JL 26 — Higuchi Ichiyō: Poverty and Girlhood in Takekurabe

Higuchi Ichiyō: Poverty and Girlhood in Takekurabe

A girl who once loved being noticed begins to wish that nobody would look at her. Her friends cannot understand what has changed. The streets are familiar, the games are still there and yet she no longer feels able to join them.

Higuchi Ichiyō (樋口一葉, 1872–1896) follows this painful change in Takekurabe (たけくらべ, 1895–1896). For Midori, growing older brings her closer to a livelihood that others expect her to enter. Her older sister is a courtesan in Yoshiwara, Tokyo’s licensed prostitution district.

Within Japanese literature, this short work brings us close to a child whose future is already being decided by family circumstances. We come to know her through the pleasures she enjoys and the friendships she gradually finds harder to sustain.

1. A Story on the Edge of Adulthood

Takekurabe appeared in seven installments in Bungakukai between January 1895 and January 1896. English readers encounter it under titles including Growing Up and Child’s Play. It follows children living near Yoshiwara as their friendships begin to change.

The principal figures are Midori, Nobu, also called Shinnyo, Shōtarō and Chōkichi. Family occupations and neighborhood rivalries shape their relationships long before they understand the consequences.

The story belongs to Meiji literature, written during the era of 1868–1912. Against the period’s rapid changes, Ichiyō asks us to consider what growing up offers this particular girl. The world around Midori is changing while the choices available to her remain painfully narrow.

2. Ichiyō’s Working Life

Born in Tokyo on May 2, 1872, Ichiyō was named Natsu. After her father’s death in 1889, she faced the responsibility of supporting her mother and younger sister. Writing was a vocation she hoped would also help pay the household’s bills.

She studied classical poetry under Nakajima Utako at the Haginoya school. Later, her family ran a small shop near Yoshiwara, selling household goods, inexpensive sweets and other items. The business struggled. Its customers and surrounding streets nevertheless gave her opportunities to observe neighborhood life.

These circumstances help explain her attention to money, dependence and wounded dignity. Her place among Japanese women writers rests partly on how closely she understood the practical pressures of earning a living. Recognition could bring another commission without making the household secure.

Ichiyō died of tuberculosis on November 23, 1896, aged twenty-four. In the stories she left behind, a conversation between two people can reveal the needs and expectations of an entire household.

3. Yoshiwara: Comfort Beside Hardship

The neighborhood surrounding Yoshiwara contains shops, modest homes and businesses dependent on the district’s visitors. Its prosperity is unevenly distributed. The lights and traffic of the pleasure quarter exist close to households struggling to get by.

Midori herself enjoys a measure of material comfort. Her sister’s earnings provide attractive clothing and spending money. That relative comfort helps her command attention among the children.

Yet the same livelihood that supports her family exposes her to contempt and points toward the future expected of her. Money provides advantages without securing independence.

Readers of Edo print culture may recognize Yoshiwara as a place represented in commercial guides and images. Ichiyō’s story directs attention toward the children and households whose daily lives depend on its economy. The district’s appeal to outsiders has a very different meaning for those growing up beside it.

4. When a Quarrel Becomes Public Shame

Midori is lively, generous and proud. She likes company and can answer back sharply. We get used to her presence among the children, which makes her later withdrawal especially painful.

The children organize themselves into rival neighborhood groups associated with Shōtarō and Chōkichi. During a confrontation, Midori challenges Chōkichi. He insults her through her family’s connection to prostitution and throws a muddy sandal at her forehead.

The insult turns the quarrel into a public humiliation. Chōkichi attacks her family’s livelihood, turning something that supports her into a source of public shame. Her family’s money cannot protect her from that humiliation.

Ichiyō also shows how early children learn which insults will hurt. Their games take place within a community whose distinctions they are already learning to enforce. The sandal turns that borrowed contempt into a blow she cannot simply laugh away.

5. Nobu and the Cloth Left in the Rain

Nobu is the son of a Buddhist priest and is expected to continue toward religious training. His awkward relationship with Midori gives the story some of its most tender moments.

When the strap of his wooden footwear breaks in the rain, Midori brings a scrap of patterned cloth that could help him repair it. She struggles to speak and finally drops it through the lattice. Nobu recognizes her gesture but leaves the cloth untouched.

For Midori, his response feels painfully cold. Readers can also see his embarrassment. We can understand why she feels rejected even as we recognize how difficult he finds it to respond.

The cloth lies within reach, ready to solve an ordinary problem. Their inability to make use of it gives the scene its ache. A few words might help, yet neither manages to say them.

Their different family backgrounds deepen the awkwardness. Still, treating the scene only as an illustration of social barriers would lose its emotional precision. Pride, attraction and fear of being observed also keep them apart.

6. Why Does Midori Suddenly Change?

Later, Midori becomes withdrawn. Her appearance changes, familiar company becomes unwelcome and Shōtarō struggles to understand her distress. She wishes she could return to playing with dolls instead of growing older.

A longstanding interpretation connects her change with first menstruation and the recognition of approaching adulthood. Other critics have read it as suggesting sexual initiation or exploitation. Ichiyō does not explicitly describe the event that would settle the disagreement.

