Fall asleep tonight while listening to Natsume Souseki’s (夏目漱石) Ten Nights of Dreams (夢十夜, Yume Jūya).
View all our Japanese sleep stories: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJNhDugUSaWd6mQJnabnwm1xUfi7uVOIN
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This video contains the first five stories. Our next video will finish the set.
If you would prefer to view the stories with Japanese text shown (and without the rain), please see the playlist here:
Originally serialized in the Asahi Shimbun in 1908, Natsume Souseki wrote ten short “dreams” are written in a surreal, dreamlike style. Weird, disturbing, and somewhat humorous, these short stories are like haiku—they hint at a much bigger story which is left to the reader to fish out.
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From Wikipedia:
The First Night
The dreamer sits at the bedside of a woman who says she is dying. Because of the warm color in her lips and cheeks, he questions, several times, if she truly is dying. After confirming that she must indeed die, the woman asks a favor. After she dies, he should dig her grave with a large shell, mark it with a fragment of fallen star, and wait at its side a hundred years for her return. The dreamer prepares her grave and buries her as requested. Then he begins his vigil, losing count of the days as years go by. As he begins to wonder if she didn’t deceive him, a slender stem emerges and a white lily blossoms before him. He touches his lips to a dewdrop on the lily and knows in that moment that a hundred years have passed.
The Second Night
The dreamer, who is staying in a temple, returns to his chamber after leaving the high priest’s quarters. He settles himself and reaches under his seating cushion to confirm the presence of a dagger. Then, he reflects on his exchange with the high priest. The priest had scorned him for his years of failure in attaining enlightenment. No true samurai, the priest had said, would succumb so to failure. The dreamer decides he must take either the priest’s life or his own, that very evening, when the clock strikes the next hour. If he succeeds in attaining enlightenment, then the priest will pay. If not, then he will commit seppuku. He struggles mightily to find “nothingness.” His struggle turns to frustration and then to anger. As he struggles without success, the clock strikes the hour.
The Third Night
The dreamer is walking at dusk with a six-year-old child on his back. He believes the child is his own, and he knows that the child is blind and that its head is shaved. However, he does not know when the child lost its sight or why its head is shaved. Despite its blindness, the child seems to know where they are and where they are going. Its voice is childlike, but its words are mature. The dreamer grows ill at ease, and he resolves to abandon the child in the woods up ahead. As they enter the woods, the child directs the dreamer to the base of a cedar tree. The child states that he was killed by the dreamer, in this very place, on a similar night, a hundred years before. The dreamer remembers the night, and at the same moment the child grows heavy as stone.
The Fourth Night
An old man sits alone at a large table in an earthen-floored room, escaping the heat of the day. He drinks saké and converses enigmatically with the proprietress. When he departs, the dreamer, who is a young child, follows him to a willow where children are playing. The old man produces a towel and tells them to watch it become a snake. He blows a whistle and circles with dance-like steps, but the towel remains a towel. Finally, he puts the towel into his box and walks on, still insisting it will change. They reach the riverbank, but the old man doesn’t stop. The dreamer watches him wade in, still hoping to see the snake when he emerges on the other bank. The old man, however, disappears beneath the surface and does not reappear.
The Fifth Night
The dreamer is defeated in battle and captured alive. Brought before the enemy general, he chooses death over capitulation. However, he requests to look one last time on the woman he loves before dying. The enemy general gives him until daybreak, when the cock crows, to summon his woman. The woman mounts her unsaddled white horse and races through the night, black hair streaming behind her. Suddenly, she hears the crowing of a cock from the darkened roadside and loses hope. When the cock crows a second time, she releases the taut reins, and horse and woman tumble into a deep canyon. The crowing of the cock was in fact Amanojaku, a mischievous goddess, who from that moment on is the dreamer’s eternal nemesis.