夢十夜

A short story by Natsume Soseki, the celebrated Meiji-era writer. First published in the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun and Osaka Asahi Shimbun in 1908 (Meiji 41), the work is composed of ten dreams — from the "First Night" through the "Tenth Night" — rendered in a fantastical and deeply poetic style. Four of the ten open with the words "I had a dream like this," narrating the memory of a dream from the perspective of someone already awake. A novel in which Soseki — a writer who had long confronted the out...