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Takahashi O-Den (1850-1879)
Jan. 12th, 2024 08:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomiTakahashi O-Den was born in 1850 (or maybe 1848 or 1851) in Gunma, supposedly the daughter of the domain retainer Hirose Han’emon and a maidservant; she was adopted by Takahashi Kanzaemon and his wife Kino (or maybe O-Haru), and upon their divorce fostered out to Kanzaemon’s brother Kyu’emon and his wife Hatsu. Or maybe Kino was the maidservant in question all along? Who knows, not us and probably not O-Den herself.
She was married at fourteen to Miyashita Yojiro, but they got along badly and were divorced two years later. She began work in a restaurant and found herself pestered by unruly clients; concerned, her foster father brought her home and, in 1867, had her marry Takahashi Naminosuke, who became an adopted husband. At first they worked peacefully in the fields together, but Naminosuke’s increasing gambling habit made him a bad husband and led to the confiscation of their rice paddy to pay his debts, leaving them little choice but to flee under cover of darkness. (Or maybe they were chased away after he developed Hansen’s disease, without any gambling happening.) They settled in Yokohama, where O-Den worked as a maid and Naminosuke became bedridden with Hansen’s disease (or maybe something else). Finding that her wages weren’t enough to pay the medical bills, she became one of the prostitutes then servicing the many foreigners in Yokohama. After Naminosuke’s death in 1872, O-Den moved to Tokyo, living with first a merchant called Ozawa Ihei and then a vagabond called Ogawa Ichitaro.
The next part depends which account you follow.
Possibly: Under Ogawa’s influence, she fell into the habit of getting money any way she could come by it. In 1876 she acquired an admirer called Goto Kichizo, a rich used clothes dealer in his fifties, and asked him to meet her at an inn and bring with him two hundred yen (not enough for two cans of coffee today, but a huge sum at the time) in order to “arrange a business opportunity.” Goto met her there, slept with her, and told her that he hadn’t had the money on hand at the moment but would absolutely bring it next time. Then he rolled over and fell asleep. O-Den saw red, and slit his throat with the razor she had on hand. She ransacked his belongings, seized the twenty-six yen he had on him, and fled. Captured not long after, she was put to death in December 1879, among the last women in Japan to be beheaded.
Or possibly (this version was reported by the newspapers at the time): While living with Ogawa, O-Den (or maybe Ogawa himself) fell into debt for 10 yen to a man named Tanaka. She consulted Goto the used clothes dealer for advice; he offered to put up the money, but kept putting it off. When he said one night “Let’s you and me go somewhere and get it on” to O-Den, she thought, this is my chance, I’ll do what he wants and then he’ll lend me the money, and if he doesn’t I’ll kill him. They checked into a hotel as “Uchiyama Sennosuke and his wife Matsu,” and went to bed together. In the morning, Goto told her he didn’t have any money on him; when he had gone back to sleep [this part is consistent among accounts] she slit his throat with the razor she had brought and left a note to the innkeeper on his corpse, saying that she had murdered him out of revenge for his part in her sister’s death and was going to turn herself in after visiting her sister’s grave, signed Matsu. She took 11 yen from his belongings and let herself out. The next day she paid Tanaka back his 10 yen, as well as returning one yen to a neighborhood woman named O-Kiku. The day after that she was arrested, and from there on the story is the same.
Her funerary name is engraved on the grave of the Takahashi family in her hometown. A widely believed legend says that shamisen players who visit her grave will become more skillful.
The life of O-Den as a famous dokufu or “poison lady” has been depicted in at least two dozen versions, fiction and non-fiction, from kabuki to movies, novels, biographies, and traditional songs. Many are highly sensationalized, painting her as a crazed victim of passion for sex and/or money. (Not even getting into the part about the autopsy or what the doctors are supposed to have said about her body.) This proliferation has helped give rise to the one zillion “or maybes” above.
Sources
Nakae
https://www.fujiarts.com/cgi-bin/item.pl?item=934089 (Woodblock print of O-Den and her crime)
https://makmjk.wixsite.com/takahashioden (English: comparison of historical facts about Oden with Kanagaki Robun’s play about her; a site put together by a couple of Japanese college students, very earnest, very pretty, terrible site design)
https://bushoojapan.com/jphistory/kingendai/2023/01/30/13671 (Japanese: straightforward and sympathetic account of O-Den’s life, including a pretty contemporary illustration, which argues that she did her best by all the men in her life (“except Goto, and he asked for it”).
