A stunning new translation-the first in more than forty years-of a major novel by the father of modern Japanese fiction

Natsume S?seki's Kusamakura follows its nameless young artist-narrator on a meandering walking tour of the mountains. At the inn at a hot spring resort, he has a series of mysterious encounters with Nami, the lovely young daughter of the establishment. Nami, or "beauty," is the center of this elegant novel, the still point around which the artist moves and the enigmatic subject of S?seki's word painting. In the author's words, Kusamakura is "a haiku-style novel, that lives through beauty." Written at a time when Japan was opening its doors to the rest of the world, Kusamakura turns inward, to the pristine mountain idyll and the taciturn lyricism of its courtship scenes, enshrining the essence of old Japan in a work of enchanting literary nostalgia....

Natsume Soseki, widely held to be Japan's greatest modern novelist, in fact began his career as a literary theorist and scholar of English literature. In 1907, he published Theory of Literature, a remarkably forward-thinking attempt to understand how and why we read. Soseki would later critique Theory of Literature as an unfinished work, but the text remains an unprecedented achievement, anticipating by decades the ideas and concepts that would form the critical foundations of formalism, structuralism, reader-response theory, cognitive science, and postcolonialism. Employing the cutting-edge approaches of contemporary psychology and sociology, Soseki created a model for studying the conscious experience of reading, as well as a theory for how the process changes over time and across cultures. By insisting that literary taste is socially and historically determined, Soseki was able to challenge the superiority of the Western canon, and by grounding his theory in scientific knowledge, he was able to claim a universal validity. Along with Theory of Literature, this volume reproduces a later series of lectures and essays in which Soseki continued to develop his theories& mdash;some of which have never before been translated into English. In addition, the editors of the book provide a critical introduction contextualizing Soseki's theoretical project in history and exploring its contemporary legacy....

Kokoro, meaning 'heart', is a tantalising novel about the friendship between a young man and an enigmatic elder whom he calls Sensei. Set in the early twentieth century, when the death of the emperor Meiji gave way to a new era in Japanese politicial and cultural life, the novel enacts the transition from one generation to the next in the dynamic between Sensei, who is haunted by mysterious events in his past, and the unnamed young man, one of the new generation's elite who will inherit the coming era....