/lit/ - Literature

>Kitchen
Banana Yoshimoto
>Snow Country
Yasunari Kawabata
>Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness
>A Quiet Life
Kenzaburo Oe
>Confessions of a Mask
Yukio Mishima

Have fun.

>>4169162
>>4169556
help either. Most readers are profoundly solipsist in their daily lives, and literature generally only corroborates the idea that everybody else is just a character in your story or a figment of your imagination.

But seriously. Read Zhuangzi, the Dao De Jing, and Disputers of the Dao and then come back to this discussion. There are a lot more modern academic texts on the subject that I could recommend, but you should start there.

The A.C. Graham translation of the Zhuangzi is usually cited as best, but I think that Brook Zipporyn's is even better. He gives a glossary of critical characters from the classical Chinese and enumerates all that they denote and connote, which is extremely helpful is understanding the concise subtlety of the language in the Zhuangzi. Classical Chinese is notoriously tricky to translate, and the fact that Zipporyn does it so well (having made stabs at translating the original Zhuangzi myself) and gives non-Chinese-speaking readers a way to do their own interpreting speaks volumes about him as an academic.

>>4161701
He looks so goddamn miserable all the time.

I swear to god this bitch is aging backwards.