names; the narrator chooses not to name himself and to refer to Sensei only by this honorific title.

The narrator picks and chooses how reality is shaped in the novel, right up to the point where the decision of whether to publish Sensei’s story is left up to him. In this way, the narrator is the most powerful figure in the novel, even if he is one of the least remarkable. He governs the world as seen by the

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