Gold Coins and Other Writings

A hungry desire for drink draws a plasterer behind three military officers into a rain-soaked garden. He waits through their long games of go, enters the sleeping house and discovers coins whose shine promises more than he understands. Gold Coins turns an attempted theft into a close, ironic study of motive and mistaken value.

Three further writings widen the collection’s questions. Exorcism begins with the exhaustion of a writer pressured to produce, then finds unexpected vitality in a restaurant’s seasonal ritual. Hasegawa Tatsunosuke remembers the novelist Futabatei Shimei while questioning the reliability of remembrance itself.

The Takase Boat follows an officer escorting a prisoner toward exile. The prisoner’s contentment, and then his account of his brother’s death, unsettle the officer’s understanding of poverty, duty and judgment. Mori Ōgai’s four complete writings, first published between 1909 and 1916, appear with concise notes on historical customs and textual details. The identical Takase Boat supplied in another collection is acknowledged as an overlap, preserving this collection’s original contents.