Three Panels

O-Natsu once lived amid the wealth of a great Fukagawa timber household. Now she and her sick mother keep a small illustrated-book shop in Tokyo. Her few companions include a fierce pet rooster and Aikichi, a rough, affectionate barber’s journeyman whose attempts to defend her can make matters worse.

A humiliation at a celebrated poetry teacher’s house sets a chain of encounters in motion. Barber-shop banter leads to a beer-hall confession, a devastating fire, neighborhood panic over a rooster’s evening crowing, and a ghost story whose silver hairpin touches the lives of the teller and listener. Beneath the comedy lie sharp distinctions of rank and the damage done by rumor.

Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939) gives these streets a shifting atmosphere in which beauty, anger, affection, and the uncanny constantly meet. First published in 1900, *Three Panels* brings together theatrical dialogue and haunting images of a woman struggling with diminished circumstances. This complete edition retains all fifty sections and the author’s opening inscription, with notes on selected cultural allusions. AI-assisted translation.