She was married at fourteen to Miyashita Yojiro, but they got along badly and were divorced two years later. She began work in a restaurant and found herself pestered by unruly clients; concerned, her foster father brought her home and, in 1867, had her marry Takahashi Naminosuke, who became an adopted husband. At first they worked peacefully in the fields together, but Naminosuke’s increasing gambling habit made him a bad husband and led to the confiscation of their rice paddy to pay his debts, leaving them little choice but to flee under cover of darkness. (Or maybe they were chased away after he developed Hansen’s disease, without any gambling happening.) They settled in Yokohama, where O-Den worked as a maid and Naminosuke became bedridden with Hansen’s disease (or maybe something else). Finding that her wages weren’t enough to pay the medical bills, she became one of the prostitutes then servicing the many foreigners in Yokohama. After Naminosuke’s death in 1872, O-Den moved to Tokyo, living with first a merchant called Ozawa Ihei and then a vagabond called Ogawa Ichitaro.
The next part depends which account you follow.
Possibly: Under Ogawa’s influence, she fell into the habit of getting money any way she could come by it. In 1876 she acquired an admirer called Goto Kichizo, a rich used clothes dealer in his fifties, and asked him to meet her at an inn and bring with him two hundred yen (not enough for two cans of coffee today, but a huge sum at the time) in order to “arrange a business opportunity.” Goto met her there, slept with her, and told her that he hadn’t had the money on hand at the moment but would absolutely bring it next time. Then he rolled over and fell asleep. O-Den saw red, and slit his throat with the razor she had on hand. She ransacked his belongings, seized the twenty-six yen he had on him, and fled. Captured not long after, she was put to death in December 1879, among the last women in Japan to be beheaded.
Or possibly (this version was reported by the newspapers at the time): While living with Ogawa, O-Den (or maybe Ogawa himself) fell into debt for 10 yen to a man named Tanaka. She consulted Goto the used clothes dealer for advice; he offered to put up the money, but kept putting it off. When he said one night “Let’s you and me go somewhere and get it on” to O-Den, she thought, this is my chance, I’ll do what he wants and then he’ll lend me the money, and if he doesn’t I’ll kill him. They checked into a hotel as “Uchiyama Sennosuke and his wife Matsu,” and went to bed together. In the morning, Goto told her he didn’t have any money on him; when he had gone back to sleep [this part is consistent among accounts] she slit his throat with the razor she had brought and left a note to the innkeeper on his corpse, saying that she had murdered him out of revenge for his part in her sister’s death and was going to turn herself in after visiting her sister’s grave, signed Matsu. She took 11 yen from his belongings and let herself out. The next day she paid Tanaka back his 10 yen, as well as returning one yen to a neighborhood woman named O-Kiku. The day after that she was arrested, and from there on the story is the same.
Her funerary name is engraved on the grave of the Takahashi family in her hometown. A widely believed legend says that shamisen players who visit her grave will become more skillful.
The life of O-Den as a famous dokufu or “poison lady” has been depicted in at least two dozen versions, fiction and non-fiction, from kabuki to movies, novels, biographies, and traditional songs. Many are highly sensationalized, painting her as a crazed victim of passion for sex and/or money. (Not even getting into the part about the autopsy or what the doctors are supposed to have said about her body.) This proliferation has helped give rise to the one zillion “or maybes” above.
Sources
Nakae
https://www.fujiarts.com/cgi-bin/item.pl?item=934089 (Woodblock print of O-Den and her crime)
https://makmjk.wixsite.com/takahashioden (English: comparison of historical facts about Oden with Kanagaki Robun’s play about her; a site put together by a couple of Japanese college students, very earnest, very pretty, terrible site design)
https://bushoojapan.com/jphistory/kingendai/2023/01/30/13671 (Japanese: straightforward and sympathetic account of O-Den’s life, including a pretty contemporary illustration, which argues that she did her best by all the men in her life (“except Goto, and he asked for it”).
