The Ten Foot Square Hut and Tales of the Heike

1928. Being two thirteenth-century Japanese classics, the Hojoki and selections from the Heike Monogatari. The Hojoki consists of the reflections of a recluse who had retired in disgust from a world that was too full of violent contrasts and cataclysms, both of animate and inanimate nature, to allow a sensitive person to find it at all tolerable. If, though there are some Japanese scholars who question it, tradition ascribes this work truly to Kamono-chomei, it was disappointment at not being allowed to succeed to the ancestral position of Lord Warden of the Shrine of Kamo in Kyoto that caused him to forsake the world and go to live in the hills. As can be seen from the Heike Monogatari, which describes the period in more detail, Chomei was not singular in being thus arbitrarily deprived of position and income, neither was he the only one who sought refuge in nature and Buddhist philosophy.