Japanese Literature Summaries
日本語

Tsuru wa yamiki — Summary and Characters

A Kamakura summer, and Akutagawa

Author
Okamoto Kanoko
Published
June 1936
First appeared in
Bungakukai
Form
Novel
Genres
  • Psychological
Setting
  • Kanagawa
Length
26,495 characters
Reading time
About 53 min
Orthography
Modern script and kana

About this work

Okamoto Kanoko's effective first work as a novelist, published in Bungakukai in 1936. Taking as material her friendship with the writer Asakawa Sōnosuke — modelled on Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, dead young — it draws the memory of a summer spent at the same lodging in Kamakura, as the recollection of the heroine, Yōko. The delicate, nerve-worn Asakawa, and the pure attachment Yōko feels for him, are set against white plum blossom and the Kamakura summer. Written in mourning for Akutagawa's death, and the starting point of Kanoko's fiction.

Summary

When the white plum blossoms come, Yōko cannot help remembering the dead writer Asakawa Sōnosuke. More than eight years have passed since Asakawa, who shone in the literary world of the Taishō era, took his own life. His fine, thin figure and his clear spirit are joined in Yōko's mind with the shape of the white plum. But the time when she remembers him most deeply is the height of a summer spent at Kamakura. One summer five years before his suicide, Yōko and her family stayed at a hotel at Yukinoshita in Kamakura to escape the heat, and there they came to know Asakawa, who was lodging in the same place. Sick in his nerves and with a sensibility almost too fine, Asakawa passed the summer with them, now difficult, now as innocent as a child. Yōko, drawn by his brilliance and his solitude, treats him with a pure reverence that she never once oversteps. When summer ended and each went back to his own life, a faint thread of feeling was kept between them. But the promise of another meeting that Yōko made with Asakawa on the way to see the plums at Atami was never kept. In July of that year Asakawa left the world by his own hand. People fitted all sorts of reasons to his death, but Yōko's grief only deepens with the years. With the regret of an unkept promise, and the lament that if they had met again his fate might perhaps have been different, Yōko goes on thinking of the white plum and of that summer at Kamakura.

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 Beginning — The Writer in the Next Wing
  5. 5. The Kamakura Diary Begins — Affection and Perplexity
  6. 6. A Guilty Shadow — Eavesdropping and the Count of Guests
  7. 7. The Question of Beauty — “A Wound of Self-Satisfaction”
  8. 8. A Starry Night — A Dialogue on Life and Death
  9. 9. The Scheme at the Beach — Summer's End
  10. 10. Five Years Later — The Train to Atami
  11. 11. The Ending — A Single Crane, and July of That Year
  12. 12. Key Motifs and Foreshadowing

The opening (original text)

When the white plum blossoms come, Yōko cannot help remembering Mr. Asakawa Sōnosuke. Cannot help does not mean that she dislikes it. It means rather that she is troubled by the rising of a longing for one whom she can no longer see before her. It is already eight years since Mr. Asakawa Sōnosuke, the writer who shone in the literary world of our Taishō era, took his own life.

Tsuru wa yamiki by Okamoto Kanoko (Aozora Bunko)

The ending (original text)

And according to a piece the painter K contributed to the magazine T, Mr. Asakawa wrote in the diary of his last years that Yōko was dearer and more intelligent than any of the women he knew. That makes Yōko's feeling all the more urgent; for she did not keep the meeting she had promised him in the train to Atami, and even now, eight or nine years after his death, she regrets and grieves and laments deeply that if she had met him as she promised, and had cast into him some part of a temper grown much brighter and freer and healthier than in the Kamakura days — she, whom he had chosen and trusted and held dear even in a manner of speaking among the women he knew — it might perhaps have served a little to sway the fate of his life, or might perhaps have made some difference in the time or the direction of his death. Those who read this only as the idle sentiment of a woman named Yōko, do not laugh it away.

Tsuru wa yamiki by Okamoto Kanoko (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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