Growing Up

…and her masterpiece, Takekurabe (1895; Growing Up), a delicate story of children being reared on the fringes of the pleasure district.

Ichiyō’s short novel Takekurabe (1895; Growing Up) described the children of the Yoshiwara quarter of Edo in a realistic manner quite unlike that of the usual stories about prostitutes and their customers, but she used the language of Saikaku for her narration. Kyōka, though educated partly at a Western mission…