Ten Nights of Dreams (Yume Juya) or Ten Nights' Dreams is a series of short pieces by Natsume Soseki. It was serialized in the Asahi Shimbun from July 25 to August 5, 1908.Soseki writes of ten dreams set in various time periods, including his own time (the Meiji period) and as far back as the "age of the gods," and the Kamakura period. Four of the ten dreams begin with the phrase "This is what I saw in my dream" (Konna yume o mita).

"Ten Nights' Dreams is a collection of ten short stories or dreams. Among the ten nights, the first, second, third, and fifth nights start with the same sentence, "This is the dream I dreamed." Each dream has a surrealistic atmosphere. Some are funny, and others are grotesquely weird. Did Soseki try to express what he actually dreamed? Or was his subconscious emerging spontaneously in the form of narrative dream?"--Page 4 of cover

Born at the height of the Heian period, the pseudonymous Lady Sarashina reveals much about the Japanese literary tradition in this haunting self-portrait. Born in 1008, Lady Sarashina was a lady-in-waiting of Heian-period Japan. Her work stands out for its descriptions of her travels and pilgrimages and is unique in the literature of the period, as well as one of the first in the genre of travel writing. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A traveller comes to Japan and is slowly absorbed into a complex and increasingly unnerving interplay of reality, representation, substitution, the virtual, the artificial, the counterfeit and the unreal. In form, 'Japan Dreams' is loosely modelled on 'Pillow Book' by Sei Shonagon and 'As I crossed a bridge of dreams' by Lady Sarashina, both written c. 1000 AD. The narrative moves between travelogue, meditation, exploration of ideas, discourse on various subjects, dreams, lists, and introspection. Fact and fiction become harder to separate as the story unfolds. What starts as straightforward documentary metamorphoses into chaotic self-absorption, and the reader is left examining the very same question examined by the narrator: is this real? A very personal first-person account, 'Japan Dreams' touches on numerous aspects of Japanese culture: arts and heritage, attitudes to time and space, sexuality, language, technology, media, entertainment, identity and self, values, family, city and country life, and religion.

This is the story of Namiko. She travels to Oxford (England) to improve her English. After having returned to Japan she starts writing seventy-nine love-letters