The Quilt — Summary and Characters

A confession of love for a pupil

Author: Tayama Katai
Published: September 1907
First appeared in: Shin Shōsetsu
Form: Novel
Genres: Romance
Psychological
Setting: Tokyo
Length: 44,884 characters
Reading time: About 1 hr 30 min
Orthography: Modern script and kana

About this work

A novella published in Shin Shōsetsu in 1907. A middle-aged writer with a wife and children confesses, without concealment, his longing and jealousy and physical desire for the young and beautiful pupil living in his house. Built on the author's own life and laying its protagonist's inside wholly open, it startled the literary world, and is fixed in literary history as the source of Japanese naturalism and of the "I-novel."

Summary

Takenaka Tokio, a novelist, is a middle-aged man of thirty-six with a wife and three children. He takes into his house a young and beautiful student, Yokoyama Yoshiko, who has come to him as a disciple out of a longing for literature, and while teaching her as her master he finds a love growing in him that he cannot hold down. Torn between his position — a teacher, a man with a wife and children — and a desire that only increases, Tokio suffers in secret. When it comes out that Yoshiko has a lover, Tanaka Hideo, a student from Dōshisha, jealousy takes fire in him. Suspecting that their friendship has gone as far as the body, he plays the part of a guardian while inwardly he is pulled apart by jealousy, desire and self-disgust. At last he sends for Yoshiko's father and decides that she must be sent back to her home in the country. After she has gone, Tokio drags the bedding she used out of the closet, buries his face in the collar of the night quilt, and weeps amid desire, sorrow and despair as he breathes in the dear smell of the woman. This ending, a naked confession of the author's own experience, opened a new horizon in modern Japanese literature — that of the "I-novel."

Characters

Takenaka Tokio　The hero. A middle-aged novelist of thirty-six with a wife and three children, tormented by love, jealousy and desire for his young disciple
Yokoyama Yoshiko　The young and beautiful student who has come to Tokio as a disciple. A "new woman" with literary ambitions
Tanaka Hideo　Yoshiko's lover, a student at Dōshisha, whose relations with her feed Tokio's torment
Tokio's wife　The faithful wife who keeps the house, unaware of what is going on in her husband

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. Three Years Earlier — A Lonely Middle Age, and a Letter
5. Two Chances, and Two Days in Saga
6. The Guardian — The Eternal Lamp at Hachiman, and Living Together Upstairs
7. The Lover Comes to Tokyo, and the “Warm-Hearted Guardian”
8. A Letter by the Tone River
9. “Let Us Wait Three Years,” and “I Have Burned Them All”
10. “I Am a Fallen Schoolgirl”
11. The Ending — Parting at Shimbashi, and the Quilt in the Closet
12. Key Motifs and Foreshadowing

The opening (original text)

As he was starting down the long, gentle slope of the road that runs from Kirishitanzaka in Koishikawa out to Gokurakusui, he thought: "So the affair between her and me has come to an end. When I think that at thirty-six, with three children, I could have entertained such ideas, it seems absurd. And yet... and yet... is this really the truth of it? Was all that affection I poured out on her merely affection, and not love at all?"
The Quilt by Tayama Katai (Aozora Bunko)

The ending (original text)

Tokio pulled it out. The dear smell of the woman's hair oil and of her sweat set his heart beating in a way he could not describe. He pressed his face against the velvet of the night quilt's collar, where it was noticeably soiled, and breathed in the dear smell of her to his heart's content. Desire, sorrow and despair came over him all at once. Tokio spread out the bedding, drew the night quilt over himself, buried his face in the cold, soiled velvet collar and wept. A dim room; outside, the wind was raging.
The Quilt by Tayama Katai (Aozora Bunko)

Famous passages

Desire, sorrow, and despair all at once assailed Tokio's breast. He spread out her quilt, drew the bedclothes over it, buried his face in the cold, soiled velvet collar, and wept.
The ending, in which he buries his face in the quilt of the female disciple who has left him and weeps. Writing out even the ugliness of a protagonist who evokes the author himself, this scene became the starting point of the Japanese I-novel.

Read the original

The original Japanese text is available at Aozora Bunko, and the app downloads the same text for its vertical-text reader.

Aozora Bunko library card

Related works

Onna keizu　January 1907
Gubijinsō　June 1907
And Then　June 1909
The Gate　March 1910
The Wild Geese　September 1911
Tadare　March 1913