The Golden Demon, Volume 2

In the world of high-interest loans, a debt can become a weapon, and human attachment can be harder to escape than any contract. Hazama Kan’ichi has made money his occupation, but anger, wounded affection and unexpected disaster repeatedly intrude upon the life he has chosen.

The second supplied volume of Ozaki Kōyō’s novel follows loan disputes, a wealthy woman’s pursuit of Kan’ichi, a troubled father and son, and the devastating destruction of a household. Miya’s remorse leads to a chance meeting with an old acquaintance whose sympathy offers no easy absolution. The narrator moves between biting social satire, intimate grief and fierce moral argument.

This complete English translation preserves the supplied volume’s opening and closing continuations, all dialogue and reflections, the quoted poetic lines, and a prefatory literary letter addressed to Kōyō. Notes explain period customs, uncertain readings and a documented Japanese textual variant. The result retains the tensions of a novel in which love, money, pride and repentance cannot be cleanly separated.