A Japanese Novel

An Adopted Husband. — Translated from the Japanese of Futabatei by B. Mitsiu and Gregg M. Sinclair

The introduction to this charming novel seems to have been written with the express purpose of assuring us that it is a very serious work of art and that, whatever absurd eggshell notions we may have of life in Japan, they will be broken for ever by this presentation of modern Japanese domesticity. It is even suggested that the problem stated is not by any means unlike one of our own…. There is at any rate a jealous wife, a weak husband, an annoying mother-in-law, a stupid servant, and a very gentle lovely girl who is the wife's sister and, fatally for her own and the husband's peace of mind, lives with this family. But there, it seems to us, the resemblance ends—if it has ever really existed. For the persons of the story are caught in the delicate net that is flung over their lives and are only seen through its meshes. Their loves, their sufferings, their jealousy and their anger are all somehow exquisite, touched with faery, and wonderfully, beautifully remote from the commonplace complications of our London and provincial novelists. Consider, for instance, Tetsuya, coming home from his lecturing at the University and being met by his sister-in-law.

She caught sight of him, put her lamp by her side, placed her delicate hands on the floor, the muslin-delaine sleeves hugging her forearms, and bowed her head; a ribbon of some colour indistinguishable at night fluttered; and her decidedly fair neck appeared page 190 through the screen of some back hair. She said, ‘I am glad to have you home again.’

It were impossible not to become deeply enamoured of this exquisite little creature, Sayo-Ko, and there is in the description of her love for Tetsuya a grace, a lightness of touch, as though the author were afraid of her vanishing under his pen. And poor little Tetsuya, so cruelly treated by his wife and mother-in-law, plays the lover with a kind of awkward grace which makes us smile as though he were a doll. What could be more delicious than the description of their first meeting in the little ‘room of six mats’ above a shop that he has taken for her?

He entered the store, saying ‘Pardon me.’

The landlady with good sense called from the bottom of the stairs, ‘Miss, he's come.’ She then stepped aside and Tetsuya began to climb; it was not an easy task….‘Please be careful,’ said the landlady, from below.

‘All right …’ But his posture did not look at all right. He reached the top with great difficulty, and found waiting at the entrance of the room—Sayo-ko.

Later, they decide to go out for the evening.

‘To-day let us return to our school-days and have whole-hearted fun.’

Sayo-ko was pinning her plush shawl with a butterfly buckle. She smiled. ‘All right; I will be a romping girl.’

‘Romping?’ Tetsuya exclaimed, in a sudden flush of joy. ‘Capital. If you will be a romping girl I will be’—he could not find a corresponding word—‘I will be riotous.’

The temptation to quote from ‘An Adopted Husbands’ is very great, but it is not fair to a novel which is, like so few of our English novels, seen as a whole, and then worked out—so we gain the impression—with deliberate and page 191 fastidious care. We could not for the life of us take the tragic happenings tragically—and perhaps we are not meant to, for the author keeps putting little touches as though he too smiled at the little creatures who were caught in such an unpleasant storm, whirled about, so cruelly separated and sent flying in all directions. But let us not convey the impression that ‘An Adopted Husband’ is not a serious work of art—it is. But after a long rolling on the heavy seas of our modern novels the critic feels as though he had stepped into a blue paper boat and was sailing among islands whose flowery branches overhang the water.