Publisher description: 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.
Though the total book is held together by the continuing theme of a nameless cat's observations on upper middle-class Japanese society of the Meiji era, its essence is in the humor and the sardonic truth of these various observations.