After 74 Years, Cliffhanger Ends : Book: In “Meian Continued,” writer resolves the story by Japan’s most revered author about an unhappy newlywed couple.

Japan’s most revered author died in 1916, leaving his final novel incomplete and his readers wondering whether the main character, Tsuda, would win Kiyoko’s heart.

A writer who spent part of her childhood in the United States finally resolved the cliffhanger this year with a continuation of Natsume Soseki’s classic novel “Meian.”

For 74 years, no Japanese author had dared resolve the puzzle left by Soseki, a towering intellect. His face adorns the 1,000-yen bill and his brain is preserved at Tokyo University.

Minae Mizumura’s audacity and her success in mastering the idiosyncratic Japanese of the nation’s greatest literary figure have made her a sensation in Japan’s staid literary establishment.

“Soseki is so deified that no one can possibly live up to his reputation,” Mizumura, a petite woman in her mid-30s, said with a self-effacing laugh. “It’s natural that people would react against the book, so no one wrote it.”

Her 373-page first novel “Meian Continued” has sold more than 26,500 copies since its release in August, good for serious literature but small-time compared with hits that sell more than a million.

“I figured many people, like me, would like to know how the story ends, and since Soseki is so famous, I figured that at least libraries and Soseki scholars would buy the book,” said Mizumura, a former lecturer in Japanese literature at Princeton University.

Soseki’s novel is about newlyweds who find, after playing the doting husband and wife for about six months, that they aren’t happy together.

Tsuda, a white-collar worker from a rich family, has to acknowledge he doesn’t really love his wife, whom he met shortly after being jilted by Kiyoko, the woman he does love.

He tries to confront Kiyoko, who is married and appears only in the last few pages of “Meian,” to learn why she rejected him. The book ends just as his courage fails.

“Meian” was written in Soseki’s gloomy later years and is not among his best-loved novels. Many Japanese read the book in school, however, in addition to his more humorous earlier works.

Even the highly educated consider Soseki’s Japanese antiquated and difficult. It relies heavily on unique uses of the Chinese characters and sets of syllables that form Japan’s written language.

“Young people in Japan don’t read books written in prewar Japanese,” Mizumura said. “It’s even rather difficult for college students.”

She described her foray into serious literature as a contribution to reviving long-discarded forms of more traditional Japanese.

“Soseki was one of the last Japanese novelists to use Chinese characters to their full advantage to bring a text to life,” she said in an interview. “His use of the language is fascinating, and it’s so much richer than that used today.”

Most critics applauded her for mastering Soseki’s difficult style.

Ken Yasuhara wrote in the monthly literary magazine Gendaishi Techo that Mizumura’s continuation “is more moving than Soseki’s original,”

She left Japan at age 12 when her father’s company transferred him to the United States. Her higher education was in English and French, but she eventually drifted toward her real love, Japanese literature.

She was a doctoral student at Yale University and spent three years teaching at Princeton. In January, she will begin teaching at the University of Michigan.

Mizumura said her status as an outsider gave her the courage to approach the task other Japanese writers avoided.

“I had no literary reputation to risk, no set literary style,” she said. “I had no nothing to lose in giving it a try.”

In “Meian Continued,” Tsuda is rebuffed after finally daring to ask Kiyoko why she spurned him. “While I don’t dislike you,” she says, “you’re the sort of person I can’t stand.”

Tsuda’s wife, Onobu, realizes her efforts to win his love aren’t working, and considers suicide.

Having resolved one enigma, Mizumura leaves her readers with another: will Onobu choose life or death?