An Account of My Hut

"The flow of the passing river never ceases, and yet the water is never the water that was."

A courtier and poet who failed at court, Kamo no Chōmei withdrew in 1212 to a hut ten feet square on a mountain outside Kyoto and wrote the shortest great book in Japanese. Half of it is disaster: the fire of 1177 that ate a third of the capital, the whirlwind, the forced removal of the capital to Fukuhara, the famine in which the priests counted forty-two thousand corpses in the streets of one city, and the earthquake in which the children of a samurai family were crushed at play under a garden wall.

The other half is the hut: three metres square, taken apart and carted to a new site whenever he wishes, with a shelf of poems and music, a bracken bed, a boy from the valley for company, and the sound of the wind. And at the end, the turn that makes the book permanent — the doubt whether loving the hut is not itself one attachment too many, and whether a man who has renounced everything for the pleasure of renouncing has renounced anything at all.

Complete, in sixteen sections, with 42 notes. Short enough to read in an hour and to reread for a lifetime.

English-language digital edition. Translated by Valentin Sarić.

You receive: a 33-page PDF and an EPUB edition.

Digital download only. No physical book is shipped.