ゲーテはすべてを言った

Toichi Hiroba, a renowned Goethe specialist nearing the end of his university career, has long treated an old student quip, that there is nothing Goethe did not say, as his guiding motto. Then, over a family meal, he finds a line credited to Goethe printed on a teabag label, about love fusing all things rather than confusing them, and he cannot place it. Determined to find where it comes from, he combs through editions and archives, writes to colleagues, and revisits decades of his own scholarship, watched by Akiko, his wife, Norika, his daughter, and the young man she is to marry. That son-in-law-to-be presents himself as the narrator, shaping Toichi's account into a novel. Erudite and playful, the book weighs quotation, scholarship and invention, with the shadow of the 2011 earthquake glimpsed in the family's ties to Sendai.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Length

188 pages in the original

Set in

Japan

First published

2024 by Asahi Shimbun Publications

Author's age

23 when first published

ISBN

9784022520395 (original)