A Certain Woman

Tokyo, September 1901. Satsuki Yōko is twenty-five, brilliant, beautiful and already notorious: divorced from a famous war correspondent, mother of a little girl she has left in the care of her old nurse, and engaged by family arrangement to Kimura, a hopeful young businessman waiting for her in Seattle. She boards the steamer for America to begin a respectable life. Instead, on the long crossing, she meets the ship’s purser, Kurachi, a huge, coarse, magnetic man with a wife and children at home, and the voyage becomes the turning point of her life.

Arishima Takeo’s great novel follows Yōko across the Pacific and back, into a love affair that Meiji society will not forgive, through newspaper scandal, a hidden house among the temple cedars of Shiba, her two younger sisters, jealousy, illness and the hospital ward. Told from so close to Yōko that the narration often speaks in her own voice, it is one of the most searching portraits of a woman in modern Japanese fiction: proud, self-deceiving, magnificent and doomed by the narrow choices open to her.

This complete, unabridged translation of both parts (chapters 1–49) is made directly from the Japanese, with a translator’s note, endnotes on period terms and source information.