Miyata the Shrine Priest

Miyata is a poor farmer with little authority in his own household. Quiet and hesitant among people, he finds a different life beside the marsh, in the fields, and beneath the wide northern sky. When he rescues a young man from a merchant family, his happiness seems to reveal a new resting place for his soul.

But gratitude takes an unexpected form. The merchant household’s wealth and power draw Miyata into obligations he cannot escape, while his wife struggles to hold the family together and their children imagine lives beyond the village. Work, debt, and the promise of progress transform both the household and the surrounding landscape.

Miyamoto Yuriko brings intimate sympathy and sharp social observation to this early story, first published in 1917. The voices of villagers, the cries of felled trees, and a child’s delight in the sky create a world at once beautiful and unforgiving.