I am a neko wafer
At long last, I have acquired a copy of Natsume Soseki's Three-Cornered World, ak, unless I misremember, a both Grass Pillow (the translation of the Japanese title) and An Inhuman Journey, or maybe Tour (the title of a different translation into English, if it exists). You might now be thinking to yourself, but listen, there is, in just the previous sentence, no great distance, a link to the book being sold online, and for cheap, too. Why then is it so remarkable to have gotten a copy? Why would have confined yourself to looking in every bookstore, used and otherwise (for this book is out of print), every time you enter one, for a copy, as if one would have appeared since the last time you were there? Why go to the length, surely great, of suggesting it in a half-assed manner for resuscitation by New York Review Books? Why do all this when you could have bought it online, no fuss, no muss? The answer to your questions is, "fuck you".
I have been on the trail, diligently if not practically, of this book for about a year, since reading about it in Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West (a very poorly-written book, btw; you can see the seams where it was stitched together from separate pieces which might once have stood free, and there's a lot of redundancy as a result), where the author raves about it time and again. Finally saw it today in Myopic Books as a part of the ritual Bookstore Dance: Do they have John Crowley's Aegypt (no, but they do have Daemonomania, which I got in Palo Alto—and I see now Crowley's got a new book coming out in June). Do they have Grass Pillow ... amazingly, yes. Rawk.
Comments
on 2005-04-21 9:38:07.0, Matt Weiner commented:
Have just started Love and Sleep, having waited a while after Aegypt. Am liking L&S much better although I think I'm about to hit the part where having forgotten what happened Ae is going to hinder comprehension. The difference may be in me, not in the books. Is the new one going to be the completion of the tetralogy? Does the tetralogy have a name?
and, further, on 2005-04-21 9:38:28.0, Matt Weiner commented:
"what happened in Ae"; the sentence makes no sense otherwise.
and, further, on 2005-04-21 9:54:02.0, ben wolfson commented:
I do not know if the new one is going to be the tetralogy's completion or if the tetralogy has a name, though it seems to be referred to as "Aegypt" itself. The book is to be called "Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land", so if that sounds as if it could plausibly be the fourth book, maybe it is (I am doubtful, just because the title of the book is of an entirely different style).
Crowley seems to have reviewed Alasdair Gray's Lanark, and Little, Big is being reissued.