Japanese Literature Summaries
日本語

Tadare — Summary and Characters

A kept woman after the wife's place

Author
Tokuda Shūsei
Published
March 1913
First appeared in
Kokumin Shimbun
Form
Novel
Genres
  • Psychological
  • Romance
Setting
  • Tokyo
Length
74,715 characters
Reading time
About 2 hr 29 min
Orthography
Modern script and kana

About this work

A long novel Tokuda Shūsei serialized in the Kokumin Shimbun in 1913. Shūsei, a central figure of naturalism, draws the way one woman, Omasu, lives, in a matter-of-fact hand with sentiment refused. Omasu, who once worked in the water trade, becomes the kept woman of Asai, a man with a wife and children, and in time threatens even the wife's position. The daily life of a man and a woman in which jealousy and tedium, calculation and desire twine together, copied down evenly without either prettifying or condemning: one of the central works of Shūsei's maturity.

Summary

Omasu, who has washed her hands of the water trade, is secretly kept by Asai, a man with a wife and children, and moves from Shitaya to Kōjimachi. Asai's wife suffers from asthma, and Omasu, without quite saying it outright, keeps pressing Asai to divorce her and make Omasu his proper wife instead. By day she lingers at the house of old Ochiyo next door, absorbed in games of hanafuda; by night, alone in bed, she calls to mind her old working days and the faces of the men she once knew — carrying an unsatisfied longing and irritation, and the wounds of a woman's life, Omasu lives her days on toughly, and half in despair. Jealousy toward the proper wife, the maneuvering to hold Asai's heart, rivalry with the women around her. At the end of this accumulation of infatuation and tedium, Omasu at last settles into the position of Asai's wife. One night, now married, the two of them sit facing each other in the sitting room, and Omasu, her face bright and clear, talks over what is to come. A central work of naturalism in which Shūsei copies down the shifting desire and feeling of one woman, without either prettifying her or passing judgment on her.

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 Supporting Characters
  4. 4. Days as a Kept Woman — From Shitaya to Kōjimachi
  5. 5. The Wife's Incursion — Driven to Akasaka
  6. 6. Ousting Oryū — “Now It's Your Turn”
  7. 7. The Wife's Seat — Shizuko, and a Body That Will Not Heal
  8. 8. Oryū's Death, and a Young Man Named Muro
  9. 9. The Shadow of Oima — A Ring, and Being Cast Out
  10. 10. A Double Betrayal
  11. 11. Conclusion — The “Toast” on the Wedding Night
  12. 12. Key Settings and Foreshadowing

The opening (original text)

It was in the autumn of that year that Omasu moved from the Shitaya house, where she had first been kept, over toward Kōjimachi. At the Shitaya house, the first place she had settled since becoming a free woman, Omasu had spent three months, from the end of spring through the hot summer.

Tadare by Tokuda Shūsei (Aozora Bunko)

The ending (original text)

It was quite late by the time he got back. The married couple, in the sitting room with Shizuko and the others already fast asleep, sat facing each other, still in their day clothes, drinking tea, on and on. "Wouldn't it be nice to ask that person along and have a toast together, just the three of us, sometime?" Omasu, her face bright and clear, got up and went to the inner room to change.

Tadare 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

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