Kusamakura (Penguin Classics)

"I suppose you could say that the artist is one who lives in a three-cornered world, in which the corner that the average person would call 'common sense' has been been sheared off from the ordinary four-square world that the normal inhabit."Alan Turney's award-winning translation of Natsume Soseki's 1906 novel, Kusamakura, literally meaning Grass Pillow, was chosen from one of the opening passages of this novel, this succinct philosophy of aesthetics, the pilgrimage (Grass Pillow, in fact, has connotations of travel in Japanese) of a young painter/poet/ aesthete seeking inspiration outside of the hurly-burly modern world of early 20th Century Japan, wrestling with. There is an important impetus to Kusamakura, a tension and reckoning between isolationist national character and embrace of modernity, but the real energy suffusing this magnum opus of Soseki is the artistic process, the yin/yang of inspiration gleaned from external inspiration and stimulus, of nature, balance, texture (this is by far his most innately painterly work; artists if his time were variously and often moved to make images the text inspired), the unique moments of intrinsic and ineffable colours. We witness every tableau of our painter's pilgrimage like the found-light shots of Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, but we hear the narrator's struggle, we experience his strife in rendering visually, eventually or not, images wholly borne of inner ideation or external images suffused with experience and the dichotomy of subjectivity and objectivity, or emotion and sentiment and stoic universality.And then there is his Muse, Nami. The troubled daughter of the inn in the remote mountain village of Nakoi; a woman with a past, torn between instinctual love and traditional arranged marriage, subsequently divorced and reminding our narrator of Ophelia. Nami carries the ancient, archetypal cruse of another ages-old tale of a woman similarly torn between two loves who ultimately chooses suicide in a local pond. The dance of seduction, the wordplay, his descriptions of her sudden and diaphanous procession through his consciousness, sometimes in her full bridal finery, another time descending the steamy steps to share his bath, are the most romantic, sensual passages I've read of Soseki.I read both Alan Turney's The Three-Cornered World and Penguin Classics' later translation by Meredith McKinney. Reading the same work twice in succession was of course an extraordinary pleasure, but I think familiarity was not altogether responsible for the revelatory sweep and splendour of Ms. McKinney's translation. Also astonishing to not in her introduction that this Process of The Artist As A Young Man was purportedly written in a white heat, over the course of one week. Little wonder as well that this truest, most intuitively and intellectually precise and profound precis of the artistic experience became the favorite book of Glenn Gould. It was a book he was obsessed by for the last 15 years of his life, and he collected every extant English translation of Soseki's work.

"Kusamakura" is surely one of the weirdest novels of the twentieth century. A very early work by Natsume Soseki, who would go on to be one of Japan's foremost novelists, it's a pioneering one-shot experiment with what the author himself called a "Haiku novel" years before Kawabata Yasunari got the credit for such with his Palm-of-the-Hand Stories. A novel without a plot, where nothing of note really happens, and yet it's an endlessly engaging tale. Or is it a philosophical treatise on aesthetics narrated in the form of a story? Breathtakingly ethereal one moment, it's hilariously crass the next. In genre, it's a heady fusion of the Western novel and the Eastern poem equally at home with Percy Shelley and Yosa Buson, John Millais and Katsushika Hokusai, Oscar Wilde and the Tales of Ise, Christ and Bodhidharma. Staunchly nostalgic and even a tad traditionalist in an age when such things were being pell-mell thrown along the wayside, and yet modernist about a decade or so before its time--arguably ever bit as experimental as Joyce's "Ulysses" in many ways and yet a hundred times more readable and, yes, enjoyable. Indeed, everything I've said up to now may make "Kusamakura" seem rather portentous, but as a work of literature it's utterly unpretentious and approachable. It also so happens, as you may have guessed, to be one of my all time personal favorites.Which is why nobody could be more thrilled to see "Kusamakura" newly translated and published by Penguin--the folks who have been making classics approachable for decades. Meredith McKinney's new translation here is nothing less than excellent. Unpretentious as it is, "Kusamakura" is nowadays something of a hard nut to crack linguistically speaking, filled as it is with deliberate archaisms of an ornate nature on the one hand and cockney-esque colloquialisms on the other (among other slight puzzlers now obscure in contemporary printed Japanese) and yet McKinney handles Soseki's many voices and sometimes elliptical narration with a surefire grasp of the language and manages to convey the same in highly fluent and idiomatic English. It's carefully accurate and true to the original and yet makes itself at home in its new language to a degree that seems natural and easy but must in fact have entailed much hard work and scholarly care. This edition is also judiciously supplemented with unobtrusive but helpful endnotes following up on Soseki's principal references, and the introduction does a fine job of adequately situating this idiosyncratic classic in the context of Soseki's larger opus and of contextualizing both within the larger framework of Japanese literature and history at the turn of the (last) century without unduly overburdening the book.In short, this is a wonderful edition of a wonderful book--totally flawless. Okay, not totally; when you first open the book and glance at the half-title page, you'll see in the little blurb the dates for the Meiji period incorrectly given as 1868-1914 instead of 1868-1912. That little nitpick aside, though, this fine book is going to be the definitive edition of Natsume Soseki's early masterpiece for decades to come. Even if you've already read this novel in its previous English version (available in a number of printings, including  The Three-Cornered World (Peter Owen Modern Classic)  and  Three Corner World (Unesco Collection of Representative Works. Japanese Series.) ), I highly recommend this new and vastly improved one. And if you've never come across "Kusamakura" before at all, well then, the open road to the deep south awaits you, grass pillow and all!

