About ten minutes on the Tokyo Metro Tozai Line from Takebashi Station, where Palaceside Building stands, brings you to Waseda Station. Exit west and climb from Babashitamachi crossing toward Wakamatsucho crossing — that road is Natsume-zaka Street. Natsume Soseki's father is said to have named the slope in front of their house Natsume-zaka. From crossing to crossing it is 690 meters.
In Soseki's essay "Inside My Glass Doors" he writes: "My father also gave his own surname, Natsume, to the long slope one had to climb when going south from in front of the house. Unfortunately it never became as famous as Kikui-cho and remains a mere slope. Yet in the meantime someone came and said that, looking up names around here on a map, there was a Natsume-zaka, so perhaps the name my father gave is still of some use."
Soseki, the Meiji literary giant of "Botchan" and "I Am a Cat," also taught, studied in London, and spent years on the staff of the Asahi Shimbun. After moving from Hongo to Waseda-Minamicho he published "Sanshiro," "The Gate," "Kokoro," and "Grass on the Wayside," and died at fifty in December 1916 (Taisho 5) while writing "Light and Darkness."
At his birthplace stands a black granite monument carved "Birthplace of Natsume Soseki." The place of his death became Shinjuku Ward's Soseki Park, and in 1991 a bust by Naoki Tominaga was completed.
The master of modern Japanese literature who gave the world so many masterpieces from Meiji into Taisho was born in Waseda and died in Waseda.