TRANSLATION: The Gold Demon

The great unfinished novel of Japanese literature

The Gold Demon by Ozaki Kōyō is this week’s new translation.

Kan’ichi Hazama and Miya Shigisawa have loved each other since childhood. Raised under the same roof, pledged to marry, they share a bond so deep that Kan’ichi has staked his entire future on it. Then a wealthy man with a diamond on his finger enters their world, and Miya’s parents, dazzled by the prospect of a brilliant match, break the engagement. On a winter night at the beach in Atami, Kan’ichi confronts the woman he loves and demands she choose. She cannot answer.

What follows is one of the most famous scenes in all of Japanese literature, and the beginning of a long descent: Kan’ichi, shattered by betrayal, abandons his studies and remakes himself as a moneylender of terrifying ruthlessness, a man determined to worship the only god that never disappoints: money. Miya, married into luxury, discovers that wealth without love is its own kind of prison.

As the years pass, guilt, longing, and the memory of what was lost draw them toward each other again, but the damage may be beyond repair. The Gold Demon is a story about what happens to the human soul when love is weighed against fortune and found wanting. It is also a story about Japan at the turn of the twentieth century, a society in the grip of rapid modernization and new money.

This edition, translated by Kenji Weaver, is the first complete English translation of The Gold Demon ever published. Available for Kindle, KU, and audiobook on Amazon. The ebooks have already been sent out to the paid subscribers.

About the author. Ozaki Kōyō (1868–1903) was the most celebrated Japanese novelist of his generation. A prodigy who founded the influential Ken’yūsha literary society while still a student, he became the star writer of the Yomiuri Shimbun. He began serializing The Gold Demon on New Year’s Day, 1897, and the novel became a national sensation, but his health was already failing. He died of stomach cancer on October 30, 1903, at the age of thirty-five, leaving the story unfinished, mid-sentence, in the middle of a letter. It is the most celebrated unfinished work in Japanese literature. The novel was adapted into seventeen films and has never been out of print in Japan.

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Excerpt

“Therein lies a story fit for a novel. Not a lover: a husband. And this husband is one of the great moneylenders of the age before ours, a man named Akagashi Gonzaburō, lawless, rapacious, and on top of it all a prodigious lecher.”

“I see! Avarice and appetite struck a spark, and the candle is burning at both ends.”

The Ōshima tsumugi gentleman delivered this witticism with relish, and even the grave Arao could not help breaking into a smile.

“This Akagashi made a practice of using debt collection as a pretext to toy with women, and the number he debauched extends into quarters you would never expect. Now, the Beauty, she too fell into his hands. Originally the daughter of a poor samurai family, perfectly respectable, but the old fox took one look at this girl and his appetite stirred mightily. To make her his captive, he lent a trifling sum to her father. When the term came and the father could not repay, the old man said nothing, but lent again, and again, three or four times more. Then, when the hook was well set, he announced that he was short-handed at home and would be grateful if the girl could come work as a housemaid for a fortnight or so. Even if the father could see through the old man’s designs, it would have been humanly impossible to refuse under the circumstances.

This was six years ago; the girl was nineteen, the old man a bald skull of about sixty, so naturally no one suspected anything amorous. He got her into his house and made his proposition. He had no proper wife, just a dubious creature he kept as a cook and bedwarmer. Before long the girl had become a concubine in all but name. She begged to go home at first, but presently her father began sending word: Come back, come back — and she would not go. In time the truth came out, and the father, a man of samurai sensibilities, flew into a towering rage. There was a great scene of you are no daughter of mine and I am no father of yours. Then the old bald head sent word: If you object because she is a concubine, I will put her in the family register as my legal wife; give her to me. The father went to see her, and the girl said: Father, please consent — which only made the old man angrier. But in the end he gave her up as lost to some demon, and surrendered his only daughter to a moneylender ten years his own senior.

“After that, Mitsue won the old man’s favor entirely and took charge of the household. You would think she would send money home to her own father, but aside from the ceremonial gifts at the proper seasons, she would not part with a leaf or a twig. This too pleased the old bald head. Meanwhile the woman, having watched the moneylending business from the inside, found herself developing a taste for it, and when she looked at the family fortune and reckoned it as her own, she arrived at a resolution of breathtaking audacity: a single father was less valuable than money.”

“Astonishing,” murmured Arao, his expression clouding with something close to distaste.

“She is a quick-witted woman, no question. She absorbed the art of usury by osmosis, and eventually, when there were more cases than the old man could handle, she began going out on his behalf — more astonishing still. Then, the year before last, the old man suffered a stroke and has been bedridden ever since. She nurses him to the point of attending to his bodily functions, and all the while she runs the business single-handedly and thriving. As for the father, he died the year before the stroke, they say. He breathed his last lying on a thin rush mat spread over a bare plank floor. While her husband was still well, she would scarcely let the old man near. Heartless beyond description, yet somehow one cannot quite fathom her. Still, these are the facts. So: the husband is an invalid, and the woman has the field entirely to herself, swinging her arm with more vigor than ever. Hence the name ‘the Beauty.’

“Her age? Twenty-five, I am told, though she looks no more than twenty-two or -three. She has a sweet, soft voice and a gentle manner; she says little, but what she says is devastatingly well-chosen. She has an air of such refinement that you would think she might mistake a silver coin for a foreign decoration. Yet the skill with which she pushes for a renewal, or presses a promissory note to its crisis point — the suppleness and cunning of her technique — it is as though she uses some drug to melt men’s wills. I myself have been melted three times. Softness conquers hardness; for moneylending, a beauty is ideal. Give that woman a kingdom and she would be Cleopatra. She would destroy you.”

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