きりぎりすKirigirisu — A Small Cricket

Contents

1. A Farewell, and How the Marriage BeganA twenty-four-year-old wife writes to tell her painter husband that she is leaving him, because she is afraid of his way of living. She then recalls how, five years earlier, she turned down two respectable suitors and was drawn instead to the odd proposal the art dealer Tajima made on the unknown painter's behalf. She secretly went to see his painting of a quiet, sunny veranda at her father's company.
2. Marrying the Painter Against Her ParentsShaken by a painting, the narrator becomes sure she must marry its painter, and she wins out over her parents' objections with Tajima's help. Their two poor years in a Yodobashi apartment were her happiest. Since the husband's sudden success and their move to Mitaka, she feels empty and ashamed, because she had believed he was a pure, unworldly artist whom only she could understand.
3. Success Arrives and Changes HimThe wife insists she never resented her husband's success. She describes their poor, carefree years in Yodobashi, when Tajima quietly bought his paintings and she never asked for money or fame. Then the first solo exhibition is a sensation, and he begins to change: he has his teeth fixed with gold, spends nights calling on great painters, and starts gossiping about them. She says she can bear the usual worries of a wife, but something else hurts her far more.
4. Sudden Wealth and a Changing HusbandThe painter suddenly becomes successful, joins the Nika-kai, and, urged by Tajima, moves into a large house in Mitaka filled with department-store furniture. The narrator watches him grow talkative and worldly, repeating other people's opinions as his own and openly discussing prices, and she is ashamed and uneasy even as everything goes well for him. She longs for a quiet, poor life lived with a hidden pride.
5. Money, Vanity and Empty FriendshipsThe wife describes how her husband now watches money closely: he checks her purse, banks his earnings, and proudly brings home what he has not spent, though she wants nothing and only asks him to build a loofah trellis. When a friend comes asking for help, he pretends to be poor and mocks her for hiding twenty yen. She calls him a selfish, lying optimist who lives on flattery, forms groups with people he despised, and speaks ill of each friend to the other.
6. No Misfortune Comes, and a Cricket SingsThe wife hopes for some misfortune to humble her husband, but his success only grows. After he takes her to visit the great painter Okai, flatters him to his face and then sneers at him on the way home, she decides to leave him. Hearing his pompous radio talk, she switches it off, and that night she lies listening to a small cricket under the floor, resolving to keep its faint voice inside her for the rest of her life.

Easier versions

This story is also retold in simpler Japanese. Reading an easier version first makes the original much more approachable.

• N5 retelling · 1,178 characters
• N4 retelling · 1,497 characters

Before you read

• Learn the narrator's formal letter vocabulary before you start: ～でございます, 申し上げます, 居ります (= おります), and verbs written with older kanji such as 怺える (こらえる, to bear or endure). They appear throughout, and recognising them quickly frees your attention for the content.
• Watch for register shifts as signals of emotion. When she drops from ～でございます into casual feminine endings like ～の, ～わ, ～ね, or ～ですもの, she is usually at her most hurt or most honest. Her husband's quoted lines (～やがる, 来やがった) are deliberately coarse by contrast.
• Much of her argument is built from patterns of change and degree, such as ～につれて, ～一方だ, and ～ば～ほど. Expect to meet ～てならない (can't help feeling) and ～のかも知れません when she hedges her own judgements.
• Keep track of where scenes take place. Yodobashi stands for the poor, happy years and Mitaka for the prosperous, unhappy present, so a place name often tells you which period she is describing.
• Notice how often she reports his words and then comments on them, for example when he repeats her opinion of Maupassant as his own. Phrases like ～というじゃありませんか mark her disbelief, and reading these passages slowly shows how her criticism works.

Words to know

The most useful words from the notes across the story.

Plot summary

About the author

Dazai Osamu (太宰治) was the pen name of Tsushima Shūji, born into a wealthy landowning family in Aomori Prefecture in northern Japan. He studied French literature at Tokyo Imperial University but did not graduate, devoting himself instead to writing. He is best known for the novels The Setting Sun (斜陽) and No Longer Human (人間失格), which draw heavily on his own troubled life. Much of his work is dark and confessional. Keep Running, Melos shows a brighter, more straightforwardly heroic side of his writing. He died by suicide in 1948.

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