Repository path: workshop/translations/aru-shokko/R06-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-aru-shokko-R06-v1 — Miyaji Karoku, 「ある職工の手記」 opening (first pass)

Source. 宮地嘉六「ある職工の手記」, 「改造」1919 (大正8) 年9月号; copy-text Aozora Bunko 001446/50533_40585.html (底本『現代日本文學大系 49』筑摩書房), decoded as cp932 per CLAUDE.md, ruby and Aozora annotation markers stripped by tools/fetch_aozora.py. Span: the opening through 「…家を離れると朝夕父のことを思はずにゐられなかつたのだ。」 — 795 non-whitespace characters. SHA-256 of the extracted span in workshop/experiments/E-20260807-narrator-unknown/materials/sources.json.

Regime. R06 — lead single pass, source only. The frozen draft required by R04 §Procedure 2a; the revision is T-aru-shokko-R04-v1. Cost $0, never ledgered.

Contamination: none. No English translation of Miyaji Karoku was reachable; the declaration rests on an absence of comparator, which is stated rather than hidden.

For some reason there has been trouble in my family over stepmothers, generation after generation. When I say generations, I know nothing of what went on before I was born, but it was already so in my father's time. My father lost his own mother early and was left to a stepmother. That stepmother had a number of boys, and my father stopped enjoying being in his own house and in the end bolted from it. He was the eldest son, but he was unable to inherit his dead father's property properly. That was the stepmother's scheming.

That I should have gone exactly the same way as my father — what a piece of fate that is. I was the eldest son. My stepmother had two girls. I could not watch calmly while those girls were brought up and made more of than I was. My stepmother was not of good quality, and the more she came to understand my jealous feeling toward my sisters, the more she made a point of putting it in front of me. Not that it was like that all the year round; at any rate I did not enjoy being at home. And on top of that even my father began to look to me like one of her kind. Year by year, as I grew, my observation of my stepmother got sharper and more sardonic, and toward my father it turned into a sneer. At the same time her hatred of me grew coarser, and more biting. My father went along with it. My father was rather the sort to be wound round by a second wife. Since treating me — the first wife's eldest son — coldly inside the house pleased the second wife not a little, my father had a habit of treating me coldly with a will, to curry favour with her. Whether he was aware of it himself I do not know; I was still a boy of twelve or thirteen then, but I recognised my father's stupidity for what it was.

Out of deference to his second wife my father would not even keep me in the house, and put me out as an apprentice at my aunt's, the tailor's. There too I was badly used by my aunt's spiteful husband; I stuck it out for more than a year all the same, and then fell ill and went home. There is no telling how much I fretted over my father the whole time I was at my aunt's. At home I did not think of him particularly, but once I was away from home I could not help thinking of him morning and evening.