Botchan is a hilarious tale about a young man's rebellion against "the system" in a country school. It is a classic in Japan and has occupied a position of great importance in the canon of Japanese literature, one vaguely analogous to Huckleberry Finn or The Catcher in the Rye in American culture. The setting is Japan's deep south, where the author himself spent four years teaching English in a middle school. Into this conservative world, with its...