Hojoki: Visions of a Torn World (Rock Spring Collection of Japanese Literature)

Rating:
Summary: Brief and beautiful
Review: This is the most poetic book of prose I have ever seen. Kamo-no-Chomei starts the book with recollections of a series of disasters that struck Kyoto in the late twelfth century: fire, plague, famine, and more. The descriptions are personal and vivid. The near-poetic form of the writing puts intense feeling behind the words. Although Chomei wrote many years after the events, his grief and horror came through as very fresh.

The second part of the book describes Chomei's gradual withdrawal into solitary monasticism. The string of successively less grand homes ends in his famous 'ten square foot hut.' He was not strictly a hermit, but seemed mostly content with a small and simple kind of life. I was especially moved by his descriptions of time spent with a small boy. It brought to mind the end of Hesse's Glass Bead Game.

It would be easy to write a review longer than the work itself, so let me finish with a few words about the translation. The text is readable, elegant, and unaffected, quite an achievement for a book of this sort. The historical footnotes add real insight to the text, they are not just academic filler. It won't take long to read this book, but I promise time well spent to the thinking reader.