Days of Childhood: Letters to a Lady

A man in a Tokyo townhouse sends his small sons off to their first days of school, and begins a long letter to a friend far away in the mountains. The letter turns back to his own childhood: a post-station village in the Kiso mountains and the old house that once lodged feudal lords, the maid Omaki who carried him on her back to the village play, old Tasuke and his stories by the hearth, a sulking feud with a bald old neighbor woman that lasts sixty days, and a first childish passion for the girl next door.

At nine he is sent to Tokyo by stagecoach over mountain passes and through a night alarm of highwaymen, to live with his married sister, then under a brusque, hurried foster-sister, and finally in the lively Ginza household of Mr. Toyoda, where an elderly landlady teaches him manners and he struggles with hunger, shame and a first reading of Napoleon.

Written by Shimazaki Tōson, the author of The Broken Commandment, as a series of letters in the women's magazine Fujin Gahō in 1912-1913, Days of Childhood is a gentle, precise and sometimes startlingly frank memory of boyhood in the Meiji era. This complete English translation, with endnotes, keeps the letter form and the author's own section divisions.