A New Household

Shinkichi, a sake dealer's apprentice from a snowbound mountain village, has risen at last to a shop of his own on a new street in Tokyo. He marries Osaku, a former maid, and the two begin the long business of making a household: the rice and the ledger, the creditors, a friend's ruin, a neighbour's wife who leaves, a child on the way.

Tokuda Shūsei's Shinjotai (1908) is the novel that made his name and set the course of Japanese naturalism: an unsentimental, closely observed picture of small-shop life in late-Meiji Tokyo.

For readers of Japanese classics, Meiji fiction and quiet novels of ordinary lives.