Author Description

Product DescriptionThe Miner is the most daringly experimental and least well known novel of the great Meiji novelist Natsume Soseki. An absurdist novel about the indeterminate nature of human personality, The Miner, written in 1908, was in many was a precursor to the now-infamous work of Joyce and Beckett.The narrative unfolds within the mind of an unnamed protagonist-narrator, a young man caught in a love triangle who flees Tokyo, is picked up by a procurer of cheap labour for a copper mine, then travels toward and inside the depths of the mine, in search of oblivion. As he delves, the young man reflects at length on nearly every thought and perception he experiences along the way, in terms of what the experience means to him at the time and in retrospect as a mature adult narrating the tale. His conclusion? That there is no such thing as human character. The result is a novel that is both absurd and comical, and a true modernist classic.Review‘Soseki is the representative modern Japanese novelist, a figure of truly national stature.’– Haruki Murakami'A delightful surprise … Jay Rubin has had the perception to see the specialness of a neglected work and has rescued it from undeserved obscurity … It is a marvellously if strangely funny book.'– Phyllis Lyons, Northwestern UniversityAbout the AuthorSōseki Natsume (1868–1916) is widely considered the foremost novelist in modern Japanese history. After graduating from Tokyo Imperial University in 1893 and a brief stint as a teacher, Sōseki spent two years in London on a Japanese government scholarship. He returned to Tokyo to lecture English Literature. Numerous nervous disorders forced him to give up teaching in 1908, at which point he dedicated his life to writing full-time, producing fourteen novels as well as a raft of poetry, academic essays, autobiographical pieces and fairy tales.