A Certain Woman — Summary and Characters
A woman true to her passion, ruined
- Author
- Arishima Takeo
- Published
- March 1919
- Form
- Novel
- Genres
- Romance
- Psychological
- Setting
- Tokyo
- Kanagawa
- Length
- 355,532 characters
- Reading time
- About 11 hr 51 min
- Orthography
- Modern script and kana
About this work
A long novel published in two parts in 1919, Arishima's finest work and the source of one of the great female figures of modern Japanese literature. Satsuki Yōko, beautiful and quick-witted, kicks through the morality of her time and tries to live true to her own passion — and is ruined by it. On the ship to America she falls violently in love with the purser Kurachi, a married man, abandons the crossing and returns to Japan; hounded by society and by the man she loves, eaten by illness, she goes toward a lonely end, traced in acute psychological detail. It grew out of "Glimpses of a Certain Woman," serialized in Shirakaba, and was heavily rewritten. This app carries the whole in two volumes.
Summary
Chapter-by-chapter synopsis
The app covers this work chapter by chapter (full text in the app).
- 1. About This Work
- 2. Main Characters
- 3. Main Supporting Characters
- 4. Part One, Chapter 1: Shinbashi Departure — A Man from the Past
- 5. Part One, Chapter 2: The Ejima-maru Sets Sail — Purser Kurachi Sankichi
- 6. Part One, Chapter 3: Seattle — Abandoning Kimura
- 7. Part Two, Chapter 1: Scandal — The Article in the Hōsei Shinpō
- 8. Part Two, Chapter 2: The Hideaway in Shiba — Dismissal and Divorce
- 9. Part Two, Chapter 3: Her Sisters, and a Night at the Takeshibakan
- 10. Part Two, Chapter 4: Kamakura — Mind and Body Wasting Away
- 11. Part Two, Chapter 5: Collapse — Sadayo's Illness and Kurachi's Disappearance
- 12. Conclusion — The Operating Table at Kajiki Hospital
- 13. Key Motifs and Foreshadowing
Related works
- Light and Darkness May 1916
- Kokoro April 1914
- Naomi March 1924
- Tadare March 1913
- The Wild Geese September 1911
- The Gate March 1910