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# 2025-10-30 - Kusamakura (Unhuman Tour) by Natsume Soseki
IMG Ophelia by Kyujin Yamamoto (1926)
I enjoyed reading this book. I thought the titular adjective
"unhuman" might be appropriate for Halloween reading, but it was not
what i might have expected. It was deeply poetic and psychological
in nature. If i had to classify this book, i would call it an
unusually candid slice of life.
The protagonist uses poetry as a therapeutic aid to maintain his
"unhumanity" or artistic detachment from worldly limitations,
refraining from unnecessary action until the Right Moment for
inspiration to strike.
> To be a poet is to be enlightened, and I mean no disparagement,
> when I say, it is the simplest and easiest. The simpler the more
> beneficial it is, and should the more be respected. Suppose you
> lose your temper. You make a seventeen syllable [haiku] of your
> indignation. The moment seventeen get into shape, your anger
> becomes something outside of you--you cannot be fuming with anger
> and composing a [haiku] at the same time. You are moved to tears;
> you make seventeen syllables, and they delight you. When your
> tears are changed into seventeen syllables, your tearful anguish
> has left you, and you have become a self only joyous of being a
> [person] capable of weeping.
The protagonist leaves Tokyo to get away from the "stink" of
humanity, not a literal smell but the dramas and traps of mundane
day-to-day life. He compares the artists perspective to living in a
3-cornered version of a 4-cornered world: the 4th corner of
common sense being cut off, which i suppose could be compared to the
zen concept of beginner's mind and to the tarot archetype of
The Fool. This otherworldly perspective is what is meant by
unhumanity.
He walks a mountain path towards a remote hot springs hotel where he
becomes fascinated by Nami-san, the daughter of the hotel owner.
Early on he observes about her:
> There was no unity of expression. I might have said, light and
> darkness of mind were living under the same roof, quarreling. The
> fact that there was no unity in her expression was evidence, as I
> took it, that there was no unity in her mind. That there was no
> unity in her mind must be the consequence of there being no unity
> in the world in which she had lived. Hers was the face of one
> struggling to overcome the unhappiness that was weighing down upon
> her. She must be a woman standing under a star of ill-luck.
I was fascinated by his commentary on how modern living is designed
to crush out individuality.
> The twentieth century strives to develop individuality to its
> utmost, and then goes about crushing this individuality in every
> conceivable way, saying you are free in this lot of so many by so
> many feet, but that you must not set a foot outside the encircling
> fence, as in the case of railway train prisoners. But the iron
> fence is unbearably galling to all with any sense of individuality,
> and they are all roaring for liberty, day and night. Civilization
> gives [people] liberty and makes them strong as a tiger. It then
> entraps and keeps them encaged. It calls this peace. But this is
> not a real peace. It is a peace like that of the tiger in the
> menagerie, which is lying quietly as [it] looks calmly over the
> crowd that gathers round [its] cage. Let a single bar of the cage
> be out of its place and darkness will descend on the earth.
Below is a link to an excellent book review by Stephen Lumb.
HTML Kusamakura Book Review
author: Natsume, SÅseki, 1867-1916
TEXT detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Kusamakura_(novel)
LOC: PL812.A8 K8
DIR source: gopher://gopher.pglaf.org/1/7/3/1/3/73131/
tags: ebook,fiction
title: Unhuman Tour
# Tags
DIR ebook
DIR fiction