Ukigumo
Bunzō, a conscientious junior clerk in a Meiji ministry, loses his post for want of the flattery that keeps other men in theirs, and goes on living in the upstairs room of his uncle's Tokyo house, in love with his cousin Osei and unable to say so. His colleague Noboru, promoted where Bunzō was dismissed, begins calling on the household, and his aunt Omasa's reckoning of what her daughter is worth adjusts accordingly. Written in the colloquial genbun itchi that Futabatei was working out as he went, and abandoned after three instalments, it is generally taken as the first modern Japanese novel.
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