Ten Nights of Dreams

About

Each story begins the same way: “I had such a dream.” Over ten nights, Soseki dreams his way through Japanese history and myth — from the age of the gods to the Kamakura period to his own Meiji era — in stories that are strange, tender, and sometimes terrifying. In one dream, a dying woman asks to be buried with a fallen star fragment and promises to return in a hundred years. In another, a man is scolded by a monk for failing to achieve enlightenment. The dreams move between love and death, fame and oblivion, honour and despair, each one self-contained but resonating against the others like notes in a chord. Serialised in the Asahi Shimbun over eleven days in 1908, these are the briefest works by one of Japan’s greatest writers — and among the most revealing. The unconscious is the only place Soseki lets himself be unguarded.