Thirteenth Night and Other Stories

On the harvest-moon night, a wife who has fled her husband's house is driven home in a hired rickshaw, and the driver turns out to be someone she once knew. On the last day of the year, a young servant has a hand in a drawer she cannot leave alone. In a back-street tenement, a young umbrella maker learns that the seamstress he counts on is leaving. Three complete stories by Higuchi Ichiyo (1872-1896), who wrote about money, duty and the hard bargains of women's lives in Meiji Tokyo and died at twenty-four.

Thirteenth Night, The Last Day of the Year and Parting Ways: a complete new translation from the Japanese, with a translator's note, endnotes and source information. AI-assisted translation.