Kusamakura

A painter climbs into the mountains to feel nothing, and finds that he cannot.

Order this book
Paperback from IngramSpark →
Hardcover from IngramSpark →

About this edition

A young painter climbs into the mountains determined to leave the human world behind, to meet everything he finds, even sorrow, even beauty, as though it were only a picture, and to feel nothing at all. What follows is less a story than a spell: hot springs and misted peaks, an old inn, a barber, and a woman glimpsed like a figure in a scroll.

Natsume Sōseki called Kusamakura (1906) his “haiku novel”, a book meant, he said, to leave an impression of beauty and nothing more. Quiet, funny, and unexpectedly deep, it is the gentlest and strangest of the works that made him the foremost novelist of modern Japan.

Presented here in Kazutomo Takahashi’s public-domain 1927 translation, freshly typeset in EB Garamond and Marcellus behind an original mixed media illustration by JVB Atelier Designs.

Details

• Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916)
• Translated by Kazutomo Takahashi (1927)
• Northlume Classic Library
• Paperback and hardcover, 6 × 9, 132 pages