Kusamakura Read Free

to the work. The constant digressions are also a foil to any latent urge toward plot. They hold the reader firmly inside the terms of the novel: to explore experience rather than be swept along by it. We, like the protagonist and Soseki himself, emerge from this journey with its larger questions left unanswered, but with a wealth of fresh understanding and experience that has made the journey well worthwhile.
     
    MEREDITH MCKINNEY

A Note on the Translation
    It is, of course, impossible to reproduce adequately in English the effect of Soseki’s prose, particularly the frequent passages of elevated diction and parallel syntax in the Chinese style, which contrast with sections, such as the farcical barbershop scene of Chapter 5, that draw on the alternative tradition of a comic and “vulgar” mode. In much of Kusamakura, Soseki’s style is consciously elegant and literary, carefully distinguishing itself from the modern Japanese of the Naturalist writers of his day (although in other ways the writing is contemporary and even innovative in the history of the modern novel). I have attempted to preserve its tone with a rather more old-fashioned literary language than contemporary written English. My primary aim has been to give some sense of the elegance of the Japanese, although reproducing its beauty is impossible.
    Most of the novel is written in the present tense. Since English, unlike Japanese, cannot sustain occasional shifts to past-tense narration, I have chosen to retain the present tense throughout, in order to reproduce the effect of the journey’s open-ended experiment that asks the reader to experience the protagonist’s moment-by-moment feelings and thoughts.
    A final word about the title. This novel was previously translated by Alan Turney with the title The Three-Cornered World, a reference to the quirky nature of the artist found in Chapter 3. The Japanese title, Kusamakura (literally “grass pillow”), is a traditional literary term for travel, redolent of the kind of poetic journey epitomized by Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North. I have chosen to retain the original Japanese title.

Acknowledgments
    My thanks to the Australian National University’s Japan Centre, which provided me with a haven as a Visiting Fellow while I worked on this translation.
    Nobuo Sakai generously spared me his precious time to read through the translation and carefully check for errors.
    I also owe a debt of gratitude to Elizabeth Lawson, whose perceptive comments and suggestions helped the manuscript to achieve its final form.

Suggestions for Further Reading

OTHER WORKS BY NATSUME SOSEKI
    Brodey, Inger Sigrun; Ikuo Tsunematsu; and Sammy I. Tsunematsu, trans. My Individualism and the Philosophical Foundations of Literature. Tokyo: Tuttle, 2005.
    Cohn, Joel, trans. Botchan. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2007.
    Ito, Aiko, and Graeme Wilson, trans. I Am a Cat. Tokyo: Tuttle, 2002.
    McLellan, Edwin, trans. Grass on the Wayside. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1971.
    ———, 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
     
    Beangcheon, Yul. Natsume Soseki. London: Macmillan, 1984.
    Brodey, Inger Sigrun. “Natsume Soseki and Laurence Sterne: Cross-Cultural Discourse on Literary Linearity.” 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.
    McLellan, 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. “The Evil and the Ordinary in Soseki’s Fiction.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 46, no. 2 (December 1986), 333-52.
    Turney,