During his second day on the train, a young woman asks Sanshirō for help with lodgings when they stop in Nagoya for the night, and they end up in the same room with a single futon.
On his third and final day of travel, Sanshirō encounters an enigmatic man who casually declares that Japan is rushing toward its own destruction.
The novel includes a comical subplot in which Yojirō, an incorrigible meddler, campaigns discreetly on behalf of Professor Hirota, hoping to have him appointed to the university faculty in the College of Letters.
Older men, established in their careers, court Mineko, and she is eventually married off, by arrangement, to an acquaintance of her elder brother.
Subsequently, and following his time abroad in London, he was given a professorship at the University of Tokyo, where the popular lecturer Lafcadio Hearn had recently resigned amidst controversy.
A subplot of the novel, in which students lobby for a native Japanese appointment in the Department of Literature, is a playful reversal of the situation under which Sōseki took up his post.
Topics include the recently won Russo-Japanese war, Western science, the role of women in society, approaches to academic instruction, and basic human nature.