Kusamakura
Natsume Sōseki, 1906
A painter escapes to a mountain inn to see the world as art, and finds a village, a strange woman, and a war that will not stay outside the frame.
Natsume Sōseki
1867–1916
Sōseki was a devoted haiku poet and a professor of English literature; Kusamakura's painter-narrator reflects both passions.
Feels like wonder, art and nature.
Delicate spring air conceals the scent of far-off blood.
My old host volunteered in his nephew’s place to let me understand that the youth was destined to leave for Manchuria in a day or two. I had thought that there was only feathered songsters to listen to, only flowers to see fall, only hot spring to warble forth in this dreamy land of poetry in a mountain bosom, in peaceful Spring. Alas, the living world had come crossing the sea and mountain and oozing into this home of a forgotten tribe, and the time may come when a small fraction of blood making a crimson sea of bleak Manchuria may flow from this youth’s arteries. This very youth is sitting next to an artist who sees nothing worth seeing in human life but dreaming. He sits so near that the artist may hear his heart throb. Books by Natsume Sōseki
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