A critical biography of Usui Kojima, a pioneer of modern Japanese mountaineering and a contributor to travel writing. It situates his life across mountains, literature, and art within Meiji and Taisho cultural history.

It revives a Meiji-era figure who walked mountains and left prose within cultural history.

A nonfiction work about Fumihiko Otsuki, compiler of Genkai, Japan’s first modern Japanese dictionary. It joins the long labor of dictionary-making with the Meiji era’s urgent concern for language.

Through a life devoted to one dictionary, the sea of modern Japanese language comes into view.