Japanese Literature Summaries
日本語

Floating Clouds — Summary and Characters

Adrift: two who cannot part

Author
Hayashi Fumiko
Published
November 1949
First appeared in
Fūsetsu
Form
Novel
Genres
  • Romance
  • Psychological
Setting
  • Tokyo
  • Gunma
  • Kagoshima
Length
229,767 characters
Reading time
About 7 hr 40 min
Orthography
Modern script, historical kana

About this work

A novel set in Japan after the defeat, following a man and a woman who came together in French Indochina during the war to the end of an attachment neither can name. Yukiko went south as a typist; Tomioka is a married forestry official. Meeting again in the burnt-out ruins of Tokyo, they part and come back to each other over and over, and drift at last to Yakushima in the rain. Regarded as the summation of Hayashi Fumiko's work, and famous also from Naruse Mikio's film.

Summary

In the winter of the year of the defeat, Yukiko comes ashore at Tsuruga from a repatriation ship. With no house to go to, what she carries in her breast is the memory of her days at Dalat in French Indochina, where she went during the war as a typist — the dreamlike ease of a hill station in the highlands, and the face of Tomioka, an engineer of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, with whom she fell in love there. Tomioka has gone back to the wife waiting for him in Japan, and when they meet again he remains evasive; Yukiko takes up with another man; and still the two cannot get free of each other. At the Ikaho hot spring, where they go having talked of dying together, Tomioka takes up with Osei, the young wife of the inn, and Yukiko is tormented with jealousy. An abortion, a life of living off men, keeping house with a man who has made money out of a new religion — the two slide down and down; and yet theirs is also a strange bond of fate, in which whenever one of them goes under the other puts out a hand. In time Tomioka accepts a posting to the forestry office on Yakushima, and Yukiko, now ill, begs to go with him. On that island where the rain never stops she dies, and Tomioka, alone, looks at himself as a drifting cloud that vanishes without anyone's noticing. Seeing the emptiness of the postwar age down to the bottom of the relations between a man and a woman, it is the summit of Hayashi Fumiko's work.

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. Dalat in French Indochina — Love on the Plateau
  5. 5. Repatriation — A Reunion in the Ruins
  6. 6. The Journey to Ikaho — Two Who Could Not Die
  7. 7. The Way Down — Religion and Solitude
  8. 8. Six Hundred Thousand Yen and Yakushima — The Last Journey
  9. 9. The Ending — Yukiko's Death, and the Floating Cloud
  10. 10. Key Motifs and Foreshadowing

The opening (original text)

Wanting if possible to take a train that would arrive late at night, she had come out of the reception center after three days and idled about the town of Tsuruga on purpose for a day. Having parted at the center from the sixty-odd women, Yukiko found a house near the customs warehouse that was half a hardware shop and half a resting place, and there, alone at last, she was able to stretch out on the matting of her own country for the first time in a long while. The people of the house were kind and heated the bath for her. There were few guests, and they seemed not to change the water, so that it was cloudy; but to Yukiko, who had come through a long voyage, even that whitish water with the warmth of other bodies in it felt good; and the sleety rain slapping against the dim, sooty window of the bathroom drew something immeasurable out of her lonely heart.

Floating Clouds by Hayashi Fumiko (Aozora Bunko)

The ending (original text)

The woman talked fast in a strongly accented dialect and drove the guitar player away. Her accent was somehow like Yukiko's. The face of Yukiko as she had been then, buried in the earth where the rain soaked down, was burned into Tomioka's breast. And yet that strong single life had perished. And here too the wheat of every delusion was putting out its shoots. Adam, drawn on by feeling, incorrigible.... God had sown seed without number. The harvest only grows by leaning on a power that works "of itself." He had not the spirit to go back to Yakushima. And yet he could not bear to go away and leave Yukiko's buried body alone on that island. And what was there for him now if he returned to Tokyo? Tomioka was thinking of himself as a drifting cloud. A cloud that will vanish, sometime and somewhere, without anyone's seeing it go.

Floating Clouds by Hayashi Fumiko (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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