Japanese Literature Summaries
日本語

Love Suicide at Imado — Summary and Characters

Despair behind the quarter's glitter

Author
Hirotsu Ryūrō
Published
July 1896
First appeared in
Bungei Kurabu
Form
Novel
Genres
  • Romance
Setting
  • Tokyo
Length
36,702 characters
Reading time
About 1 hr 13 min
Orthography
Modern script and kana

About this work

Hirotsu Ryūrō's central work, and a masterpiece of the grim school of Meiji fiction, published in Bungei Kurabu in 1896. Set in the Yoshiwara quarter, it draws the doomed love and death of Kichisato, a courtesan at the height of her earning. Abandoned by Hirata, the client she cared for, Kichisato wavers between him and Zenkichi, who is poor and single-hearted in his devotion to her, and grows coarser in body and mind. The despair of a woman behind the glitter of the quarter, drawn in terse, sharp dialogue and a realist hand: the summit of Ryūrō's work, singing the sorrow of the lower orders.

Summary

In the early winter of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter, the courtesan Kichisato — not a beauty, but a girl with a round, appealing face and a spirited, faintly sharp-edged temper — is one of the leading women of her house. Hirata, the client she once loved with her whole heart, went home to his native province and never wrote again, abandoning her outright. As if to numb that wound, Kichisato grows intimate with Zenkichi, a poor but single-minded customer devoted to her, and is soon whispered about by those around her as "heartless" and "fickle." Only Koman, an elder sister-courtesan she can speak freely with, senses what is really in Kichisato's heart. Cast off by Hirata, Kichisato gradually lets herself go — borrowing money and goods from all sides and never repaying them, her cheeks growing gaunt, her rouge forgotten, aging visibly almost overnight. One day she entrusts to Koman the bundle of letters from Hirata that she had so carefully kept, asking her to send them back to him. Even when Koman reproaches her for such coldness, Kichisato only hangs her head. On the day of the year-end housecleaning, Kichisato, thoroughly drunk, leaves Koman with a parting remark heavy with unspoken meaning, throws on Okuma's short coat, and slips quietly out the back door. Left behind in a paper parcel are a photograph of herself and Hirata placed face to face, with the single character "heart" written on the back, and a farewell letter of apology addressed to Hirata, Nishinomiya, and Koman. The next day, at Imado on the bank of the Sumida River, a courtesan's sandals and a man's are found side by side, cast off. Kichisato had thrown herself into the river together with Zenkichi, the man who had loved her so single-mindedly. The following January, a woman's body washes ashore upstream of Eitai Bridge — and it is, beyond doubt, Kichisato's own. Cast off by the man she truly loved, and dying instead beside the man who loved her — this is the anguished fate of a courtesan, rendered here in the starkest of "serious novels."

Chapter-by-chapter synopsis

The app covers this work chapter by chapter (full text in the app).

  1. 1. About This Work
  2. 2. Main Characters
  3. 3. Major Supporting Characters
  4. 4. Introduction — The Last Night
  5. 5. Parting at Dawn
  6. 6. Zenkichi in the Stand-In Room
  7. 7. The First Train and the Returned Cup
  8. 8. "From Now On, Be the One I Depend On"
  9. 9. Days of Unraveling
  10. 10. Conclusion — The Housecleaning Day, the Riverbank at Imado
  11. 11. Key Motifs and Foreshadowing

The opening (original text)

One Not a single cloud lodged in the vast sky, yet it had turned a deep, inky black; the moon of the twenty-fourth had not yet risen, and the glittering of the stars, as though alive with spirit, was enough to chill one to the bone merely to look up at them. Even the electric lamps that boasted of this sleepless city could not escape the desolation of the frost-withered third month of winter; from the Great Gate to Suidōjiri, not even the shrill chatter of voices from the upstairs rooms of the teahouses could be heard. The day after tomorrow would be the eighth of November, the first Day of the Rooster. The year had been somewhat mild, so that one hardly needed three layers of quilted robes — but once night grew late, the chill of early winter still crept, unmistakably, into the skin.

Love Suicide at Imado by Hirotsu Ryūrō (Aozora Bunko)

The ending (original text)

Koman ran, still in tears, clutching the photograph and the farewell letter, to Kichisato's room on the same upper floor — but of course Kichisato was nowhere to be found; only Okuma, the house clerk, and two or three others were there, in an uproar. Koman went into the front room and looked out the window, but all she could see were the scattered lights of the houses around Tarō Inari and Iriya-Kanasugi, and, far in the distance, the electric lamps of Ueno glimmering like will-o'-the-wisps. Around noon the next day, the Asakusa police found, in an alley near Hashiba in Imado, the short coat of Okuma's that Kichisato had been wearing, cast off; and on the bank of the Sumida River in that same alley, a pair of a courtesan's sandals and a pair of straw-soled men's sandals, likewise cast off. But the bodies were not easily found. Toward the end of January the following year, a newspaper reported that a woman's corpse had washed ashore upstream of Eitai Bridge; when Okuma went, just to be certain, to see for herself, the face had decayed too far to be identified — but the clothing was unmistakably what Kichisato had been wearing when she left. Weeping, Okuma had her buried at the unaffiliated temple in Minowa, and Koman sent Oume, again and again, to offer incense and flowers on each seventh day.

Love Suicide at Imado by Hirotsu Ryūrō (Aozora Bunko)

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

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