Wandering

After a failed crab-canning venture in Karafuto, Yoshio Tamura reaches Sapporo with little money and no settled destination. He stays with an old friend, visits a poet preparing a business magazine, and pursues plans that might rescue his fortunes. Each possibility exposes another gap between his confidence and his circumstances.

Letters from Tokyo keep his troubled relationship with Tori alive, while the city offers drinking parties, literary conversation, walks among dark trees, and encounters in its licensed quarter. Yoshio insists that vigorous living must embrace suffering, yet loneliness and dependence repeatedly test what that conviction means. A woman he meets unexpectedly begins to seem closer to him than the people he has left behind.

First published as a book in 1910, Wandering is the third work in Iwano Hōmei’s five-work cycle. This complete English translation preserves all twenty-four chapters, embedded poems, correspondence, and financial arguments, with notes on period customs, uncertain names, and unresolved source details.