An early novella by Natsume Sōseki, writer of the Meiji era. First published in the journal Shinshōsetsu [1906]. Its famous opening lines read: "Be guided by reason and you grow hard-edged. Follow sentiment and you are swept away. Press your own will and you feel hemmed in. The world of men is hard to live in, any way you look at it." A thirty-year-old painter, disillusioned with modern civilization, leaves Tokyo for a mountain hot-spring inn (based on Koten Onsen in Kumamoto), where he encounte...
