Japanese Literature Summaries
日本語

Kusamakura — Summary and Characters

A painter in search of detachment

Author
Natsume Sōseki
Published
September 1906
First appeared in
Shin Shōsetsu
Form
Novel
Genres
  • Psychological
Setting
  • Kumamoto
Length
84,400 characters
Reading time
About 2 hr 49 min
Orthography
Modern script and kana

About this work

A novella published in the magazine Shin Shōsetsu in September 1906. Through the eyes of a painter travelling to a hot-spring inn in the hills in search of a state he calls "non-emotion" — a detachment from worldly interest and feeling — it renders landscape and people in a haiku-like, deliberately beautiful prose. An experiment aimed at a "haiku novel," closer to painting or poetry than to plot, and the work in which Sōseki's own views of art and civilization show most plainly.

Summary

"I," a painter, wishing to paint in a state of non-human feeling apart from the interests and emotions of the world, sets out for the hot spring inn of Nakoi in the mountains. Having heard from the old woman at the teahouse on the pass the talk about Nami, the young mistress of the inn, "I" is drawn by her extraordinary beauty and by a bearing somehow out of this world. Nami has been divorced and has come back to her family, and in the village she is spoken of as an odd one; but in his dealings with her "I" tries to find the possibility of a beauty beyond the vulgar. During his stay he touches the joys and sorrows of the village people — Nami's cousin Kyūichi is going off to the war — but passes his days without ever taking up a brush. At the end, at the station where they see Kyūichi off to the front, Nami unexpectedly comes face to face with her former husband through the window of the train, and on her face appears the "pity" that "I" had been searching for all along. At last "I" finds in Nami's face the instant that completes his picture.

Characters

Chapter-by-chapter synopsis

The app covers this work chapter by chapter (full text in the app).

  1. 1. About This Work
  2. 2. Main Characters
  3. 3. Main Supporting Characters
  4. 4. The Mountain Path — “Work with Your Intellect and You Rub People the Wrong Way”
  5. 5. The Inn at Nakoi — A Night Song and a Phantom Woman
  6. 6. Village Rumors, a Trailing Sleeve, and Steam from the Bath
  7. 7. The Tea Ceremony and Reading Without Human Feeling — “A Good Place to Drown Oneself”
  8. 8. Mirror Pond — Camellias and the Woman on the Crag
  9. 9. The Dagger and the Purse — Parting from the Warrior
  10. 10. The Ending — “Pity” at the Station
  11. 11. Key Motifs and Foreshadowing

The opening (original text)

Going up a mountain path, I thought about this. Work with your intellect and you rub people the wrong way. Push off with your feelings and you are carried away by the current. Insist on your own way and you find yourself cramped. However you take it, the world of human beings is hard to live in.

Kusamakura by Natsume Sōseki (Aozora Bunko)

The ending (original text)

"Look out. She's leaving." And beneath the voice the iron wheels begin to move, keeping time, with a heavy grinding and no regret at all. The windows pass in front of us one by one. Kyūichi's face grew small; and when the last third-class carriage passed before me, another face came out of a window. From under a battered brown felt hat, a bristling face like a rustic warrior's put itself out, with a look of regret. And at that moment Nami and the warrior found themselves looking at each other. The iron wheels ground on. The warrior's face was gone at once. Nami stood vacantly and watched the train go. And in that vacancy there floated, strangely, an expression of "pity" such as I had never once seen in her before. "That's it! That's it! With that in it, it will make a picture," I said in a low voice, patting Nami on the shoulder. The picture in my breast was completed in that instant.

Kusamakura by Natsume Sōseki (Aozora Bunko)

Famous passages

Approach everything rationally, and you grow rigid. Pole your boat along the stream of human feeling, and you are swept away. Insist on having your own way, and you find yourself confined. However you look at it, the human world is a hard place to live.

The opening monologue of the painter climbing a mountain path. Through a cascade of parallel clauses on the hardship of living in the human world, it stands as one of Sōseki's finest passages of prose.

When the difficulty of living grows too great, one wants to move somewhere easier. It is when one realizes that no place, however far one moves, is any easier to live in, that poetry is born, and paintings come into being.

A passage following the celebrated opening. It states the novel's theme: that art exists to make an unlivable world just a little more bearable.

Read the original

The original Japanese text is available at Aozora Bunko, and the app downloads the same text for its vertical-text reader.

Aozora Bunko library card

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