The Miner

The Miner is one of Natsume Soseki’s most underrated books, an intense first-person account of an underground coal miner. The book is at times Proust-like, as Soseki includes extended descriptions of the narrator’s thoughts and observations:

As always, the miners were looking down at me from their barracks, chin on hand. Their faces, which before had filled me with such loathing, now seemed like clay dolls' heads. They were not ugly, not frightening, not hateful. They were just faces, as the face of the most beautiful woman in Japan is just a face. And I was exactly like these men, a human being of flesh and bone, entirely ordinary and entirely meaningless.

[…]

I have a habit of recalling the adventures I experienced back then whenever I have a few spare moments.  It was the most colorful period of my life.  Each time I bring back those images to savor, I wield my scalpel mercilessly (you can do this with old memories) in an attempt to chop up my own mental processes and examine every little piece.  The results, however, are always the same: I don’t understand them.

[…]

In fact, there is no such thing as character, something fixed and final. The real thing is something that novelists don’t know how to write about. Or, if they tried, the end result would never be a novel. Real people are strangely difficult to make sense out of. Even a god would have his hands full trying.

The 2016 Aardvark edition includes an introduction by Haruki Murakami.