The Miner — Soseki Natsume

The Miner is the most daringly experimental and least well known novel of the great Meiji novelist Natsume Soseki. An absurdist novel about the indeterminate nature of human personality, The Miner, written in 1908, was in many was a precursor to the now-infamous work of Joyce and Beckett.

The narrative unfolds within the mind of an unnamed protagonist-narrator, a young man caught in a love triangle who flees Tokyo, is picked up by a procurer of cheap labour for a copper mine, then travels toward and inside the depths of the mine, in search of oblivion. As he delves, the young man reflects at length on nearly every thought and perception he experiences along the way, in terms of what the experience means to him at the time and in retrospect as a mature adult narrating the tale. His conclusion? That there is no such thing as human character. The result is a novel that is both absurd and comical, and a true modernist classic.