The Strange Grass Pillow

What if you could see every feeling that flickers inside a human heart — blazing crimson for anger, soft indigo for grief, shimmering gold for joy?

Gen Tanada, a thirty-two-year-old painter, has grown weary of Tokyo's noisy art world and its demands for raw, marketable emotion. His lifelong pursuit is hi-ninjō no bi — an "impersonal beauty" achieved by stripping feeling entirely from the act of seeing. When he wanders into a mist-shrouded mountain pass and touches a strange triangular stone ...