This English was drafted by keikaku, a translation engine running on Meta's models. Before a line was drafted, it wrote an analysis of the book, its people and its tone, and that analysis steered every stage: the draft, the two readings against the Japanese, and the editing. It is published here in full, with the voice the draft was written in.
If you'd read this story differently, start your own edition and steer it. Or go back to the translation.
This is a study in social plausibility: Tatsuya wins not despite being charming but because charm, rank, flattery and appetite are indistinguishable in the world he moves through. The horror is that his predation has no special register. It sounds like energy, competence, even good humour, until the reader hears what it is counting.
He ingratiates himself with the inn maids, Zenpei, Mitsuyo’s whole household, and finally with officials, while privately treating a government coal-mine disposal as plunder and Mitsuyo as part of the payment. Zenpei is not simply deceived: his vanity and greed make him enjoy being deceived. Tsunao sees Tatsuya at once, but rectitude without social grace looks pale, pedantic and ungenerous beside him.
In the English: Keep the story’s surface genuinely charming. Tatsuya must work in English as he works in a room—quick, amusing, at ease—and then, alone, reveal himself in the same untroubled voice: Mitsuyo is “beautiful prey,” her father is to be hooked, his debts and the mining concession are parts of one campaign. Do not signal villainy in advance, do not make the soliloquy brooding or conscience-stricken, and do not soften its sporting delight. The shock depends on how little his tone changes.
A second reader, who read the Japanese without seeing the reading above, put the heart of the story differently. keikaku drafted with both in mind.
The story is told in a high, lyrical, scenic narration that never lowers itself to judge its villain, while the moral exposure happens entirely through a split in Tatsuya's voice.
The hot-spring landscape, lake, and seasonal close are rendered in ornate, impersonal periods (paragraphs 2 to 4, paragraph 37, paragraph 40), and the same surface covers a corrupt mining concession. Tatsuya is all polished deference with Zenpei and hosts (paragraph 7, paragraphs 101 to 112), but alone he becomes 'ore': Mitsuyo is a 'beautiful prize' (美しき獲物, paragraph 16), Tsunao is to be crushed 'konagona' (paragraph 48), and the mine, the father, and the girl are one rapid campaign — '兵は神速' (paragraph 49). Mitsuyo, by contrast, is characterised by unvaried insistence and repetition — 真実に six times in one outburst (paragraph 27) — which Zenpei then mocks by repetition back. Flatten any of this into uniformly fluent, psychologically explanatory English and Tatsuya becomes either a declared cad or a romantic suitor, and Mitsuyo a merely charming ingenue, instead of the predator and the child the juxtaposition shows.
In the English: Keep a distinctly elevated, periodic narrative prose, but let dialogue break register sharply: Mitsuyo's repetitions and girl's protests must stay repetitive rather than be varied for elegance, Zenpei's bluff familiarity stay bluff, and Tatsuya must sound ingratiating in company and coarsely proprietorial alone. Do not make Tatsuya slangy throughout, or Mitsuyo more articulate and knowing than she is.
The ending, and the narration throughout, withholds the very facts a reader most wants — who got Mitsuyo, what the bribery came to, who was punished — and that withholding is the story's verdict.
Tatsuya's demand is made brutally explicit — the reward for the draft cabinet order is Mitsuyo herself: 'お貰い申しましたよ' (paragraph 130) — and then the narrator simply stops: 'われはこの後のことを知らず' (paragraph 132). What follows is only rumour and rhetorical question: Tatsuya has taken a wife, 'その妻は誰なるらん'; someone has thrown himself into philosophy, 'その人は誰なるらん'; '明日は誰が身の'. Earlier the same reticence governs motive and perception (the singer identified only by inference, paragraph 10; Tsunao and Tatsuya each privately misreading the other while Zenpei alone imagines mutual respect, paragraph 44).
In the English: Preserve every refusal to resolve: do not name the wife, do not identify the philosopher beyond what the syntax leaves open, do not add a concluding moral, a marriage, a ruin, or an ironic wink that settles it. English pronouns and connectives must be chosen to keep the same degree of knowing-and-not-knowing as the Japanese.
The crux is that this story’s surface genuinely charms. Okumura Tatsuya, a ministry secretary convalescing at a hot-spring inn, wins not despite being plausible but because plausibility is his instrument. He is quick with maids, landlords, an ageing rich man, officials and strangers; he knows what each person wishes to hear. Alone, in the same brisk and untroubled voice, he counts Mitsuyo as “beautiful prey,” her father as a man not to be let escape, and the disposal of the Kijima mine as a field for fees, bribes and leverage. Do not let English darken him in advance. He must first be good company. Nor should his private monologue become Gothic villainy: it is exuberant, comic, almost boyish in its appetite—“my trick,” “let’s begin,” speed is everything. The chill comes because nothing in his manner admits a conflict.
