Nagatsuka Takashi's novel The Soil, published in Japan in 1910, provides a moving and sensitive but unsentimental portrait of rural peasant life in Japan during the Meiji era. The community described is the author's native place, and the characters whose lives are described in vivid detail over a period of years are drawn from life.

Ann Waswo is University Lecturer in Modern Japanese History at the University of Oxford. A Fellow of St. Antony's College, she is the author of Japanese Landlords: The Decline of a Rural Elite (California, 1977).

"Nagatsuka Takashi (1879-1915) in The Soil achieves a highly visual story in which he builds up a picture of life in a rural village in intimate detail. . . This novel's most remarkable achievement is its portrayal of a relationship between nature and man of such closeness that, indeed, nature and man are one."—Maria Flutsch, Asian Studies Review

"Every time I read this novel I am struck by Nagatsuka's sincerity as a writer, the beauty of his descriptions of nature, which are informed by the acuity of his power of observation, and his lyricism. I have never doubted that The Soil is in a class of its own in the history of Japanese literature."—Taeko Midorikawa Crump, Japan Forum

"This richly detailed novel is both fascinating and informative. Credit must also go to Ann Waswo for so effectively rendering this textured and lively portrait of a vanished past so vividly in English."—Francis Bosha, Mainichi Daily News