Pathway to Japanese Literature

Discover Japan's stories—across time, across language.

Fellow TravelersAuthor: Miyamoto Yuriko

Original Title	道づれ
Author	宮本百合子
Genre	Modern Short Fiction
Author Type	Female Author
Summary	In 1920s Tokyo, amidst swirling winds of political upheaval and artistic fervor, a group of young intellectuals gathers in dimly lit rooms thick with cigarette smoke and impassioned debate. Shigeyoshi, a brooding idealist, navigates clandestine meetings with comrades like Mitsui and Yamahara, their discussions oscillating between Marxist theory and the visceral power of proletarian literature. Across the city, students Hiroko and Haruko grapple with their place in a society teetering on revolution, their earnest conversations with radical thinkers tinged with both hope and uncertainty. Meanwhile, Eiko—a woman of contradictions, her glamour masking restless desires—entangles herself in a tense liaison with the enigmatic Tazawa, their encounters charged with unspoken tensions. Through backstreets and department stores, these lives intersect: Miho, a sharp-eyed shopgirl, confronts the stark divide between her working-class reality and the bourgeois world she observes daily. As literary manifestos clash with personal yearnings, each character treads a precarious line between ideology and human connection, their choices echoing against the backdrop of a nation straining toward modernity.