Kusamakura (1906) is Natsume Soseki's third novel and has been recently re-translated (2008) by Meredith McKinney. the original English translation was done by Alan Turney in 1965 and he saw fit to change the title to "The Three-Cornered-World," McKinney returned to the original title. I see this book as something as a turning point for Soseki in that he is transitioning from his comedic style (which is at it speak in the novel that precedes this one-Botchan) to a more philosophic and contemplative style that would be seen in later books such as Kokoro and The Gate. It is essentially a plot-less novel, an artist goes to an abandoned onsen town and has various conversations with people. The most spirited conversations are with the recently divorced daughter of the owner of the ryokan that the artist is staying at. She is something of a free spirit and iconoclast in her thinking. The artist writes haikus and muses on art and aesthetics. There are comedic scenes throughout-usually conversations the artist has with various people for example there's a conversation he has with an old Tokyo-ite who now lives in the onsen town and another where he suggests that people in Tokyo are they types of people that catalogue the number of farts people have. despite the fact that there are no developments or plot, the novel is a pleasant mediation on beauty and art with some comedic asides.

It took me about 30 pages to warm to this book, once I got settled into it and it opened up what a superb read. A lyrical masterpiece, my second book by Soseki after previously reading Kokoro. I didn't know what to expect but I must say that after a slow start I thoroughly enjoyed it.A very intimate and beautiful book, evocative and artistic. I am glad I stuck with it. It ended up being one of my absolute favourites.

This was a lot of fun even though not a lot happens other than meandering and often humorous discussions on art. I suppose I should not be that surprised at being amused, given Soseki's earlier comic novels, but I was expecting something different. Excellent translation by Meredith McKinney (her Pillow Book translation is also recommended).

This book remains too ephemeral. And yet it is profoundly infused with the feeling of living in (or with) the present. It’s a book that goes on changing as a self but its characteristic motif is of lightness and timelessness. Kusamakura is Natsume Soseki’s plunge into experimental literature. It’s a first on many counts and will be the longest-lived.It’s a book that realizes its extraordinariness but not in the way that most books do. The present is all that the book is willing to give up and that’s what makes it a meditative read. When you step into the world of a fictional character, you’re taken through objects as if in reality. You explore new horizons, observe the map of the character’s world which a novel allows you to investigate.And even if you come out of this book without feeling inspired or transformed. Know that to read it is to let go of the chaos that resides everywhere around you. To read it is to appreciate stillness which grows with every page. And there’s nothing more revealing and rewarding for a reader - to be the one at the receiving end of this beautiful transaction.

This was a gosh darn amazing book. If you like turn of the 19th to 20th century history and art, this book is for you.The quality of the book shipped to me was fair. Somebody had written in the first chapter and essay bits but stopped. Maybe a student that had to read the first bit? Regardless, it was well worth the price for a used physical book.

Natsume Soseki possui um olhar crítico e reflexivo para observar as inovações e as tradições em uma sociedade em desenvolvimento.