Upper intermediate · JLPT N2
黄金風景Ōgonfūkei — A Scene in Gold
- JLPT N2
- 2,939 characters
- 2 parts
- about 24 minutes
"A Scene in Gold" is a short first-person story by Dazai Osamu. It opens with an epigraph credited to Pushkin about a golden chain. The narrator begins with a confession: as a boy in his home village, K, he was cruel to Okei, a maid in his family's house whom he took to be slow-witted. The story then moves forward about twenty years. He is now ill, poor and renting a cheap house by the muddy sea at Funabashi, when a policeman doing the household-register rounds recognises him and turns out to have a connection to his past. The tone is typical of Dazai: self-mocking and frank about the narrator's own meanness, with a quiet, unexpected warmth in the closing scene. For a learner the story is short and has a clear shape, but the prose is demanding. Sentences run on, the narration uses some older forms such as 細き, 堪忍できぬ and 居られた, and much depends on the contrast between the narrator's curt replies and the polite, humble speech of the people who call on him.
Contents
Before you read
- Learn the causative 〜させる early. The childhood section depends on what the narrator made Okei do, and the causative forms show his power over her.
- Expect classical negatives and older verb forms in the narration: 〜ぬ for 〜ない (堪忍できぬ, 〜ぬうちに), attributive 〜き (細き), and 居られた for いられた. Read them as their modern equivalents, and don't let them slow you down.
- Watch the speech levels in the dialogue. The narrator answers in short, sullen phrases. The policeman and Okei use deferential polite Japanese, and Okei uses honorifics about the narrator. Who is polite to whom is central to the story's meaning.
- Several recurring patterns carry the narrator's reflection and the timing of events: 〜たものである for nostalgic or habitual past, 〜はずなのに for things that should have been otherwise, 〜かのように for 'as if', and 〜たとたん and 〜たまま for sudden or unchanged states. Recognising them will make the long sentences easier to break apart.
- Useful words to learn first include 女中 (maid), 巡査 (policeman), 戸籍 (household register), 馬車 (carriage) and 負ける (to lose or be defeated). 負ける and its related forms matter in the final lines. Note also that K is simply the narrator's home village, given only as a letter.
Words to know
The most useful words from the notes across the story.
| Word | Meaning | JLPT |
|---|---|---|
| 女中じょちゅう | maid, female household servantOld-fashioned word for a live-in maid. It is avoided today in favour of お手伝いさん. | — |
| 足りないたりる | (in the negative) not all there, simple-minded (lit. 'insufficient')dictionary form: 足りるLiterally 'not enough'. Used of a person, it is a blunt euphemism for low intelligence. | N4 |
| ぼんやりぼんやり | absent-mindedly, in a dazeOften used as ぼんやりする, 'to be vacant or lost in thought'. | N3 |
| 噂うわさ | talk about someone; rumour〜の噂をする = to talk about someone (not necessarily gossip). | N3 |
| 流石さすが | even so, as might be expected (here: even someone like me)The kanji spelling is ateji and is usually written in kana today. | N2 |
| 戸籍こせき | family register (official household record)戸籍調べ was a door-to-door police check of who lived in each household. | N1 |
| 出世しゅっせ | success in life; rising in the worldOften career or social advancement; 出世する = to get ahead. | N1 |
| のろくさいのろくさい | slow, sluggish, dawdlingColloquial and scornful. It comes from のろい (slow) plus 〜くさい, which adds a sense of distaste. | — |
| 疳にさわってかんにさわる | to get on one's nerves, to irritatedictionary form: 疳にさわるToday usually written 癇に障る. | — |
| 不器用ぶきよう | clumsy, unskilful with one's handsThe opposite of 器用 (deft). | — |
| 癇癪かんしゃく | temper, fit of anger癇癪をおこす means 'to lose one's temper, throw a tantrum'. | — |
| いびったいびる | to torment, to bully (someone weaker)dictionary form: いびるSuggests petty, persistent harassment, such as a mother-in-law picking on a bride. | — |
| 堪忍かんにんする | to put up with, to tolerate, to forgivedictionary form: 堪忍するIn Kansai speech, 堪忍して also means 'forgive me'. | — |
| 窮迫きゅうはくする | to be reduced to dire povertydictionary form: 窮迫するA formal, written word. | — |
| 寝汗ねあせ | night sweatsA classic symptom of tuberculosis in literature of this period. | — |
Plot summary
Show the full summary (contains spoilers)
As a boy, the narrator bullied Okei, a slow maid in his family's house. Once he made her cut soldiers out of a picture book all day, then kicked her in a fit of temper. Nearly twenty years later, ill and poor, he rents a cheap house at Funabashi in Chiba. A policeman checking the household register recognises him. The policeman speaks with the accent of the narrator's home region and once ran a carriage business in K. He explains that his wife is Okei and says they will come to thank him. When the family arrives, the narrator puts them off rudely and flees into town to kill time. On his way back he overhears Okei and her husband praising how kind he was as a child. He weeps and accepts this defeat as a good thing, one that gives him hope for tomorrow.
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.