The Old Master

Komoro, a silk-raising town in the Nagano mountains, around 1900. Sada, a farm girl of seventeen, goes into service in the New House of the banker Arai, a progressive man who dyes his hair and dotes on his young wife from Tokyo. The mistress is bored, homesick and quick to anger, and a young dentist begins to call. Sada, flattered and frightened, becomes the go-between, and then, when she is betrayed, the informer.

Told by Sada herself in a breathless, comic and bitter spoken voice, The Old Master is an early prose work by Shimazaki Tōson, the author of The Broken Commandment. This complete English translation, with endnotes, follows the story from the bank's anniversary celebration to its sudden close under the cheers of a Red Cross rally.

AI-assisted translation.