Arakure

O-Shima was given away as a small child, raised by a papermaking family on the edge of Tokyo, and told whom she would marry. She refuses. What follows is a life she fights for at every turn: a run from home, a first marriage that collapses, work in a cannery town and a mountain inn, and at last a tailoring business in Tokyo that she drives forward with her own hands and her own temper.

Arakure (1915), "the rough one", is Tokuda Shūsei's naturalist masterpiece: an unsentimental portrait of a woman who will not be broken or tamed, set among the shops, back streets and boarding houses of late-Meiji Japan.

For readers of Japanese classics, Meiji and Taishō fiction, and novels about women making their own way.