Last Christmas Dad gave me The Three-Cornered World, by Natsume Soseki, and I’m halfway through it.

Our narrator is an artist in Meiji Japan. He is a Victorian sort of host to you in his head: meta-introverted: there’s a perspective, but he tries not to come on too heavy. He wants to get outside himself and into the world, so you have a nice combination of cockpit and overhead views.

I think the attitude (translation disclaimer goes here) is delicate but appropriate.

I wish I had the time to put the book in context. There is presumably an interesting mythological or traditional significance to butterflies, for instance. Here and there are sort of stereotypically oriental litanies of divinity:

If pressed for an explanation, I would say that my soul was moving with the spring. Imagine all the colours, breezes, elements and voices of spring solidified, ground to powder and blended together to form an elixir of life, which had then been dissolved in dew gathered from the slopes of Olympus, and evaporated in the sun of fairyland. I felt now as though the vapour rising from just such a precious liquid had seeped through the pores of my skin and, without my being conscious of it, saturated my soul.

I think I speak for me when I say what the hell? Dew? Fairyland? Vapour? If he’s making fun, I’d at least like to know how. If he isn’t – well, how did this metaphor get hired? In his place, I’d be proud to say just that the day seemed to be soaking in. There’s literature afoot, and I don’t know where to look: Soseki’s winking, and I’m shrugging.

Even if I can’t follow the discursions, or even work out where we are other than by comparing the thickness of the pages read to the pages to be read, it’s very very good. The fairyland shenanigan quoted above comes just after a first-rate landscape, and works around to an elegant little riff on abstract art. (He decided that you can take the subject out of a portrait and leave the portrait: that art means evocation more than representation. – Quite rightly, I think, and at least fifty years ahead of most people.)

I’ve got the Canturbury Tales in translation (perilation?) here, and for the moment I’d rather read them. Soseki was great this morning, over miso soup and in natural light, but right now I can only handle the Pogues and Unix.