"The irony in the portrayal of characters, even those with whom Sôseki seems to sympathize, and the sharpness of the details of life in the Tokyo of 1907, make this work more enjoyable than many of his more accomplished novels."
—Donald Keene, Dawn to the West


"Written by an intellectual steeped in the traditions of Chinese learning and English literature, Nowaki stands apart from the works of the naturalist school in its audacity of moral judgment, its rigorous intellectuality, and its defense of certain literary and moral ideals."
—Angela Yiu, Chaos and Order in the Works of Natsume Sôseki


"The confessions of the characters, full of passion and intensity, are writ large in the book. A lot more of these 'insights' of the heart and mind makes for a didactic novel, but the ideas must be welcomed for their honesty and the forthcoming way they were blurted out and shared. . . . Nowaki is not only an epigrammatic novel, with every other page containing the kind of insane quotes worth underlining, but also a key work closely tethered to the novelist's themes. It explicitly identifies and discusses the abstractions that beset the protagonists of later novels. It could be Sôseki's most 'preachy' novel, surprisingly political in parts, and is a definite throwback to the subtle feelings and subdued atmospheres generated by works such as Kokoro and Mon. Nevertheless it illuminates the undercurrent of cynicism running through his mature novels. More than a novel, [Nowaki] is an 'essay on character.'"
—Rise