The uncertainty makes Midori’s distress harder to explain away. We see its effects without being given full access to what has happened to her.

What the narrative does make clear is her altered relationship to being seen. Attention that once pleased her has become difficult to bear. Her mother’s knowing response contrasts with the confusion of her young friends.

For Midori, physical maturity brings her closer to the work her family expects her to enter. Her wish to remain a child belongs to these circumstances. Growing older means becoming visible to others in a way she has little power to control.

7. The Artificial Narcissus at the Gate

Near the ending, someone leaves an artificial narcissus at Midori’s lattice gate on a frosty morning. She places it in a vase and treasures its quiet beauty. The narrative then connects the following day with Nobu’s departure for religious schooling.

The timing suggests a farewell from Nobu, although the narrator leaves the giver unidentified. We are allowed to sense a connection without receiving confirmation.

One possible reading sees the flower as the kindness that could not be exchanged openly in the rain. Another emphasizes separation: an object reaches Midori as the possibility of companionship recedes. The narrator leaves room for these possibilities without settling on one.

The ending gains tenderness from Midori’s response. Whatever she understands about the gift, she makes room for it. A small act of care remains possible within a life becoming harder to share with others.

8. How Ichiyō Turns Tradition and Experience into Fiction

Ichiyō’s achievement also lies in how she tells the story. Her classically inflected prose brings older literary resources into contact with the pressures of Meiji neighborhood life. Her writing shows how older forms could still give expression to lives being changed by modern conditions.

The title Takekurabe, often rendered literally as “comparing heights,” recalls episode 23 of The Tales of Ise (tenth century), where childhood companionship develops into adult attachment. Familiarity with waka and tanka helps readers recognize the poetic exchanges within that older narrative. Against this background, Ichiyō’s children face a particularly painful separation between youthful closeness and adult possibilities.

Comparison with the later I-Novel tradition raises a useful question about how lived experience becomes fiction. Ichiyō knew the neighborhood she depicted. That knowledge does not make Midori a disguised version of the author or turn the story into a diary.

The story’s objects offer another way into its craft: the muddy sandal humiliates, the offered cloth goes unused and the flower is cherished. Following these objects, we move from public cruelty through an awkward attempt at kindness to a gift received in private. Their different uses give the story much of its emotional shape.

9. The Childhood Midori Wants Back

By the end, the absence of Midori’s earlier liveliness changes the feeling of the neighborhood. We remember the pleasure she took in company because Ichiyō has allowed us to spend time with it.

Midori’s moods, attachments and easily wounded pride remain with us. We have watched her enjoy being herself. The life expected of her now seems to leave less room for the girl we have come to know.

When she wishes she could go back to her dolls, the wish carries more than nostalgia. She wants the ordinary freedom to remain among her friends without the demands gathering around her changing body. Ichiyō leaves us close enough to understand that wish and unable to grant it.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Who was Higuchi Ichiyō?

Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–1896) was a Japanese writer of the Meiji period. Her fiction examines money, family obligations and women’s constrained choices through closely observed relationships.

When was Takekurabe published?

It was serialized in Bungakukai in seven installments between January 1895 and January 1896. English titles include Growing Up and Child’s Play.

Is Midori poor?

Her sister’s earnings provide relative material comfort. The story’s economic concerns include dependence and unequal opportunities as well as poverty. Midori’s possessions do not give her control over her future.

Why does Midori become withdrawn?

Critics disagree about the immediate cause. Interpretations include first menstruation and sexual initiation or exploitation. The narrative leaves the triggering event unstated while showing her distress about maturity and attention.

Did Nobu leave the artificial narcissus?

The timing of his departure strongly invites that reading. The narrator does not explicitly identify the giver, so it remains an inference.

Is Takekurabe autobiographical?

Ichiyō drew on her knowledge of life near Yoshiwara. The characters, scenes and narrative arrangement belong to a work of fiction rather than a direct record of her life.

References and Further Reading

1. Higuchi Ichiyō, Takekurabe (1895–1896), Japanese text and original publication information, Aozora Bunko.

2. Danly, Robert Lyons, In the Shade of Spring Leaves: The Life and Writings of Higuchi Ichiyō, a Woman of Letters in Meiji Japan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981).

3. Van Compernolle, Timothy J., The Uses of Memory: The Critique of Modernity in the Fiction of Higuchi Ichiyō (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006).

4. Levine, Emily, “Tales of Ise Grows Up: Higuchi Ichiyō, Kurahashi Yumiko, and Kawakami Mieko,” in Rebecca Copeland (ed.), Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023), pp. 51–65.

5. Buriticá Alzate, Juliana, “Embodiment and Its Violence in Kawakami Mieko’s Chichi to ran: Menstruation, Beauty Ideals, and Mothering,” Japanese Language and Literature, 54.2 (2020), pp. 515–549.

6. Copeland, Rebecca L., Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000).

7. Taito City, “Special Exhibition ‘Shitaya Ryusenjicho, where Ichiyo lived’ Coverage Report,” Art & Culture Information in Taito City (accessed November 13, 2026).