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Kusamakura (Penguin Classics)

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Author: Natsume Soseki
Creator: Meredith Mckinney
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Category: Book

List Price: ~~£9.99~~
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Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars

1 reviews
Sales Rank: 299882

Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 176
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 0.4

ISBN: 0143105191
Dewey Decimal Number: 895.6342
EAN: 9780143105190
ASIN: 0143105191

Publication Date: July 31, 2008 (In 22 Days)
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars

A Midspring Night's Dream March 8, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful

"Kusamakura" is surely one of the oddest novels of the twentieth century. A very early work by Natsume Soseki, 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 humourously 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.

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 on the one hand and nonstandard 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 actually 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, 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 ("The Three-cornered World"), 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!

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