The Miner, the second of Srseki's nine novels, is his most exper-imental and least well known. First appearing in serialized form in the columns of the Asahi newspaper in 1908, the novel is vir- tually devoid of plot or characterization, and instead unfolds within the mind of the unamed protagonist-narrator, a young man caught in a love triangle who flees Tokyo, is picked up by a procurer of cheap labor for a copper mine, and then travels toward and inside the depths of the mine in search of oblivion. The young man reflects at length on nearly every thought and perception he experiences along the way in terms of what each experience means to him at the time and in retrospect as a mature adult narrating the tale. Ruminating extensively on the nature of personality, he concludes that there is no such thing as human character. The result is a novel that is both absurband comical.