The Miner

The Miner is the most daringly experimental and least well-known novel of the great Japanese writer Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916). Written in 1908, it explores the indeterminate nature of human personality. An absurdist tale, in many respects, The Miner anticipates the work of Joyce and Beckett. The story unfolds entirely within the mind of an unnamed protagonist, a young man whose love life has fallen to pieces. As the man flees Tokyo, he is picked up by a procurer of cheap labour for a copper mine, and then travels toward - and finally burrows into the depths of - the mine, where he hopes to find oblivion.In a stunning translation by Jay Rubin, and featuring an introduction from Haruki Murakami, this new edition of The Miner brings a lost classic to a new audience.



NATSUME SŌSEKI is widely recognised to be Japan's greatest modern novelist. Born Natsume Kinnosukein Edo in 1867, the year before the city was renamed Tokyo, he survived a lonely childhood, being traded between foster and biological parents. At the age of twenty-two, Natsume chose from a Chinese source the defiantly playful pen name Sōseki ("Garglestone") to signify his own sense of eccentricity. Though hoping to become a writer as early as the age of fourteen, Sōseki chose the more respectable path of English literature scholar, and was sent to London by the Ministry of Education in 1900 for two years. In 1907, Sōseki took to writing full time. His early works relied on a freewheeling sense of humour, but they darkened as Sōseki wrestled with increasingly debilitating bouts of depression and illness. He died in 1916 with his last and longest novel still unfinished.Each new generation of Japanese readers rediscovers Sōseki, while Western readers find in him a modern intellect doing battle in familiar territory, a truly original voice among those artists of the world who have most fully grasped the modern experience.