is a Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

ese novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 published in 1906 by Natsume Sōseki

Natsume Soseki

, born ', is widely considered to be the foremost Japanese novelist of the Meiji period . He is best known for his novels Kokoro, Botchan, I Am a Cat and his unfinished work Light and Darkness. He was also a scholar of British literature and composer of haiku, Chinese-style poetry, and fairy tales...

. It tells the story of an artist who retreats to the mountains where he stays at a remote, almost deserted hotel. There he becomes intrigued by the mysterious hostess, O-Nami, who reminds him of John Millais' painting Ophelia

Ophelia (painting)

Ophelia is a painting by British artist Sir John Everett Millais, completed between 1851-52. Currently held in the Tate Britain in London, it depicts Ophelia, a character from Shakespeare's play Hamlet, singing before she drowns in a river in Denmark....

.

Ostensibly looking for subjects to paint, the artist makes only a few sketches, and instead he writes poetry. His poetry is interspersed in the text, which itself is composed of scenes from the artist's reclusive life and his essay-like meditations on art and the artist's position in society. In his musings, the artist quotes and mentions a variety of Japanese, Chinese and European painters, poets and novelists. For example, he discusses the difference between painting and poetry as argued in Lessing

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a German writer, philosopher, dramatist, publicist, and art critic, and one of the most outstanding representatives of the Enlightenment era. His plays and theoretical writings substantially influenced the development of German literature...

's Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Other writers and poets mentioned include Wang Wei

Wang Wei

Wang Wei , was a Tang Dynasty Chinese poet, musician, painter, and statesman. He was one of the most famous men of arts and letters of his time. Many of his poems are preserved, and twenty-nine were included in the highly influential 18th century anthology Three Hundred Tang Poems.-Name...

, Tao Yuanming, Bashō

Matsuo Basho

, born , then , was the most famous poet of the Edo period in Japan. During his lifetime, Bashō was recognized for his works in the collaborative haikai no renga form; today, after centuries of commentary, he is recognized as a master of brief and clear haiku...

, Lawrence Sterne (Tristam Shandy), Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...

 (The Critic as Artist

The Critic as Artist

The Critic as Artist is an essay by Oscar Wilde, containing the most extensive statements of his aesthetic philosophy. A dialogue in two parts, it is by far the longest one included in his collection of essays titled Intentions published in May 1891...

) and Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of prose drama" and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre...

. The twelfth chapter contains an apology of the death of Sōseki's student, Misao Fujimura

Misao Fujimura

was a Japanese philosophy student and poet, largely remembered due to his farewell poem.Fujimura was born in Hokkaidō. His grandfather was a former samurai of the Morioka Domain, and his father relocated to Hokkaidō after the Meiji Restoration as a director of the forerunner of Hokkaido Bank...

, who committed suicide by drowning. Calling his death heroic, the narrator asserts that "that youth gave his life - the life which should not be surrendered - for all that is implicit in the one word 'poetry'".

English translations and titles

Kusamakura was translated into English in 1965 by Alan Turney, under the title The Three-Cornered World. Turney himself explained his choice of the title in an introduction:

Kusa Makura literally means The Grass Pillow, and is the standard phrase used in Japanese poetry to signify a journey. Since a literal translation of this title would give none of the connotations of the original to English readers, I thought it better to take a phrase from the body of the text which I believe expresses the point of the book.

The phrase from the book to which Turney refers is (in his own translation):

...I suppose you could say that an artist is a person who lives in the triangle which remains after the angle which we may call common sense has been removed from this four-cornered world.

A new English translation of the book by Meredith McKinney was published in 2008 under the original title Kusamakura. Explaining her choice of the title in an introduction, McKinney notes the connotation of The Grass Pillow in Japanese as a term for travel, "redolent of the kind of poetic journey epitomized by Bashō

Matsuo Basho

, born , then , was the most famous poet of the Edo period in Japan. During his lifetime, Bashō was recognized for his works in the collaborative haikai no renga form; today, after centuries of commentary, he is recognized as a master of brief and clear haiku...

's Narrow Road to the Deep North

Oku no Hosomichi

, translated alternately as The Narrow Road to the Deep North and The Narrow Road to the Interior, is a major work by the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō considered "one of the major texts of classical Japanese literature."...

".