Japanese Literature Summaries
日本語

Mold — Summary and Characters

A household drifted into, and tedium

Author
Tokuda Shūsei
Published
August 1911
First appeared in
Tokyo Asahi Shimbun
Form
Novel
Genres
  • Family
  • Social
Setting
  • Tokyo
Length
110,783 characters
Reading time
About 3 hr 42 min
Orthography
Modern script and kana

About this work

One of Tokuda Shūsei's central works, and the novel held to have established naturalism in Japan, serialized in the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun from August to November 1911 on Natsume Sōseki's recommendation. A beginning writer falls into an irregular relationship with the girl who keeps house for him and drifts into setting up a household with her; the course of it and the tedium that follows are drawn in a realism that refuses sentiment. A first-rate I-novel.

Summary

Sasamura, a beginning writer, takes on O-Gin, the daughter of the old woman who used to look after him, when the old woman goes back to the country. Finding it comfortable to be well looked after by a young girl, he is on more than ordinary terms with her before the old woman returns. Before long O-Gin is with child, and Sasamura moves alone to a lodging in Ushigome, meaning to throw himself into a large piece of work he has been asked for; but the household weighs on his mind and the work does not go forward at all. O-Gin bears a boy, and the two go on living as husband and wife in all but name; yet an unsettled feeling smolders on in Sasamura's breast. One day, falling into a quarrel with O-Gin over some trifle, he walks straight out of the house.

Characters

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. Main Secondary Characters
  4. 4. Living Together — The Old Woman's Daughter
  5. 5. Pregnancy — "The Face of the Child to Come"
  6. 6. The Ushigome Lodging — Master M, and the Birth of Shōichi
  7. 7. Entry in the Family Register — A Marriage by Sheer Inertia
  8. 8. Weariness — A Second Child, and a Violent Hand
  9. 9. The Conclusion — Flight, and the Train to Nishi-Nasu
  10. 10. Key Motifs and Foreshadowing

The opening (original text)

It was about the same time that Sasamura entered his wife in the family register as that he registered the birth of the infant born between them. Sasamura, to whom keeping a household had been no more than a matter of custom, came back about that time from a journey of less than half a year in the west, and looked back the more clearly on the disorder of the lodging-house life to which he had so long and so unwillingly clung. While he was traveling about with his wicker trunk from one place to another, what struck his bloodshot eyes most strongly was the men who came aboard the boats bringing young wives with them. At a hot-spring inn in Kyushu, too, suffering from idleness, he soaked too long in the bath and came down with a fever; and apart from exchanging a word now and then with a geisha down from Osaka who came to sit by his pillow, he had not a single person to talk to.

Mold by Tokuda Shūsei (Aozora Bunko)

The ending (original text)

"Sir, you really will take me to Nikkō, won't you?" A gold tooth shone in the woman's mouth. Her voice, too, sounded hoarse. She had come there to pay her respects for the night before. In the afternoon Sasamura put on the Western clothes that had hung so long on the wall and went off alone to the station, on the spur of the moment. And he was just in time for the train to Nishi-Nasu.

Mold by Tokuda Shūsei (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

More by this author

Related works