A painter climbs a spring mountain path hoping to live in a detached, 'non-human' aesthetic state and takes lodgings at a remote hot-spring inn. There the enigmatic, half-mad Onami drifts through his days, he reads her an English novel at random, and he cannot paint her until he sees her face at a train station seeing off her cousin to war.
Books mentioned in Kusamakura (5)
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “I do not mean to spread the realm of Wang Wei and Tao Yuanming in this age, but such feelings seem to me better medicine than a play or a ball. I value them above Faust, above Hamlet. [auto-translated]”
Hamlet by William Shakespeare: “I do not mean to spread the realm of Wang Wei and Tao Yuanming in this age, but such feelings seem to me better medicine than a play or a ball. I value them above Faust, above Hamlet. [auto-translated]”
To a Skylark by Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Suddenly I remembered Shelley's poem To a Skylark and tried to recite what I could, but I remembered only two or three lines, among them: 'We look before and after, and pine for what is not.' [auto-translated]”
Laocoön by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: “The argument does not matter. I have mostly forgotten Laocoön, and if I looked into it I might find myself wrong. At any rate, since I had failed to make a picture, I would try making it a poem. [auto-translated]”
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: “In a book called Tristram Shandy it says that no way of writing is more pleasing to God. He writes the first line by his own power, then simply prays to God and lets the pen move. [auto-translated]”
Books that mention Kusamakura (1)
In Praise of Shadows by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki: “Natsume Sōseki, in Pillow of Grass, praises the color of the confection yōkan; and is it not indeed a color to call forth meditation?”