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Rough Living
Humorous and poignant, Rough Living (Arakure) follows the fortunes of an ambitious young seamstress, Oshima, as she strives to survive and prosper in Meiji Japan. Written in 1915 by Tokuda Shusei (1872-1943), the great chronicler of Japan's working class, Rough Living explores the social transformations the country underwent in the early twentieth century from the perspective of a young woman who personifies the hungry, entrepreneurial spirit of the times. Through Oshima's eyes we see the formation of the structures of modern everyday life under capitalism as they evolved in Japan from the time of her birth in 1884 until the end of the novel, around 1910.
An unwanted child, Oshima is adopted by a prosperous family but runs away repeatedly after refusing an arranged marriage to a young man with "the feudal mentality of a slave." Oshima endures a series of ineffectual husbands and lovers and failed business ventures but refuses to be the victim. She does not tolerate derogatory treatment by men and shocks the citizens of Tokyo by wearing Western-style dresses and riding a bicycle around the city to promote her tailoring business. Largely through her efforts, she and her common-law husband prosper, but in the end she relinquishes her hard-won success for a chance to start a new business with an attractive employee she hopes to seduce.
An unwanted child, Oshima is adopted by a prosperous family but runs away repeatedly after refusing an arranged marriage to a young man with "the feudal mentality of a slave." Oshima endures a series of ineffectual husbands and lovers and failed business ventures but refuses to be the victim. She does not tolerate derogatory treatment by men and shocks the citizens of Tokyo by wearing Western-style dresses and riding a bicycle around the city to promote her tailoring business. Largely through her efforts, she and her common-law husband prosper, but in the end she relinquishes her hard-won success for a chance to start a new business with an attractive employee she hopes to seduce.
192 pages, Paperback
First published April 29, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 22, 2017
It's Meiji Tokyo's answer to "EastEnders" ... which isn't a bad thing. Poor old Oshima has a rough time of it, with no love. Sad.
June 27, 2007
meiji capitalism.
the argument that can be made from reading this novela is that small-scale capitalism was democratic and had the potential to liberate working class women.
it's easy to see why it might be used as a textbook for a japanese history class.
the argument that can be made from reading this novela is that small-scale capitalism was democratic and had the potential to liberate working class women.
it's easy to see why it might be used as a textbook for a japanese history class.
February 2, 2021
Rough living was interesting enough, but I wish plot turns weren’t so rapid and unexplained, though I understand why this was the case given Rough Living’s initial serialization.
April 4, 2026
Rough Living is a good title for this book; I could also call it Rough Writing. So scrappy and patchy is the narration that the translator or editor or somebody included a time line at the end of the book. It isn't even "tell not show", it's more "barely mention, move quickly on to something else, and later circle back as if the reader already knows what led up to the event that wasn't even described."I guess that fits with the lifestyle of Oshima and those around her. I have known people like them myself in turn of the millenium Spain. Not liked them, but known them.
Tokuda must have had a very low opinion of his fellow human beings; all the men in the story with the possible exception of Oshima's foster father are pretty useless. Every single one of the younger men is a wastrel, and they usually pick up with a prostitute and live off her earnings, unless she takes them for every sen they have. Or indeed both. The older men are all opinionated drunks. Oshima herself makes great play of her business savvy and the many orders for garments she gets--and yet she can't seem to get paid for them, and lets huge tabs slide repeatedly. Her response is to up sticks and go somewhere else. She also repeatedly declares she's not a whore--and yet in five years she has as many "marriages." It's also implied very obliquely that she had some kind of "relationship" with a couple of doctors at the hospital where she receives treatment for some sort of sexual problem that we're told she didn't actually have. One thing that made me laugh is the description of bicycle riding as so hard on her that...it wears all her pubic hair off? My word--who taught her to ride a bike? She of course sees herself as the victim of the predatory men, and yet the other women mistrust her brash, fast-talking ways. She has no woman friends.
Three stars for the descriptions of the train moving through the landscape. It's obvious that however little Tokuda thought of his fellow citizens, he loved Japan. Those sections are the most immediate and captivating in the whole book.
Tokuda must have had a very low opinion of his fellow human beings; all the men in the story with the possible exception of Oshima's foster father are pretty useless. Every single one of the younger men is a wastrel, and they usually pick up with a prostitute and live off her earnings, unless she takes them for every sen they have. Or indeed both. The older men are all opinionated drunks. Oshima herself makes great play of her business savvy and the many orders for garments she gets--and yet she can't seem to get paid for them, and lets huge tabs slide repeatedly. Her response is to up sticks and go somewhere else. She also repeatedly declares she's not a whore--and yet in five years she has as many "marriages." It's also implied very obliquely that she had some kind of "relationship" with a couple of doctors at the hospital where she receives treatment for some sort of sexual problem that we're told she didn't actually have. One thing that made me laugh is the description of bicycle riding as so hard on her that...it wears all her pubic hair off? My word--who taught her to ride a bike? She of course sees herself as the victim of the predatory men, and yet the other women mistrust her brash, fast-talking ways. She has no woman friends.
Three stars for the descriptions of the train moving through the landscape. It's obvious that however little Tokuda thought of his fellow citizens, he loved Japan. Those sections are the most immediate and captivating in the whole book.
June 28, 2022
A poignant -- and surprisingly feminist -- portrait of a middle class woman's life in a society that is undergoing massive social change. There is a commentary on gender threading through this novel; expectations of women, their right to agency and control over their bodies, their income, and their freedom of movement are just as visible as the themes around capitalism, labor, and class.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews