Japanese Literature Summaries
日本語

The Soil — Summary and Characters

A tenant farmer's year by the Kinu

Author
Nagatsuka Takashi
Published
June 1910
First appeared in
Tokyo Asahi Shimbun
Form
Novel
Genres
  • Family
  • Social
Setting
  • Ibaraki
Length
227,057 characters
Reading time
About 7 hr 34 min
Orthography
Old script and kana

About this work

A long novel drawing minutely the life of Kanji, a poor tenant farmer, and his family, together with the seasons of a farming village on the Kinu river. The days of poverty and labour that begin with the death of his wife Oshina are copied down in a thoroughgoing sketch style with sentiment entirely refused. Taking as material the farming life of the author's native Ibaraki, it is the landmark that established Japanese peasant literature, and is known too for Natsume Sōseki's part in getting it serialized in the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun.

Summary

A poor hamlet on the banks of the Kinu River. The tenant farmer Kanji lives a life of grinding poverty, clinging to the soil, together with his wife O-Shina, who helps support the household by peddling tofu and konjac, their daughter O-Tsugi, and their small son Yokichi. One winter day, O-Shina, pregnant again, tries to abort the child herself, falls ill, and dies young. Left alone, Kanji burdens the still-young O-Tsugi with the housework and the care of her little brother, while he himself silently drives his hoe into the fields day after day. In time his wife's father, the stubborn old man Uhei, comes to live with them, but the old man and Kanji get along badly, and poverty only sharpens the friction within the household. Fire, illness, and an unending struggle for money — as the workings of nature and the labor of farming pile up, without pause, one upon another, the lives and deaths of nameless peasants are set down through an eye of pure, unflinching observation, stripped of all embellishment. With no dramatic plot to speak of, this novel — in which the soil and seasons of the Kinu riverside themselves seem to be the true protagonist — became the cornerstone of modern Japanese peasant literature.

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. The Wife's Death — The Ground-Cherry Root
  5. 5. The Three Left Behind — The Oak Root and the Policeman
  6. 6. Stealing from the Soil — Sorghum and a Red Sash
  7. 7. The Shut Door, and the Séance
  8. 8. The Old Man Returns — The Hut and the Fire Tongs
  9. 9. The Fire — And the Copper Coins in the Ashes
  10. 10. Key Motifs and Foreshadowing

The opening (original text)

A fierce west wind struck the withered stands of deciduous trees again and again all day long, as though hurling some vast, invisible mass against them with a great gust, and again, and again. The branches now and then let out a sound like a thin, anguished cry. The short winter day was already sinking, blinking as it cast out its last yellow light. And then the west wind would sometimes drop all at once, falling so still it seemed as though it had stopped entirely. Clouds like flung clods of mud clung motionless, unevenly, above the woods, showing that the sky itself was still restless. And so, now and again, as if remembering itself, the branches would rustle and creak. The world had grown suddenly forlorn. O-Shina set down her carrying-pole once more. O-Shina hung a small hook, fashioned from a tree branch, from the end of her short bamboo pole, and used it to hitch up the handle of her bucket. It was her custom, in the gaps between farm work, to buy in tofu from the village and walk it around two or three neighboring villages to sell. Since she carried it all in nothing but a bucket, it required no capital, and so the profit was thin as well, but even so, it brought in a little visible pocket money day by day, better than farming alone, and so she had gone on doing it for some while now.

The Soil by Nagatsuka Takashi (Aozora Bunko)

The ending (original text)

"Well now, thank you kindly, ma'am," he said, and as he undid the purse from his sash and drew it out, it felt to him strangely lighter than before, and he tilted his head, glancing at the purse from the outside. He fished about again at the bottom of the purse for the coins. The copper coins, pulled from the ashes of the burned ruins and turned the color of bronze, had their scorched surfaces peeling away here and there to show the bright metal beneath. He brought them close to his eyes and stared at them, transfixed, for a while. Then, seeming to catch himself, he suddenly looked up at the woman as though startled, and, with a small clink, let the coins drop back to the bottom of the purse.

The Soil by Nagatsuka Takashi (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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