eShop USA > Books > Kusamakura (Penguin Classics)
Kusamakura (Penguin Classics)
List Price: $14.00Our Price: $11.90 You Save: $2.10 (15%)Prices subject to change.
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 895.6342
EAN: 9780143105190
ISBN: 0143105191
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 176
Publication Date: January 29, 2008
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Studio: Penguin Classics
Related Items: Featured Listmania!
Editorial Review:
A stunning new translationthe first in more than forty yearsof a major novel by the father of modern Japanese fiction Natsume S?sekis 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?sekis word painting. In the authors 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.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - A Midspring Night's Dream
"Kusamakura" is surely one of the weirdest novels of the twentieth century. A very early work by Natsume Soseki, who would go on to be one of Japan's foremost novelists, 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 ... Read More
Related Categories:
| |
 |
