Natsume Soseki's 1906 novella Kusamakura is what made me become a professor of Japanese literature.   I first encountered it as an undergraduate in 1985 via Alan Turney's 1966 translation (he changed the title to The Three-Cornered World), and it was love at first sight.   The story-without-a-story, all told in experimental stream-of-consciousness mode, blew me away.   

   Turney seemed to "get" Soseki in a way that his other translators didn't.  Turney seemed to understand that Soseki was a 20th century modernist, not a 19th century realist.  In the same way that Kafka would later use nonstandard dialect, folk tales and Hassidic lore to defamiliarize the modern world, Soseki here mobilizes haiku, classical Chinese poetry, and a cut-up aesthetic lifted from Tristam Shandy to reveal the pent-up tensions that lie just behind the surface of our supposedly stable reality. 

   I was recently asked to write something for a new anthology that will collect brief essays from scholars, writers, and others, in which the contributors each introduce what they think is an unjustly neglected book.  It was an easy choice for me.    In writing my piece, though, I learned that Penguin just brought out a new translation of Kusamakura by  Meredith McKinney, an Australian scholar.   And so over the past week I've had the pleasure of reacquainting myself with this old friend, albeit in new garb.

   McKinney does a fine job of mirroring the crafty writing style of the original, which quilts together colloquial dialect, modern and classical Japanese, as well as Chinese.  She also fills in more of the cultural details, both in the translation text and in her helpful endnotes, than the earlier version did.  Most importantly, it remains a terrific, often startling, read. 

   I still have a soft spot in my heart (or perhaps it's in my head?) for the Turney, but I'm delighted to see my old flame reach a new English-speaking audience.  Perhaps someday I'll get the nerve up to try my own hand at producing a translation....