The Broken Commandment by Shimazaki Tōson
Published 1906 · 85,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Social Fiction
How hard is The Broken Commandment to read?
The Broken Commandment scores 57 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 54 out of 100
- Strong's translation carries Meiji educational and administrative vocabulary, Buddhist temple terminology, and the loaded caste vocabulary of eta, hinin and burakumin.
- Sentence structure: 54 out of 100
- Formal naturalist prose with long descriptive passages of the Shinshū landscape and weather, and dialogue in which class registers matter.
- Abstraction: 56 out of 100
- A concrete social novel that keeps returning to explicit argument about caste, sincerity and whether confession is liberation or surrender.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Meiji caste law, the politics of rural school appointments, local elections and Buddhist temple economics are all conveyed with little explanation for the modern reader.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- The novel is built on a secret, so almost every conversation carries a double meaning, and Ushimatsu's own reasoning about his silence keeps shifting under him.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- The father's bull, the mountain snow, the classroom, and the recurring image of a man reading another man's published confession give the book its figurative spine.
- Ironic distance: 60 out of 100
- A teacher whose profession is telling the truth, living the biggest lie in the town, while the colleague who despises outcasts is the one he must be pleasant to every morning.
- Resolution withholding: 66 out of 100
- The confession is total and the aftermath is not: Ushimatsu leaves for Texas, and Japanese critics have argued for a century about whether the ending is a liberation, an exile or an evasion by the author.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Chronological third-person narration in twenty-three chapters with a single viewpoint and a conventional realist structure.
How The Broken Commandment is regarded
The Broken Commandment holds a literary regard score of 75 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.