Japanese Literature Summaries
日本語

Troubled Waters — Summary and Characters

The fate of Oriki, a bar girl

Author
Higuchi Ichiyō
Published
September 1895
First appeared in
Bungei Kurabu
Form
Novel
Genres
  • Romance
  • Social
Setting
  • Tokyo
Length
20,138 characters
Reading time
About 40 min
Orthography
Modern script, historical kana

About this work

One of Higuchi Ichiyō's central stories, published in Bungei Kurabu in September 1895. Around Oriki, the star attraction of the Kikunoi, a cheap drinking house on the edge of town, it follows men and women coming apart between money and feeling. Through her relationship with Genshichi — once a respectable man, now neglecting his wife and child for her — and its wretched end, it draws with great force the loneliness and the fate of a woman living at the bottom of Meiji society.

Summary

O-Riki, the most sought-after of the serving women at the Kikunoi, a cheap drinking house on the edge of town, passes her days handling customers while keeping her own history hidden, and carries inside her an emptiness she can confide to no one. Genshichi, a man who once had a business of his own, ruined himself over her, and now lives in a poor back tenement with his wife O-Hatsu and their son Takichi, still unable to cut himself free of his longing for her. To one customer alone, Yūki Tomonosuke, O-Riki opens something of herself: that she was born in the house of a poor craftsman, and that since childhood something in her heart has been broken. But no one can reach the root of her suffering and save her. On the sixteenth night of Bon she slips away from the party rooms and wanders the streets, and, meeting Tomonosuke, clings to him and passes the night with him. Meanwhile, in Genshichi's house, where quarrels over her never cease, he at last tells his wife and child to go. A few days later two coffins are carried quietly out of the new quarter — O-Riki's palanquin, brought out of the Kikunoi's retired house, and one more. Whether it was a double suicide, or one death forced upon the other, no one ever knows; only the talk of it is left behind.

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. Introduction — The New Quarter and O-Riki of the Kikunoi
  5. 5. A Customer Named Yūki Tomonosuke
  6. 6. The Nine-by-Two Room — Genshichi's House
  7. 7. The Sixteenth Night of Bon — A Soliloquy in the Dark
  8. 8. The Night of Confession — Three Generations of Misfortune and the Miso Strainer
  9. 9. Catastrophe — Divorce, and Two Coffins
  10. 10. Key Motifs and Foreshadowing

The opening (original text)

"Hey, Kimura-san, Shin-san, come in! When I say come in, surely you might come in. You mean to walk straight past again and go on to the Futabaya, don't you? I'll come after you and drag you back, so mind. Really, if you're off to the bath, be sure to stop in on the way home. You're a liar, so there's no telling what you'll say" — talking in the scolding way of a woman standing at the front of the shop, catching hold of a man in loose clogs who seemed to be a regular.

Troubled Waters by Higuchi Ichiyō (Aozora Bunko)

The ending (original text)

Some days after the Feast of the Dead, when the light of the Bon lanterns was still faintly lonely, two coffins went out of the new quarter, one in a palanquin and one slung on poles; the palanquin came quietly out of the Kikunoi's retired house. Listening to the whispering of the people along the main street: that girl had wretched luck, to be taken a fancy to by such a worthless fellow, a pitiful business. No, says another, she went willingly; there is a sure witness who saw the two of them standing and talking on the temple hill at dusk that day; and the woman was beside herself, and the man being what he was, she must have gone with him out of a sense of obligation. Nonsense — as if that hussy knew what obligation was; she met him on her way home from the bathhouse and could hardly shake him off and run, so no doubt they walked along and talked; but she was cut from behind across the shoulder, with a graze on the cheek and a stab at the neck and other wounds besides — she was certainly struck down while she was running. The man, on the other hand, made a fine job of it, said others; from his days at the bedding shop I never thought much of him, but that was his flower in death — he looked splendid. In any case the Kikunoi will be badly out of pocket; that girl was to have had a fine patron, and it is a shame to have let her slip, said some, making a joke of other people's grief. The talk ran every way and settled on nothing; but a grudge is long, and there were those who told of seeing, now and then, a trailing light — a soul-fire, or whatever it may be — fly up from the little rise they call the temple hill.

Troubled Waters by Higuchi Ichiyō (Aozora Bunko)

Famous passages

Hey, Kimura, Shin-san, why don't you stop in? I said stop in, so what's the harm in stopping in? I bet you're planning to walk right past and go on to the Futabaya again — well, think again, because I'll come out and drag you in myself.

An opening that begins with Oriki's voice calling out to customers from the doorway of a wine shop. Ichiyō's storytelling style, in which narration and dialogue melt into one another, carries the very air of the pleasure quarter with it.

Oh, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it — if only there were some way to go somewhere quiet, so quiet, where no human voice, no sound of anything, could reach me, where my own heart and mind could go blank and free of every thought

A monologue Oriki lets slip on her way back through the night streets, after seeing off a customer. The utter lack of any way out for a woman living as a courtesan surges forth in waves of repeated words.

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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