Kusamakura

Walking along a mountain path towards a remote hot springs hotel, our unnamed protagonist muses on his theory of "unhumanity" and his hopes that it will break him out of his creative block. On arrival, the town itself has plenty of unhumanity on display, but while poems on those subjects spring easily to mind, painting still eludes him. Will the mysterious Nami-san, the daughter of the hotel owner, be the catalyst that unlocks that frustratingly out-of-reach art? Natsume Soseki was already a household name in Japan after his previous novels I Am a Cat and Botchan, but it was the success of Kusamakura that allowed him to give up his role as a professor of English literature at Tokyo Imperial University to focus on writing. Kusamakura translates to English directly as "grass pillow," which for the Japanese reader has a connotation of a poetic wandering; for this edition Takahashi Kazutomo added the subtitle "Unhuman Tour" to bring the same feeling to the translation. Equal parts travelogue, meditation, and quiet romance, Kusamakura offers a brief, luminous escape into a world where beauty is pursued for its own sake-an ideal companion for anyone who has ever longed to leave the noise of ordinary life behind. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)