Japanese Literature Summaries
日本語

The Gold Demon — Summary and Characters

Betrayed for money on the Atami shore

Author
Ozaki Kōyō
Published
January 1897
First appeared in
Yomiuri Shimbun
Form
Novel
Genres
  • Romance
  • Social
Setting
  • Tokyo
  • Shizuoka
Length
252,196 characters
Reading time
About 8 hr 24 min
Orthography
Modern script, historical kana

About this work

Ozaki Kōyō's major work and the high-water mark of the Meiji newspaper novel. Serialization began in the Yomiuri Shimbun on 1 January 1897, and its story of lovers destroyed by money made it enormously popular; but Kōyō's illness made publication intermittent, and it broke off in May 1902. He died of stomach cancer in October 1903, leaving it unfinished. The scene on the Atami shore in which a man betrayed by his betrothed swears revenge is still widely known, and statues of Kan'ichi and Omiya stand there today. A searching portrait of an age in which money was eating into people's hearts, and one of the outstanding long novels of modern Japan.

Summary

Hazama Kan'ichi, a student at higher middle school, lost his mother as a small child and his father at fifteen, and for ten years has lived in the house of Shigisawa Ryūzō, who looked on Kan'ichi's late father as his benefactor; he and the Shigisawas' only daughter, Miya, have pledged themselves to each other. But at a New Year's card party Miya catches the eye of Tadatsugu, son of Tomiyama Jūhei of the Tomiyama Bank. Miya, who has traded on her beauty and dreamed of a great match, wavers, and her parents press Kan'ichi to stand aside, offering to send him abroad to study. On the shore at Atami he demands the truth of her, but she will not open her heart to him and will not turn back. Beside himself, Kan'ichi kicks her to the ground and disappears, leaving his curse behind him: a year from tonight, in this month, on this night, he will cloud the moon with his tears. Abandoning his studies, he becomes the clerk of Wanibuchi Tadayuki, a rapacious moneylender, and sets out to repay the world through money as a lender without mercy. Four years later, married into the Tomiyama family and unhappy, Miya repents of her mistake and writes letter after letter of contrition; Kan'ichi burns them unopened. Around them move Akagashi Mitsue, a beautiful woman moneylender who pursues Kan'ichi relentlessly, Arao Jōsuke, an old friend who reproaches him for what he has become, and Sayama Motosuke and Aiko (Oshizu), lovers he saved from a suicide pact. The novel breaks off with Kan'ichi finishing at last Miya's long letter of contrition, left unfinished by Kōyō's death.

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. Major Supporting Characters
  4. 4. The Opening — The Card Party and the Diamond Ring
  5. 5. Development — The Shore at Atami, and Into Moneylending
  6. 6. The Turn — The Attack and the Wanibuchi House Fire
  7. 7. Sequel to The Gold Demon — Miya's Return and the Dawn Dream
  8. 8. Second Sequel to The Gold Demon — The Double Suicide at Shiobara
  9. 9. The Ending — Left Unfinished
  10. 10. Key Motifs and Foreshadowing

The opening (original text)

It is still early in the evening, yet every gate with its New Year's pines is shut fast, and the great road that runs long and straight from east to west holds not the shadow of anything, as though it had been swept clean. In that desolate stillness, with all traffic ended, the wheels rattle past more thickly than usual — people coming home from their New Year's calls, some in haste, some having drunk too much. And the far-off beat of a lion-dance drum, borne in at intervals, seems to grieve for the three days of the New Year already ending: so plaintive a sound that it might break a small heart in two.

The Gold Demon by Ozaki Kōyō (Aozora Bunko)

The ending (original text)

When I consider it, dying is not so fearful a thing as people say. If I were to breathe my last this instant, just as I am, I should count it the greatest good fortune. Only when I think of the grief of the parents I should leave behind, and of how I was born to no purpose and have had so thin a bond with this world — how this shape of mine that is here now will vanish at once, while this brush, this inkstone, this ring, this lamp and this house, this night and this summer, even the whine of these mosquitoes, all the things around me will long remain, and I alone shall be gone, so little regarded that people will think no more of it than of a flower withering — when I consider such frailty, I grow wretched past bearing, and an unwilling clinging to life rises in me after all.

The Gold Demon by Ozaki Kōyō (Aozora Bunko)

Famous passages

Listen well, Miya. It is the seventeenth of January. When this same month and this same night come round again next year, I will make the moon cloud over with my own tears — and when the moon... when the moon... when the moon clouds over, Miya, know that Kan'ichi is somewhere cursing you, weeping just as he weeps tonight.

On the beach at Atami, Kan'ichi, abandoned by his betrothed Miya, looks up at the hazy moon and hurls these parting words at her. Popularized through shinpa theater and hit songs, it became one of the most famous lines in modern Japanese literature.

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