Troubled Waters is a collection of five stories depicting everyday lives on the margins of Meiji‑era Tokyo. Focusing on courtesans, children, and working‑class families, the book explores poverty, desire, and unspoken longing with lyrical restraint. Through quiet moral tension and delicate observation, it offers an intimate portrait of social hardship and emotional endurance in a rapidly changing Japan.

Ichiyo Higuchi (1872–1896) was a pioneering Japanese writer of the Meiji period and is widely regarded as Japan’s first professional woman writer. Writing in a refined yet accessible classical style, she produced short fiction that sensitively depicts the lives of women, children, and the urban poor in late‑nineteenth‑century Tokyo. Drawing on her own experiences of poverty, her work combines psychological insight with social realism. Although her career was cut short by tuberculosis, she left an enduring literary legacy and remains a central figure in modern Japanese literature.

If you have any questions, please call The Japan Society office on 020 3075 1996 or email events@japansociety.org.uk.

Free for members of The Japan Society

Book available from Bookshop.org, Amazon and Waterstones (translated by Bryan Karetnyk)
Japanese version available here