The Miner

About

A young man, reeling from a personal crisis, impulsively joins a group of labourers heading to a copper mine. Underground, he discovers a world that strips away identity, social class, and every certainty he carried down the shaft. The mine becomes a laboratory for testing what remains of a person when everything external has been removed. Natsume Soseki's most experimental novel — written in 1908, decades ahead of the existentialist fiction it resembles — follows a consciousness in freefall, unable to determine its own nature or explain why it ended up here. A precursor to Kafka and Camus, hidden in plain sight in the bibliography of Japan's greatest novelist.