Against Myself

Yukiko has been married for less than two years, but the work that once absorbed her now slips beyond her reach. When her husband travels to his family’s home, she returns to her own, hoping its familiar room and garden will restore her creative concentration.

Instead, the warmth of her welcome exposes a painful conflict. Her mother’s devotion carries expectations and suspicion of the man Yukiko chose; her longing for her husband encounters his practical, untroubled habits. What she needs is more than kindness or an orderly household: she wants a shared life of feeling and thought. As their conversations turn into quarrels, certainty about whom she loves gives way to a harder question about how she loves.

First published in 1921, Miyamoto Yuriko’s Against Myself follows these changes with intimate attention to rooms, gardens, gestures, and the shifting force of words. This complete English translation preserves all four sections and the story’s quietly unsettling ending, with eleven notes on historical details and textual language.