Almost everyone is taken in, and the text is precise about why. Zenpei, fat, laughing, Hotei-like, is not a passive fool. He loves the sound of Tatsuya’s rank, loves being recognised as a man of consequence, and wants the mine to repair earlier losses. Flattery gives his greed a respectable social form. When he agrees to pay and then, drunk on success, promises Tatsuya anything within his power, his earlier riddle has already shown where the bargain can go. English must let Zenpei be warm and ridiculous without making him harmless: the same doting father who submits to Mitsuyo’s pillow-fight can treat her, an hour later, as an asset whose transfer requires only timing.
Against Tatsuya stands Tojo Tsunao, a new philosophy graduate, and the translation stands or falls on refusing to rescue him into conventional heroism. Tsunao is right about Tatsuya immediately and almost completely. He is also pale, stiff, censorious and socially hopeless; he cannot make a necessary concession, cannot laugh off an insult, and can only leave. Seen through the inn’s eyes, and often through the narration’s, he looks like exactly what Tatsuya calls him: a pedant who will bury his life in empty theory. Yet his rigidity is the only form integrity takes here. If English gives him warm authority, the contest becomes melodrama. If it makes him merely absurd, Tatsuya has won the prose as he wins every room. He must hold his ground and make the reader pay for seeing that he is right.
Mitsuyo is the third term, and not a prize with a face. She first exists for Tatsuya as music behind a shoji, then as a glimpse, then, after the bath, as an almost embarrassingly lingering inventory of beauty. But once she speaks she becomes specific: spoiled, theatrical, quick, physically affectionate with her father, intoxicated by Tsunao’s arrival and childishly triumphant that her ally has come. Her repeated “truly, truly, truly” when she claims to be angry, her threats to break the incense box and spoil her father’s haori, her seizure of the air-pillow, are not decorative maidenliness. They establish a household in which indulgence is a language—and therefore a girl who can be bargained away in that same language. She is drawn to Tsunao naturally, without coy uncertainty; she also dislikes Tatsuya before she can say why, finding him uncanny rather than merely disagreeable. Keep both. Do not make her a knowing moral judge, and do not make her ignorant in a way that cancels her intuition.
The sound of the piece moves between three kinds of writing, and flattening that movement would be a major loss. The openings and transitions are lush Meiji scene-painting: long, tide-like sentences crowded with autumn bush-clover, lake water, waterfalls, inn corridors, thrushes and distant clappers. These passages should not be pruned into efficient setting. Their luxuriance is the world Tatsuya knows how to enjoy and exploit, and the lake-shore walk matters because beauty keeps offering an innocent explanation for his pursuit. Against this set the dialogue: Zenpei bluff and self-delighted, Mitsuyo bright with feminine Tokyo colloquialism and wheedling repetition, Tsunao formal to the point of bruising himself, Tatsuya shifting register for every listener. The third kind is procedure: ministry, bureau chief, supervisor, applications, a cabinet ordinance, first submission, commissions and annual “thanks-money.” It should remain concrete and slightly airless. Corruption here is not atmosphere. It is a sequence of doors, intermediaries and papers.
Certain repetitions carry structure. Tatsuya’s black beard is admired, joked about, accidentally insulted by Mitsuyo when she attacks Tsunao’s beard, and returns as a social sign of the fashionable man of the world. Zenpei’s laughter and Hotei bulk soften everything he does until they do not. Smoke from Tatsuya’s cigar punctuates moments of calculation, as if appetite itself were taking a pause to admire its plan. Mitsuyo’s “truly” in her tantrum is later answered, horribly, by the bargaining dialogue in which men say “certainly” and “without fail” over her. Preserve the echoes where they occur. Do not vary repeated phrases simply because English prose is taught to.
The most likely fluent failure is to tidy the intrigue into a clear contest between seducer and fiancé, with explanatory transitions and a decisive emotional climax. The Japanese instead lets domestic comedy take up room, lets a reception be described vessel by vessel, lets Tsunao walk out without farewells, and then accelerates. Zenpei returns from Tatsuya not even seeing his daughter’s tears because the mine has entered his head. That displacement—people looking straight past one another toward the desired object—is the story’s governing action. Look for it everywhere: Tatsuya at the lake still listening for a voice behind the shoji; Zenpei hearing rank rather than character; the family welcoming Tatsuya while Mitsuyo alone grows more hostile; mother and father counting Tsunao’s social failures when his moral perception has become inconvenient.
The ending must be left exactly as unresolved as the narrator leaves it. After Tatsuya asks for Mitsuyo as his “reward,” the text withdraws. It does not show acceptance, refusal, marriage, ruin or rescue. The narrator says he does not know what followed: Tatsuya is said to have taken a wife—who is she? Someone has cast off worldly trouble to devote a half-life to philosophy—who is he? Do not let word choice answer. The questions are inviting and desolate at once, and the final seasonal glance does not console. The most dangerous English additions would be a hint that virtue has been rewarded, that Tatsuya has been punished, or that Mitsuyo has understood her fate. None of that is given. What is given is a world so well arranged for Tatsuya that the reader must supply, and therefore fear, the likely result.
