The Red Bird

Reikichi has no woman to think about, so he thinks about one from a book: Gretchen, the heroine of a translated European tale, who turns back on the night she elopes to let her red bird out of its cage. To escape his nagging grandfather he goes alone to a seaside inn out of season. Six days later a drunken boatman strikes him above the eye with a lantern, and his other eye goes dark.

In a shabby provincial eye hospital, both eyes bandaged, Reikichi lies in the dark beside his anxious mother and listens. A bird sings in the next room. A woman he has never seen once spoke to him kindly in the examination room. Out of these few sounds he builds a love affair, until one night, on a balcony with a rotten rail, the woman he has imagined speaks to him again.

Suzuki Miekichi, later famous as the founder of the children's magazine Akai Tori, wrote The Red Bird in 1911, at the height of his lyrical early period. It is a strange, inward, beautifully observed story of adolescent longing, self-pity and blindness, set among inn maids, nurses, farmers and the poor of a provincial town. This new English translation is made directly from the Japanese, complete and unabridged, with a translator's note and endnotes on period details.