Ten Nights of Dreams

Written for the Asahi Shimbun in Under Two Weeks
Natsume Soseki's Concentrated Work of Fantasy Literature
Compared to Akira Kurosawa's Final Film, Dreams
Praised by Susan Sontag as a Genius Pushed to the Margins

"I had a dream like this." A hundred years pass before you wake.

Written by Natsume Soseki in 1908, Ten Nights of Dreams is a collection of ten surreal short stories, each opening with the same line: "I had a dream like this." Moving freely between the age of the gods, the Kamakura period, and a future a hundred years away, the stories blur fable into nightmare—a woman who keeps a man waiting, a samurai forced toward enlightenment, a father carrying his blind child on his back, a man chased by a horde of pigs.

This is not the Soseki known for realism. It is a descent into the unconscious and the memory of guilt, where waiting curdles into suspicion and love into betrayal. In the first night, a dying woman's request—to be waited for across a hundred years—resolves into a single lily blooming a century later. In the third, a blind child's accusation turns guilt into a physical weight carried on the back. The dream does not end when the sleeper wakes. It settles into the spine.

"[Soseki was] a versatile genius often pushed to the margins of Eurocentric world literary history." —Susan Sontag, critic

The cinematic imagination of Ten Nights of Dreams continues to inspire creators across eras. In 2006, an omnibus film adaptation was directed by Nobuhiro Yamashita, Yudai Yamaguchi, and others, reconstructing Soseki's fragmented nightmares into a single visual scroll. Photographer Masaaki Miyazawa won the Young Photographer of the Year award at the ICP Infinity Awards for a series based on the book, while Akira Kurosawa's final film Dreams is frequently compared to it for its structure of an aging master recording his visions. British critic Damian Flanagan has placed Soseki alongside Shakespeare and Goethe as a literary giant whose universality has yet to be fully recognized.

You will read ten dreams in under an hour. One of them will still be waiting for you in a hundred years.