Called: 客 (the guest in the detached room) (narrator in paragraphs 4 to 6); 奥村辰弥 (narrator in paragraph 7); 書記官 / 書記官様 (inn master, Zenpei, household, narrator); 奥村さん / 奥村様 (Zenpei, Mitsuyo, Tsunao (as あの男 / 奥村)); おれ (Tatsuya to himself); あの男, 浮薄らしい男 (Tsunao in paragraph 52, paragraph 63).
How they speak: Shifts at will: keigo-polite deference to seniors/hosts, light joking familiarity to maids and Zenpei, wheedling gallantry to Mitsuyo, brisk bureaucratic concrete prose in bribe talk. Alone: short, exclamatory, boyish-military.
Called: 老人, 満丸顔の老人 (narrator in paragraph 8); 布袋 / 布袋殿 / 布袋のその人 (narrator, Tatsuya in thought); 三好善平 (narrator in paragraph 16); 父様 / 親父(ちち) / 父 / お父様 (Mitsuyo, Tatsuya reporting, Tsunao as 伯父様); 三好さん (Tatsuya to Zenpei).
How they speak: Bluff Edo-merchant familiar: short exclamations, self-delight, teasing, proverbial; shifts to hesitant formal mercantile polite in bribe negotiation paragraphs 101 to 104.
Called: 琴の音 / 唄の主 / 琴の主 (narrator, Tatsuya inference paragraph 10); 乙女 (narrator in paragraphs 10 to 12); 光代 / 光代様 / 光代さん (narrator, Zenpei, Tsunao (お前), Tatsuya); 娘 / 末の子 / 秘蔵のもの (narrator reporting Zenpei account paragraph 16); お前 (Zenpei and Tsunao to Mitsuyo).
How they speak: Bright Tokyo maiden speech: polite -ます/-なさいまし base with childish prolongation, pouting repetition, threats, giggles (おほほほ, あら). Not analytical; instinct in bodily terms (気味が悪い, 訝しい).
Called: 綱雄 / 東条綱雄 (narrator, Zenpei, Mitsuyo); 綱雄さん / 綱雄様 (Mitsuyo to/about Tsunao); かの東条という奴 / あやしき男 / 蒼白き男 (Tatsuya in thought about Tsunao; narrator focalised); 学者 / 学士 (philosophy graduate) (Tatsuya, Zenpei, mother).
How they speak: Formal, bookish, unyielding; moral directness without phatic softening; cannot laugh off insult. Calls Zenpei 伯父様.
Called: 婢ども / 婢 / 女中 / 仲働きの婢 (narrator); 梅屋の声々 (narrator paragraph 46).
How they speak: Brief polite servant speech (存じませぬ); giggling reported speech.
Called: 亭主 / 帳場より亭主 (narrator).
How they speak: Exaggerated respectful greeting (恭しき辞儀, 御挨拶).
Called: 母様 / 母 / 光代の母 (Mitsuyo, narrator).
How they speak: Reported as世情 worldly complaints; no direct dialogue quoted at length.
Called: 姉 / 兄 / 上の隠居 / 末の婢より上の隠居に至るまで (narrator paragraph 96); 豊 / 利介 (Zenpei ordering); 善四郎 (narrator paragraph 100).
How they speak: Domestic order language; no distinctive dialogue.
Called: 按摩 (narrator).
How they speak: Formulaic (御療治は).
Called: 局長 / 監督署長 (頬髯の濃い男) / 大臣 / 御同僚 / 国友商会 / 木島炭山・鉱山 (narrator, Tatsuya, Zenpei in procedure talk paragraphs 101 to 130).
How they speak: Airless procedural polite: 願書, 払い下げ, 閣令, 周旋料, 割賦金, 謝金. Concrete doors and papers, not atmosphere.
In the English: Keep same English word each time: 'beard' (with black/thick where source adds). Do not vary to whiskers/moustache. It marks fashionable manhood and trips the comedy when Mitsuyo insults Tsunao's beard and remembers Tatsuya's.
In the English: Keep 'Hotei' with gloss once (squat laughing god), then repeat Hotei bulk/laugh. Keep 'laugh' verb repeated for Zenpei rather than varying to chuckle/guffaw.
In the English: Keep 'cigar smoke' / 'puffed smoke' language steady. Smoke pauses mark calculation admiring its own plan.
In the English: Keep Mitsuyo's 'truly, truly, truly...' unvaried and excessive; keep Zenpei's mocking 'lies, lies...' parallel. Later keep bargaining 'certainly / without fail / promise' flat and repeated to let horror rhyme.
In the English: Keep 'voice' and 'listen' wording: singing voice, listening ear, still listening. Do not resolve singer early; preserve inference.