Onna keizu — Summary and Characters
"Give up me, or give up her"
- Author
- Izumi Kyōka
- Published
- January 1907
- First appeared in
- Yamato Shimbun
- Form
- Novel
- Genres
- Romance
- Psychological
- Setting
- Tokyo
- Shizuoka
- Length
- 172,723 characters
- Reading time
- About 5 hr 45 min
- Orthography
- Modern script and kana
About this work
One of Izumi Kyōka's central works, serialized in the Yamato Shimbun from January to April 1907 and published by Shun'yōdō in two parts the following year. In part one, a man raised out of pickpocketing by a scholar and his wife, a former geisha, are torn apart by a word from his teacher; in part two he takes his revenge on a great Shizuoka family proud of its lineage and its pedigree. The line known from the celebrated shinpa play The White Plum of Yushima — that talk of parting and breaking off is for a woman while she is still a geisha — was added for the stage; neither the Yushima scene nor the line appears in the novel.
Summary
Hayase Chikara, once the pickpocket known as "Chikara the Falcon," was taken in by the German scholar Sakai Shunzō, reformed, and now stands as a scholar himself; and he has set up house in secret with O-Tsuta, formerly a geisha of Yanagibashi. But his teacher learns of it, and pressed with the words "will you throw me over, or the woman?" Chikara, unable to betray his debt of gratitude, parts from O-Tsuta. Just then his past is exposed through an affair of pickpocketing, and driven out of Tokyo he moves to Shizuoka, where he draws near to the Kōno family — a house of rank that, when it proposed a match with Sakai's daughter O-Tae, had her station and her genealogy investigated. In time Chikara confronts Hideomi, the head of the clan, with a string of scandals, beginning with the secret of the eldest daughter's birth, and drives him into a corner. About that time O-Tsuta, fallen ill, dies in Tokyo without being able to see Chikara, who is in hospital. On the day of an almost total eclipse of the sun, Hideomi, facing Chikara at the summit of Mount Kunō, shoots his wife with a pistol and puts a bullet through his own head, and his two daughters throw themselves from the cliff. That night Chikara takes poison, holding the lock of black hair he had kept. The letter he leaves behind reveals that nearly all the scandals he had thrown at them were a play got up to strike at those who prided themselves on their family.
Characters
- Hayase Chikara Once the pickpocket "Chikara the Falcon." Taken in by Sakai Shunzō at twelve and reformed into a scholar of German. The hero of the work
- O-Tsuta "Tsutakichi," a geisha of Yanagibashi. She buys out her own contract and sets up house with Chikara, but withdraws at Sakai's command and never goes back to being a geisha
- Sakai Shunzō A university professor and Chikara's benefactor. Though it is he who separates the two, he sits at O-Tsuta's pillow himself when she is dying
- O-Tae Sakai Shunzō's daughter, raised in the same house as Chikara. Her proposed match with Eikichi, the Kōno heir, sets the story moving
- Kōno Hideomi Head of the Kōno family, a house of rank in Shizuoka, and a former army surgeon-general. He marries his daughters to graduates and has his sons' brides investigated for station and genealogy
- Kōno Michiko The eldest daughter of the Kōno house and the wife of a hospital director. Chikara tells her the secret of her birth
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. Major Supporting Characters
- 4. The House in Iidamachi — Ground-Cherries and a Hidden Wife
- 5. A Night at the Kashiwaya — Will You Throw Me Over, or the Woman?
- 6. A Pickpocket's Name — Newspapers, a Farewell Gift, and a Flight by Night
- 7. To Shizuoka — A Fine Lady, and Teizō the Groom
- 8. Michiko — Poison, and a Night of Fireflies
- 9. Eclipse — Gunshots on Mount Kunō
- 10. Key Motifs and Foreshadowing
The opening (original text)
Her face is bare and her lips are painted, and because she is beautiful the color is easily mistaken; but that lovable sound is not her lips clicking. O-Tsuta is holding a ground-cherry husk between her white teeth....
Onna keizu by Izumi Kyōka (Aozora Bunko)
The ending (original text)
Eikichi, if it can be done, take my meaning and build a second household, more beautiful, more pure. Does not a man feel for another man's spirit? — such was the sense of what was written there. Eikichi, who had been covered over by the cloud of his clan's splendor and had forgotten his own existence and the independence of a scholar, sighed as the eclipse cleared on the day of the eclipse, and his mind was clear and his eyes shone, ready to listen to Chikara.
Onna keizu by Izumi Kyōka (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.
More by this author
- The Holy Man of Mount Kōya February 1900