In these musings, the artist quotes and mentions a variety of Japanese, Chinese and European painters, poets, and novelists.

Other writers and poets referred to include Wang Wei, Tao Yuanming, Bashō, Laurence Sterne (Tristram Shandy), Oscar Wilde (The Critic as Artist), and Henrik Ibsen.

With Natsume Sōseki considered culturally "celebrated,"[4] Kusamakura was later translated into English in 1965 by Alan Turney under the title The Three-Cornered World.

[1] Turney himself explained his choice of the title in the introduction to his translation: Kusa Makura literally means The Grass Pillow, and is the standard phrase used in Japanese poetry to signify a journey.

[5] Explaining her choice of the title in an introduction, McKinney notes the connotation of The Grass Pillow in Japanese as a term for travel that is "redolent of the kind of poetic journey epitomized by Bashō's Narrow Road to the Deep North.