Kusamakura

Cohn, Joel, trans. Botchan. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2007.

Ito, Aiko, and Graeme Wilson, trans. I Am a Cat. Tokyo: Tuttle, 2002.

McLel an, Edwin, trans. Grass on the Wayside. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1971.

a€”a€”a€”, trans. Kokoro. Washington, D.C.: Gateway Editions, 2003.

Rubin, Jay, trans. Sanshiro. Ann Arbor: Michigan Classics in Japanese Studies. Michigan University, 2002.

WORKS ON NATSUME SOSEKI

A

Beangcheon, Yul. Natsume Soseki. London: Macmil an, 1984.

Brodey, Inger Sigrun. a€?Natsume Soseki and Laurence Sterne: Cross-Cultural Discourse on Literary Linearity.a€? Comparative Literature 50, no.

3 (Summer 1998), 193-219.

Brodey, Inger Sigrun, and Sammy I. Tsunematsu. Rediscovering Natsume Soseki. London: Global Books, 2001.

Iijima, Takehisa, and James M. Vardaman, Jr., eds. The World of Natsume Soseki. Tokyo: Kinseido, 1987.

McLel an, Edwin. Two Japanese Novelists, Soseki and Toson. Tokyo: Tuttle, 2004.

Miyoshi, Masao. Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.

Rubin, Jay. a€?The Evil and the Ordinary in Sosekia€™s Fiction.a€? Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 46, no. 2 (December 1986), 333-52.

Turney, Alan. a€?Sosekia€™s Development as a Novelist Until 1907 with Special Reference to the Genesis, Nature and Position in His Work of Kusa Makura.a€? Monumenta Nipponica 41, no. 4 (Winter 1986), 497-99.

Yiu, Angela. Chaos and Order in the Works of Natsume Soseki. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998.

CHAPTER 1

As I climb the mountain path, I pondera€”

If you work by reason, you grow rough-edged; if you choose to dip your oar into sentimenta€™s stream, it wil sweep you away. Demanding your own way only serves to constrain you. However you look at it, the human world is not an easy place to live.

And when its difficulties intensify, you find yourself longing to leave that world and dwel in some easier onea €”and then, when you understand at last that difficulties wil dog you wherever you may live, this is when poetry and art are born.

The creators of our human world are neither gods nor demons but simply people, those ordinary folk who happen to live right there next door. You may feel the human realm is a difficult place, but there is surely no better world to live in. You wil find another only by going to the nonhuman; and the nonhuman realm would surely be a far more difficult place to inhabit than the human.

So if this best of worlds proves a hard one for you, you must simply do your best to settle in and relax as you can, and make this short life of ours, if only briefly, an easier place in which to make your home. Herein lies the poeta€™s true cal ing, the artista€™s vocation. We owe our humble gratitude to al practitioners of the arts, for they mel ow the harshness of our human world and enrich the human heart.

Yes, a poem, a painting, can draw the sting of troubles from a troubled world and lay in its place a blessed realm before our grateful eyes. Music and sculpture wil do likewise. Yet strictly speaking, in fact, there is no need to present this world in art. You have only to conjure the world up before you, and there you wil find a living poem, a fount of song. No need to commit your thoughts to papera€”the heart wil already sing with a sweet inner euphony. No need to stand before your easel and limn with brush and painta€”the worlda€™s vast array of forms and colors already sparkles within the inner eye. It is enough simply to be able thus to view the place we live, and to garner with the camera of the sentient heart these pure, limpid images from the midst of our sul ied world. And so even if no verse ever emerges from the mute poet, even if the painter never sets brush to canvas, he is happier than the wealthiest of men, happier than any strong-armed emperor or pampered child of this vulgar world of oursa€”for he can view human life with an artista€™s eye; he is released from the worlda€™s il usory sufferings; he is able to come and go at ease in a realm of transcendent purity, to construct a unique universe of art, and thereby to destroy the binding fetters of self-interest and desire.

When I had lived in this world for twenty years, I understood that it was a world worth living in. At twenty-five I realized that light and dark are sides of the same coin; that wherever the sun shines, shadows too must fal . Now, at thirty, here is what I think: where joy grows deep, sorrow must deepen; the greater onea €™s pleasures, the greater the pain. If you try to sever the two, life fal s apart. Try to control them, and you wil meet with failure. Money is essential, but with the increase of what is essential to you, anxieties wil invade you even in sleep. Love is a happy thing, but as this happy love swel s and grows heavy, you wil yearn instead for the happy days before love came into your life. Splendid though he is, a cabinet minister must bear a mil ion people on his shoulders; the weight of the whole nation rests heavy upon his back. If something is delicious, it goes hard not to eat it, yet if you eat a little you only desire more, and if you gorge yourself on it, it leaves you unpleasantly bloated. . . .

The vague drift of my thought is abruptly interrupted at this point, when my right foot slips on a loose piece of sharp rock. I try to retain balance by shooting my left leg forward to compensatea€”and wind up landing on my bottom. Luckily, however, I have managed to come down on a wide boulder about three feet across. The painting box slung over my shoulder goes flying out from my side, but otherwise I escape any damage.

As I get back to my feet, my eyes take in the distant scene. To the left of the path soars a mountain peak, in shape rather like an inverted bucket.