Poisonous Breath

A summer visit to the family home should offer rest, sea bathing, and a break from everyday life. Instead, an idle young husband grows absorbed by the smell of his own breath. His mother’s impatience, his wife’s apparent solicitude, and a cousin’s visit expose anxieties that no change of scene can soothe.

Memories gather around this small obsession: well diggers singing over their work, a father’s reckless schemes, a childhood game with an uncle, and a humiliating appearance in court. Affection and cruelty repeatedly exchange places, while the narrator’s attempts to explain himself bring him closer to truths he would rather avoid.

First published in 1926, Makino Shin’ichi’s Poisonous Breath offers an intimate, unsettling portrait of family life through a voice at once comic, evasive, and painfully revealing. This complete English translation preserves the story’s six sections and includes brief explanatory notes. Makino was a distinctive Japanese fiction writer whose work explored the uneasy border between memory, invention, and self-exposure.