The Spring Tide

He left a rich marriage in four months. She has been sent home from hers. Neither can forget the other.

In the spring fields of Kazusa, with the sound of the Kujūkuri surf in the air, gentle Shōsaku comes home from the Fukada family to the gossip of the whole village, while Otoyo, bound by her proud father's pressure to marry again, holds on to a promise she has never been allowed to say aloud.

First published in Hototogisu in 1908, The Spring Tide is the sunnier companion to Itō Sachio's celebrated Nogiku no haka: a warm, talkative, humane story of rural family pressure, a go-between's strategy, a day of secret happiness at a pond and a lakeside inn, and a quiet heartbreak on a railway platform.