On his first day at the post, “I” gives his colleagues at Matsuyama Middle School one nickname after another. Alongside the dialect friction seen in the previous article, the novel embeds another important linguistic phenomenon: naming.
Everyone gets a nickname on day one
The same day the introductions are finished, “I” writes to Kiyo:
Today I went to school and gave everyone a nickname. The principal is Badger, the vice-principal is Red Shirt, the English teacher is Squash, the math teacher is Porcupine, the art teacher is Clown. (working translation)
After a single day of observation, five colleagues have already received five nicknames. Let’s trace the origin of each from the text.
Badger — the principal. The nickname comes straight from their first meeting in the principal’s office, on the very day he arrives: “The principal is a dark-skinned man with a thin beard and big eyes, looking like a badger.” (Japanese tanuki, a raccoon dog — “badger” is the conventional English rendering for this character.)
Red Shirt — the vice-principal. “What surprised me most was that in this heat he wears a flannel undershirt. … And on top of that, it’s a red shirt — the man’s mocking everyone.” The color of the man’s clothing becomes, directly, his name.
Squash — the English teacher. “I” recalls something he was told as a child — “that man’s so pale and bloated because all he eats is stunted, late-season squash” — and immediately applies “Squash” to an English teacher with a sickly complexion. Ironically, “I” admits he doesn’t actually know the correct origin of the word himself.
Porcupine — the head of the math department. “A sturdy, chestnut-burr-headed man, with the face you’d expect on a wicked monk from Mount Hiei” — a nickname born from his looks. But there’s a second layer to this name: yamaarashi (“mountain storm,” written with characters suggesting a fierce, stormy appearance) happens to be pronounced exactly the same as the ordinary Japanese word for the animal porcupine. The rugged look of the characters and the prickly animal the sound calls to mind reinforce each other within a single name — a detail examined further below.
Clown — the art teacher. His entertainer-like dress and flattering manner of speech (“And where might you be from, may I ask? Oh, delightful!”) suggest a taikomochi — a professional flatterer or jester — and the name follows from there.
Not from character, but from looks
What’s worth noting is that none of these nicknames directly explain the person’s character or inner life. Badger and Porcupine come from looks and bearing; Red Shirt from the color of a garment; Squash from a complexion; Clown from dress and manner of speech — every one of them arises from appearance, or a single striking first impression.
This is the same mechanism seen in the Mishima Bunshō Tokuhon feature’s article on physical description — the “that guy, you know, the fat one…” way of naming someone whose name you’ve forgotten. Mishima argued that the more detail a physical description holds, the less clearly it resolves into an image. Botchan’s nicknames run the opposite way: by cutting out just one striking feature, they burn a person’s image into the mind all the more vividly.
A pun hiding in “Porcupine”
The reading given for 山嵐 (Porcupine, the math teacher’s nickname) in the text is yamaarashi — exactly the same sound as the ordinary Japanese word for the animal porcupine (山荒/豪猪). The characters chosen, “mountain” and “storm,” fit his rough, stormy-looking face; but the moment the name is spoken aloud, it also calls up a bristling, quill-covered animal. The visual violence of the man’s appearance and the prickly, defensive image conjured by the sound reinforce each other within a single name — a small piece of wordplay layered quietly beneath a nickname that, on paper, looks like a simple physical description.
Sōseki himself refers to this nickname, thirteen years later
Interestingly, Sōseki himself brings up this very novel’s “Red Shirt” in his 1914 lecture “My Individualism” (see the My Individualism feature).
There’s a character in Botchan nicknamed Red Shirt, and people used to ask me all the time who he was based on. (working translation)
A fictional nickname he invented himself left such a strong impression that readers kept asking who the real-life model was — Sōseki’s own recollection here stands as the author’s own testimony to the effectiveness of this technique.
Nicknames become the fate of the person named
As the story progresses, the nicknames grow into more than mere labels — they come to bind up with a character’s very fate. Red Shirt courts the fiancée of Squash — nicknamed “Madonna” — and drives Squash out to a post in Nobeoka. Porcupine, seeing through the injustice, turns against Red Shirt. The longer a character is called by a nickname, the more they seem to embody the very image the name carries — cunning, baseness, absurdity.
Worth checking as you read
First, the reading that nicknames come to bind up with a character’s fate is a literary interpretation offered by ToL — Sōseki never states this explicitly. The correspondence between a nickname and how a character’s arc unfolds may be, in part, a meaning readers project onto the text after the fact.
Second, every nickname’s origin is explained strictly from “I“‘s point of view. Whether the colleagues themselves knew they were being called by these names cannot be determined from the text.
Summary
| Nickname | Origin | Person |
|---|---|---|
| Badger | Thin beard, dark skin, big eyes — a first-meeting impression | The principal |
| Red Shirt | Always wears a red flannel undershirt | The vice-principal |
| Squash | A sickly complexion (recalling a stunted, late-season squash) | The English teacher |
| Porcupine | A sturdy, chestnut-burr head, the face of a wicked monk — and a pun on the word for the animal | The math department head |
| Clown | Entertainer-like dress and a flattering manner of speech | The art teacher |
In short — Botchan’s nicknames are a distinctive naming technique: instead of explaining a character’s inner life, they cut out one striking external trait and, by doing so, burn that person’s image into the mind all the more vividly.