Mulberries

Okumi is twenty, an orphan with no home to return to, when she is lent for a few days to the household of a painter, Mr. Aoki, who has come back from two years in France to find his marriage ended and his small son in the care of an old nurse who is leaving. The few days become weeks. She sweeps the garden, learns the habits of the goats, mends clothes and unpicks a sash to make a quilt, while the painter, lonely and reticent, begins to paint again, and a mulberry tree seen through a hedge becomes the occasion of a small gift that neither of them quite names.

Serialized in the Tokyo newspaper Kokumin Shimbun in 1913, Suzuki Miekichi's Kuwa no mi is a delicate domestic novel of the Taisho era, told in close third person through the quiet, courteous mind of a young servant. It is a fine early work by the man who later founded the children's magazine Akai Tori.

Translated directly from the Japanese by Valentin Sarić, complete, with endnotes on period details. AI-assisted translation.