にごりえ

Why it matters

Nigorie, translated as Troubled Waters, is a short story set over the Obon festival in an unnamed pleasure quarter. It belongs to the last two years of Higuchi Ichiyō’s brief career, and it looks at the women who work in the trade and at the men who ruin themselves in it without turning either into a lesson. Neither Oriki nor Genshichi is reduced to a type. The story still reads as alive because it understands that money, pride and loneliness can bind two people more tightly than love.

Higuchi was careful about how it ended. She sketched six possible endings before choosing the published one, which leaves a question for the reader about what happened in the final scene. The story reached English in several translations, among them Hisako Tanaka’s Muddy Bay (1958) and Robert Lyons Danly’s Troubled Waters (1981), and Hiromi Itō published a modern Japanese version in 1996. Tadashi Imai’s 1953 anthology film An Inlet of Muddy Water, which also draws on two other Higuchi stories, was shown at the 1954 Cannes Film Festival.

As you read, notice how Higuchi moves between Oriki’s side and the world of the people she has hurt, so that nobody is only a type. Watch the Obon setting, a festival of the dead that gives the evening its mood. The prose is full of period vocabulary, and an annotated or modern-language edition will help the first time through. It makes a natural pair with Takekurabe, which looks at the same world from the point of view of children who live beside it.

Introduction written for LitMundi with AI assistance and checked against the sources listed below.