A Woman's Life

A sixty-year-old woman packs her daughter, her nephew and her old nurse and leaves the house she has kept for ten years in her husband's absence.

In this late short novel Shimazaki Tōson follows Ogen of the Koyama house through a country clinic by the Kiso River, her brothers' crowded household in Tokyo, a sanatorium and a hospital for the mentally ill. Her thoughts run on two tracks: a long, bitter memory of a charming, unfaithful husband, and a growing fear of the madness that ended her father's life in a barred room. Her daughter Oshin, forty and childlike, is the one thing she will not give up.

Written in Tōson's close, interior style, with the speech of the Kiso valley, this is a harrowing, compassionate portrait of an old woman who is not sure herself whether she is ill. This complete new translation, about 16,000 words, includes a translator's note, endnotes and source information.