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A heartwarming story about a man who is turned into a giant bug and loses his family, realizing at last that they don't need him and he is free to go. Unfortunately, he doesn't find a giant bug girlfriend, nor does he eat anyone alive.

edit: More seriously, this is a difficult short story to understand if you don't read very, very carefully. I'm usually not one for hidden meaning in texts as I like bluntness, but there are all sorts of details that will go over the average reader's head, such as the meaning of the woman in fur being a reference to the guy who the word 'masochism' is coined after. You also have to keep in mind the transformation of society's view of animal life - Darwin was still a relatively 'new' and big deal in philosophical circles, and metamorphosis was one of the ways of referring to evolution. The apple his father tosses at him is also a likely biblical reference, but in the most absurd and parodyic fashion - it is used as a weapon. The short story is full of satire - the way as a giant bug he insists he just wants to convince the manager to let him keep his job, while anyone could see chasing after him is terrifying and aggressive, the desire to 'protect' his sister after she plays music by keeping her locked in a room with a giant smelly and hideous insect, or the way it's implied that at his death he is literately as 2 dimensional as the page he is on and has become artwork , the one thing he cared about beyond work (if you can call a sexy image artwork), or a cartoon like the joke that this is... It's funny. Reading it with only in-text knowledge, there is quite a bit of depth here, but it requires you to have a dark sense of humor and the ability to imagine how much being a salesman/worker beholden to an abusive boss sucks and how society expects men to be the sole caregivers of their entire family even though their family could actually survive without them by taking on jobs themselves. If you don't get this, you likely won't understand a single thing. It's no wonder so many people gave it a poor review, it can be difficult to understand and it is incredibly dark humor. My absolute favorite part is how when he dies from what is essentially suicide, he doesn't resent his family in the slightest, while they resented him horribly. It's the perfect touch and very unique, you don't see too many novels that capture that kind of misery or aspect of the human condition (ironic since he is a bug, but I digress). It is the kind of thing that if you don't get it, the novel absolutely won't explain it to you at all, but if you do get it, it means a lot. In fact, that's what edged over to being my favorite work of fiction. There is a secondary metamorphosis, which the very end paragraph makes clear by being solely about it: that of the female character Greta, who becomes a bread winner. Greta, coincidentally, is very close to the name Gregor. It is very easy to make a trans reading of this story, but just as easy to read it in a half dozen other ways: twisted biblical, political satire, Darwinian sympathy for other creatures, horror, the craving for the warmth and comfort of one's bed and a life idle and free of gravity and the tiring effort of having to get out of it to bath and eat and dress and go to work. So in short, it's something short that speaks a lot in a multitude of ways, often about things that are usually forbidden to speak about and can in some societies only be alluded to by metaphor. This is a story about a man turning into a bug. But it also really isn't at all. But to be honest if it were only about turning into a bug and dying near-happily, bitter-sweetly, I would still like it. Like Kafka, I, too, have daydreamed of transformation into a giant insect.

One of the points of reading philosophy from a wide variety of authors is to get an idea of what other people think, not just to develop your own. The lack of focus on non-Western authors is thus a pretty bad mark against this book. Secondly, it's bad because there are some genuinely really good gems from Eastern philosophy - 'a white horse is not a horse' is a nice logic puzzle that can shift how you view the world and help you analyze statements more critically, and it does it very quickly without needing hundreds of words. That automatically makes it more useful than half of Western philosophy. The title is honestly misleading and I would have bumped it up a star if it had been more accurate. Keep in mind the book was published quite awhile ago, according to Goodreads the first edition was 1926. Also, there's this (the [] my addition): ' The author believes that epistemology [the philosophical question of 'what is knowledge?' with the secondary definition of the study of knowledge] has kidnapped modern philosophy, and well nigh ruined it; he hopes for the time when the study of the knowledge-process will be recognized as the business of psychology, and when philosophy will again be understood as the synthetic interpretation of all experience rather than the analytic description of the mode and process of experience itself.' My philosophy is inherently analytic in nature (as is that of many Westerner's) so this philosophy book doesn't even fully accurately convey Western philosophy despite its focus, ironically, due to the author's bias against such philosophy as 'ruining' philosophy. This is the inherent problem with trying to rank some philosophers as the 'greatest', you introduce bias instead of giving a neutral over-view for the reader to make their own judgement. One of the definitions of epistemology is literately 'the philosophy of knowledge', so he's tossing some of Western philosophy off a cliff because he doesn't like it. Even if we're generous and assume he really just meant the scientific study, that is some very poor wording!

The summary is a dirty lie. She knows how to do one thing - farm. Although I guess that is technically surviving, it /does/ have the power to change the world.

Due to having access to only a partially translated English version of uncertain legality, this is a 'did not actually finish'. I'm sure I could painfully blunder my way through a machine translation, but I'd rather not. The brief read I had was enjoyable and had only some very one sided romance, which seemed to be a plot convenience for getting the main character cotton seeds. I liked reading about how something as simple as knowing how to cultivate mushrooms could make you rich, and I enjoyed reading about farming, history and forestry, which the author seems to have some actual knowledge of, although it was definitely clear that sometimes the author went a little further than their actual area of expertise so take everything with a grain of salt. I'm guessing this is probably a freebie web novel (not entirely sure - alas, my Japanese is almost nonexistent, and the translator notes didn't say but they did include an author's note in one chapter, which is common for web novels and very rare in actual published novels) and thus without an editor, so I don't demand too much from those except entertainment.

I'm a sucker for time traveler goes back and changes things stories, but too often they don't seem to have any actual plot to them. This one hints at a deeper plot just as I was starting to get bored with the farming, which is a nice relief, but I literately can't say what happened next. The pacing could perhaps be just a touch better, but that's to be expected from this sort of novel.

The wolves are slightly more realistic than some depictions, in that the author gets it correct that they don't really bark, but they still come off as slightly too doggish to me, and too slow - they chase a guy and somehow don't murder him even though wolves are faster than men. Wolves are pretty hard to write correctly, I guess; I see mistakes in writing about them all the time. Still, the novel was free and I have no regrets about it, so I can't complain too much.

There are a lot of novels out there with terrible pacing and nonexistent plot; this, I am happy to say, is not one of them. It's an easy quick read and it handled the 'two people initially not friendly with each other become lovers' trope gracefully. It is a cultivation novel with martial arts, but unlike some cultivation novels it doesn't drag the story and pacing down but is, as it should be, merely a supplement to the plot and something to spur action (instead of 5 chapters of just one guy training like you see in some webnovels - you won't find that kind of bad pacing here at all). Maybe I'm judging it against low standards, but, I enjoyed it. It isn't a particularly deep or complicated novel, but not all novels need to be, and that isn't to say there are no moments of angst. Human emotions are depicted well here. The wolves (who the female love interest was initially raised by) were mostly depicted well as well, but were just a shade unrealistic - nothing truly glaring though, they don't talk or act super doggish or anything like that, but I've read better wolf depictions. I'm guessing most people who read the novel are going to be in it for the lesbians and not the wolves though, and probably won't notice anything off unless they're a biologist.