Pathway to Japanese Literature

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

Funeral ProcessionAuthor: Ishikawa Takuboku

Original Title	葬列
Author	石川啄木
Genre	Modern Short Fiction
Author Type	Male Author
Summary	A man returns to Morioka, his cherished "City of Beautiful Memories," after five years to find it transformed—once-sleepy streets now hum with modernity, old haunts replaced by shops and Western buildings. Yet beneath this progress lingers a melancholy nostalgia: the fish shop where his sister’s home stood, a childhood friend’s vanished boarding house, and the castle-turned-park stripped of its ivy-clad mystique. Autumn’s crisp air sharpens his reflections as he wanders rain-dampened lanes, encountering fragments of his past—a weathered teacher, a beggar woman muttering to herself—each echo deepening his unease. \nThe city’s contradictions crystallize at a shabby funeral procession: six mourners hurry a coffin past his alma mater, only for a disheveled madwoman to hurl herself at it, wailing. Her desperate act—met with cruelty—unlocks a flood of memories: a golden dawn years prior, where he witnessed her and the deceased, both outcasts, dancing wildly beneath a ginkgo tree, their joy radiant and fleeting. Now, their tragedy stains Morioka’s autumn clarity, leaving him haunted by questions of love, madness, and the cost of time’s passage. The city’s beauty endures, but its shadows whisper of lives unraveled by change.