夢十夜

乙女の本棚

by Natsume Sōseki

乙女の本棚シリーズ最新作は夏目漱石×「刀剣乱舞」イラストレーターのコラボレーション！
小説としても画集としても楽しめる、魅惑の1冊。全イラスト描き下ろし。 こんな夢を見た。10の夢によって構成される、超有名作家による幻想的な奇譚。 本書は、有名小説と人気イラストレーターによる珠玉のコラボレーション・シリーズ「乙女の本棚」の１冊です。
今作では、『刀剣乱舞』のキャラクターデザインなどで知られ、本シリーズでは萩原朔太郎『猫町』、江戸川乱歩『押絵と旅する男』を担当するwebサイト「pixiv」でも大人気のイラストレーター・しきみが夏目漱石を描きます。
自分の本棚に飾っておきたい。大切なあの人にプレゼントしたい。そんな気持ちになる「乙女の本棚」シリーズの1冊。オールカラーで小説と描き下ろしイラストが楽しめます。 ＊この電子書籍は固定レイアウト方式で作成されています。文字の拡大・縮小や、検索、ハイライトなどの機能は利用できません。

About the author

Natsume Sōseki (夏目 漱石), born Natsume Kinnosuke (夏目 金之助), was a Japanese novelist. He is best known for his novels Kokoro, Botchan, I Am a Cat and his unfinished work Light and Darkness. He was also a scholar of British literature and composer of haiku, kanshi, and fairy tales. From 1984 until 2004, his portrait appeared on the front of the Japanese 1000 yen note. In Japan, he is often considered the greatest writer in modern Japanese history. He has had a profound effect on almost all important Japanese writers since.

Reviews

[owlette · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did not know that the author of Botchan, could write such fantastical stories. The first story, "The First Night" (「第一夜」), is breathtaking from start to end. A woman tells a man that she's about to die. The man is unsure--he thinks she looks like she might die at any moment, but the certainty in her words makes him think she's far from dying. The man asks if she wants hims to do anything. She instructs him to bury her in a grave dug with a shell and leave a piece of a star to mark the site. She tells him to wait for a hundred years by the grave when she will visit him. Beyond this conversation, other things are happening that tell you this is definitely not taking place in hard reality, but Natsume Soseki inserts sensual details that gives a redolent vivacity to this dream.

A note about the artwork: Shikimi (しきみ) draws an androgynous figure to stand in for the narrator. Since the narrator never declares himself a man--he refers to himself in the neutral jibun 自分--I guess it's possible to read the piece freely outside of the heteronormative framing. I was much surprised by my prejudice. Though I have much to say about some of the choice of artworks in Maiden's Bookshelves (乙女の本棚) series, sometimes the artist manages to open new grounds of interpretation for these new Japanese classics as Shikoku has done with Soseki’s work.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't get a lot of the historical references and I had to look up some unfamiliar words, but this is still a very readable work by Soseki. Each dream is distinct and interesting in its own way. Soseki's writing has an strange and unfinished quality to it that conveys the sense of trying to relate a dream to someone.