World Classics PDF EPUB

Kusamakura

Downloads: 181
First published: 1906
Pages: 110

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About this book

A painter flees the noise of modern life for a quiet hot-spring inn deep in the mountains, hoping to work in a state of pure aesthetic detachment, free of ordinary human feeling. Instead of finishing a picture, he drifts through poetry, reverie, and long meditations on beauty, art, and the artist's place in the world. His calm is unsettled by O-Nami, the innkeeper's beautiful and unreadable daughter, whose presence keeps pulling him back toward the emotions he wants to leave behind. Sōseki called it a haiku in the form of a novel, and it reads less as a plot than as a sustained argument about how art and life work against each other. This free PDF and EPUB edition brings the 1906 classic to new readers.

About the author

Natsume Sōseki

Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916) was among the foremost novelists of modern Japan, joining classical sensibility to Western literary form. A scholar of English literature who studied in London, he wrote Kokoro, Botchan, and I Am a Cat, and his portrait long appeared on the 1,000-yen note.

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