Yasushi Inoue

Translated by J. Martin Holman

Stories from rural prewar Japan that speak to the moment of childhood when the world of adults is as seductive as it is forbidden, by one of its foremost literary figures.

Every child in the village knew about Omitsu. And we had learned the previously unfamiliar word “mistress.” Sometimes on the road or in the rice fields we would shout, “There’s the mistress!” and scramble off pretending to be pursued by her. We imagined a mistress to look something like an ogre, and, though a mistress was not as powerful as an ogre, we considered it a creature of greater treachery and evil.

Set in a rural Japan in the 1920s depicted with remarkable clarity and tenderness, The Death of a Certain Woman collects ten stories by Yasushi Inoue—one of Japan’s foremost literary figures of the twentieth century—that speak to a moment of childhood when the world of adults is as seductive as it is forbidden and as brutal as it is full of pleasures unknown. 

In the collection’s eponymous story, gossip spreads when the mistress of an out-of-town construction contractor arrives in the village. Thirty years later, the narrator recalls the allure and mystery of this young woman—and the mystery around her death. A father’s affair is first revealed to his son in the audience of a local play. A brother fights tirelessly to keep his older sister from losing herself to her first love. A group of young village boys form a lovers’ suicide patrol and stumble upon different illicit activities instead.

Yasushi Inoue (1907–1991) worked as a journalist and literary editor for many years, beginning his prolific career as an author in 1949 with the novel Bullfight, which won Japan's prestigious Akutagawa Prize. He went on to publish fifty novels and 150 short stories, both historical and contemporary, becoming one of Japan’s major literary figures. In 1976 Inoue was presented with the Order of Culture, the highest honour granted for artistic merit in Japan.